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Building something useful on something that is primarily used as highly volatile financial speculation instrument always rubbed me the wrong way. The whole cryp

Building something useful on something that is primarily used as highly volatile financial speculation instrument always rubbed me the wrong way. The whole crypto scene is just about making quick dough with a technology, that for some reason remains hyped through and wrapped in mysticism. Face it, there is no sexy killer app for the masses. Wait. There is one: Crypto trading to... make quick dough. And the cryptonerds seeing the high trade volume then go and call this a success of crypto. lol

Synaesthesia 6y ago
Great way to put it. Yes I got excited for crypto when it came out but long ago realised there's nothing emancipatory about it.
- Taek 6y ago
  You'll be back. The fundamentals are strong and the technology is genuinely interesting, and real world use cases like Sia's Skynet are starting to finally hit stride. The get rich quick crowd overwhelmed everything else but didn't suffocate it, just merely put it way in the background.
  - DominikD 6y ago
    You're missing the point, which was "there's nothing for the masses". Interesting technology is not a selling point for the masses. Strong fundamentals are not a selling point for the masses. Whether there's a get rich quick crowd around crypto (or not) is not a selling point for the masses.
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      The haber process feeds 4 billion people, and most don't know it exists. Not everything needs to be sold and popularised to the masses.
      - DominikD 6y ago
        Again, that's not the point. The point isn't that something has to be for the masses but that there's nothing in crypto that's appealing for the masses. ASN.1 is used by everyone but that doesn't mean it's appealing to the masses.
        CryptoPunk 6y ago
        What about browser-based payments? Fast forward 2 years, and assume Ethereum has implemented POS/sharding, and zkRollups have been adapted to fully utilize the data this makes available to them. In this scenario, the world can execute 100-200,000 transactions per second on Ethereum, and people are able to execute these transactions from any software interface, including a browser wallet extension. This would make electronic payments cheap - on order of costing $0.01 in fees - and you would be able to send a payment in a stablecoin, like USDC or DAI which track the value of 1 USD. In this scenario, you could send micro-payments to any party on the internet, without having a pre-existing relationship with or divulging personal information to them, and without both parties relying on the same trusted third party payment system. Imagine thousands of news sites all around the world offering short-term browsing access, like a 1 day browsing pass for $0.05, and all of these offerings being accessible with just one browser-based wallet. This can become even more amenable to metered payments when combined with other scalability solutions, like Plasma chains and payment channel networks. In such scenarios, fees would decline orders magnitude of more, making it possible to send fractions of a cent in value for consuming tiny amounts of goods/services. For instance, you pay 0.25 cents worth of a crypto asset to access one paywalled article. This can be done behind the scenes, with you simply pressing 'okay' on a consent form. No registration, or the divulging of private identification information or credit card details necessary. A single peer-to-peer transfer of electronic cash suffices. Suddenly content providers have a massive new source of revenue apart from advertising that can sustain them, leading to the production of more quality content, and information consumers can avail themselves of this content with much greater convenience and privacy, and without the financial risk of laying our $20 for a subscription they may not use.
  - audunw 6y ago
    > You'll be back. The fundamentals are strong and the technology is genuinely interesting, and real world use cases like Sia's Skynet are starting to finally hit stride. Skynet feels more like the next step in P2P solutions like BitTorrent, than what most people think of when talking about blockchain solutions. It kind of also confirms that the only real use-cases of decentralized trustless solutions are relatively trivial problems like those involving purely digital assets (files, domains, etc) I don't think anyone will claim that the technology isn't interesting. I think it's super interesting. But I think there's way too much hype, especially on the financial side (currencies, DeFi, etc)
  - Synaesthesia 6y ago
    The people who got the initial bitcoin and held onto it still have the majority of it. I don't see that changing. It's not healthy for the monetary system having most people try to just get rich by holding onto the currency.
    - 4b11b4 6y ago
      I'm not disagreeing with you, but this isn't the first time. The people who made the first money held onto that, and then used it to control their environment and make more money. When the British queen invested in that first wooden ship to bring back riches, she made a ton of money. Then she started the East India Company. I don't see those first BTC holders as worse?
      - Synaesthesia 6y ago
        The East India company which ruined Bengal, enriched a few English elite. Yeah sounds about right.
Barrin92 6y ago
>Face it, there is no sexy killer app for the masses. It's not only the volatility but also the inefficiency which is the price that has to be paid for the decentralization. I really have trouble coming up with an app where the constant fees that have to be paid for actions are justified compared to a centralized solution.
- milansuk 6y ago
  > where the constant fees that have to be paid for actions I agree, this has to change. I see Ethereum fees as the early days of the internet when we paid for every freaking minute! Today you can have high-speed internet with no bandwidth limit with a fixed monthly fee. The only limit is maximum download/upload speed and that's probably the key question: What is "maximum speed" for Ethereum? Instead of paying for every action, we would pay fixed daily/weekly/monthly fee, but it would be limited by that "maximum speed".
- zionic 6y ago
  Decentralized uncensorable currency exchange is a real use case that is live today. Billions in real value change hands on DEXes run on ETH every day.
loceng 6y ago
That "for some reason" is that's obvious abd straight forward to anyone being honest and not trying to push propaganda is that Bitcoin, and other blockchains structures like it, are MLM schemes - and that it's decentralized and on a global scale is why it's been able to pick up so much energy - aligning people and industrial complexes globally to bring it mainstream. Design a blockchain system where it's agreed upon consensus and use/adoption is voluntary through democratically elected processes (save regulatory capture), and we'll have a good system that's not unnecessarily and unreasonably transferring wealth from later adopters to earlier adopters. You won't be able to make a fortune on it by buying it and pumping it to make its value goes up, nor will you be able to make money selling shovels to desperate or greedy or gullible people once they catch wind of the "gold rush." The one major benefit of all if this craziness is that the flood of money into blockchains has meant technology development and many more engineers with experience; whether there are engineers who'd work on non-Pyramid/MLM-Ponzi scheme blockchains though, if they're financially incentivized/aligned with Bitcoin et al, that's TBD.
- louwrentius 6y ago
  Can you point to a legitimate problem that “blockchain” can solve, which can’t be solved with existing tools? I think every smart person working on any kind of blockchain-related tech is seriously wasting their talent and life.
  - mirekrusin 6y ago
    System that can't be shut down by governments?
    - louwrentius 6y ago
      You mean that government that just shuts down internet, making your 'system' totally useless? Yes, right! You can't fix societal problems with tech.
      - dgellow 6y ago
lopatin 6y ago
Largely agree. It's what makes Bitcoin different. Bitcoin's killer app is the network itself. The fact that you can send money/transfer wealth instantly without a bank to tell you what you can and can't do IS the value of Bitcoin and why it's not some purely speculative ponzhi scheme. As far as I understand, you can't reaaally use Ethereum for the same purpose because of high fees.
- dgellow 6y ago
  That's one of the point that makes little sense to me. The government/bank regulation kicks in when you try to convert to your local currency. They now have your full history of transactions and can decide to refuse your bitcoins or find you guilty of fraud or whatever illegal thing you tried to hide. Regulations will always be present at the edge.
  - lopatin 6y ago
    I didn't say that it has to be for illegal things or avoiding regulation. I said it's a trust-less global payment infrastructure. Say I need to send $500k to a relative in a third world country at 12AM on a Sunday. A completely legal transfer of money that I plan to disclose to the government. 100% regulated. But I need the transaction to go through very quickly. What are my options? Chase? Paypal? Western Union? What if Paypal decides this transaction is fraudulent and says "no". What if Western Union decides to limit my account? What if Chase wire transfer to third world bank takes 5 days? With Bitcoin, you can just send the money, legally, but without a private third party as a middleman. There is value in that.
    - dgellow 6y ago
      I agree. The "without a bank to tell you what you can and can't do" made me believe that you were hinting to non-regulated transactions, my bad then.
      - lopatin 6y ago
        Gotcha, yep I could have phrased that better.
mouzogu 6y ago
> "that is primarily used as highly volatile financial speculation instrument " How is that different from any other asset; stocks, land, property. It's all speculation nowadays. From what I've read there are pretty much three use cases: 1. store of value akin to gold (bitcoin) 2. decentralised privacy money (monero etc, to avoid taxes?) 3. a platform on which to build decentralised technologies (ethereum, ada, thorchain...countless others - some with specific niches: gaming, streaming etc) I think your evaluation is bit unfair and shortsighted. Maybe we are not "there" yet, but why should we be? It is still a nascent technology and I think it would be foolish, and history has shown that, to dismiss it. Of course, like other asset classes, crypto is now infested with shills, scammers and their jargon designed to confuse and obfuscate in order to take money from the naive.
- aabbcc1241 6y ago
  I don't want to call cryptocurrency as money because they're not circulating as you'd expect from money. Globally limited transaction rate, relatively long confirmation time, and few adoption.
  - Consultant32452 6y ago
    An ACH transfer through my bank takes multiple days. I've only made a few transactions on crypto, but confirmation was more like seconds to minutes.
    - aabbcc1241 6y ago
      I was imagining paying subway for my lunch using money.
      - Consultant32452 6y ago
        Most people use debit/credit cards which batch process in the evening and the store doesn't get the funds until some time after that. And the fees to merchants on those cards are in the range of 2%.
martin_a 6y ago
After all those years, there's still not a single useful blockchain application around. These days I see lots companies telling me, they put their "supply chain on blockchain" and while I understand what they probably want to tell me ("you can't tamper with where our stuff comes from") I don't see the point in that. If you've got trust issues with your subcontractors you should fix those and not "seal" the willingly wrong information in a blockchain. Maybe we should just declare blockchain a "failed technology".
- mirekrusin 6y ago
  I think it's being declared "failed technology" at least once a month since inception, no?
  - martin_a 6y ago
    Not sure, but we should act more like that then.
  - boh 6y ago
    I mean it "works", but so do steam powered cars. The problem is most people don't actually use it, just trade it. The space used to mostly involve people who actually wanted to decentralize currencies, now it's almost exclusively "hodl $$$$$ to the moon etc". This article is articulating what's been clear to many people who really believed in the promise of decentralized currency: crypto in its current iteration has essentially failed. Time to try something else.
    - touristtam 6y ago
      Nevermind article like this one then: https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/05/03/jp-morgan-microsoft-ethereum-quorum-blockchain/ https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/05/03/jp-morgan-microso...
      - boh 6y ago
        Exactly. Nevermind this article because Bitcoin and a blockchain from JP Morgan have nothing in common (also JP's enthusiasm for blockchains have been steadily waning and their earlier attempts are already dead on the vine). People have no interest in the tech, just gainz, bcs blockchain finance, consensus, future, JP Morgan and whatever word cloud pumpers want to use to get you excited don't actually reflect realities. If you have so much faith in the tech, start using it for real-world transactions, which you can do right now. If you're just hodling with some vague assumptions of moon money, you're not supporting the actual purpose of crypto. But let's be honest, most people aren't really supporting it or have any interest in actually using it, that's why crypto has been failing (even though it technically "works").
mirekrusin 6y ago
Can you give better examples of funding your idea to change the internet/world/whatever? Taking aside if your idea is great or dumb.
natmaka 6y ago
> Building something useful on something that is primarily used What is built on something often determines the way it is used.
dgellow 6y ago
What about a voting system? That's the only application of a public, decentralized ledger that can kind of makes sense to me. I'm from Switzerland, every few months we have a public voting for various changes to the federal or cantonal laws. I currently do not have a way to be certain that my vote is taken in account. With a public ledger I can check and be sure that my vote is correct. I'm generally opposed to software voting because I have a complete distrust for such systems, but a public ledger (preferably not based on proof of work, so not ethereum) has interesting characteristics. And the price or inefficiency isn't an issue in this context. Edit: people commenting seem to misunderstand the proposition. I'm perfectly aware of the privacy around voting and not advocating against it. It should be possible to have a system where your vote is registered publicly as a transaction between your wallet and a "referendum" wallet, in that case unless you have a way to link the public identity of a wallet to an identity (meaning people would somehow leak their public address somewhere) you do not have a way to know my vote. The only thing you could know is the number of total votes and their choice. You can of course generate a new wallet per voting as a way to not have a history. Edit 2: the plausibility deniability is a fair point, I concede.
- 1337shadow 6y ago
  > I currently do not have a way to be certain that my vote is taken in account. That is something we do a lot of R&D on @Electis, along with the fine fellows from InfernoRed, Microsoft and others. Because the value of an election is the thrust that voters have in it! It is part of what the homomorphic encryption protocol we use (electionguard) aims at solving. Your ballot is encrypted with a joint public key, and all the "artifacts" of the election are published after it closes. You can verify that your encrypted ballot is present in the artifacts, and that the whole artifacts archive verifies mathematically. https://www.electionguard.vote/ https://www.electionguard.vote/ https://electionguard-python.readthedocs.io/ https://electionguard-python.readthedocs.io/ https://www.electis.io/ https://www.electis.io/ https://electeez.com/ https://electeez.com/
  - dgellow 6y ago
    That's great, thanks for sharing. That could be its own HN submission!
carlbarrdahl 6y ago
Could be an antidote to spam and ai generated content? It could be used as a signal in the noise because of skin in the game for the participants in the network. One could look at it as a common backend for anyone to build clients that combine and present these feeds. Perhaps we're not seeing the forest because we're looking at the monetization capabilities in the wood.
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  Micropayments to prevent spam has been attempted a number of times in the past and it has never really worked.
saadalem 6y ago
Yes but, bet on BLOCKCHAIN not a cryptocurrency(at least for now?) Satoshi Nakamoto created something truly revolutionary; a complex method of processing and recording data in a system, quickly began to overturn everything. Microsoft Word was the dominant word processing software for over a decade, with the creation of this new system, however, something similar arrived: Google Docs, Instead of one person editing a document, and being locked out when the other person began to edit, multiple people could now edit documents. That opened an entire world of possibility, from collaborative conferences online to fiction writing with both people online, using Google Docs. Microsoft Word was obsolete(even if still many people use it). Blockchain is a technology that outshines the concept of Google Docs collaboration like a spark versus a star. Blockchain runs on a principle similar to the collaborative ability of Google Docs, by having multiple computers check to ensure that digital information is recorded accurately, millions of computers, called nodes, check this data and record it perfectly, trying to hack Blockchain is like trying to write swears in Google Docs: Everyone notices immediately. Blockchain-based businesses are growing exponentially as the technology improves. Blockchain technologies are not dominated by large industries yet. The entire industry of Blockchain technology is empty except for a few small yet growing businesses. Anyone can use this technology, and anyone can learn about it. In fact, by creating a startup focused on some sort of Blockchain transaction, whether it’s for transporting value across the internet, or general information, or financial records, you’re democratizing the entire process and keeping it away from FAANG or even Govs. Blockchain has been compared to the Internet. The Internet was extremely profitable and Blockchain arguably has the potential to be more so, simply by upgrading the existing framework. The person who sets their mind to creating a Blockchain technology has the potential to be unbelievably successful beyond simply creating a profitable niche industry.
payne92 6y ago
There is a killer app for crypto: international money laundering and untraceable transfers.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  Crypto transfers are the opposite of untraceable. I’m not sure why that sentiment is so prevalent.
hoka-one-one 6y ago
This same comment appears on every single crypto post. if it was actually true do you think people would have stopped posting about crypto in the past six years or so?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  Greed is perhaps one of the most powerful motivators known to man.
  - Frost1x 6y ago
    Probably because it largely acts as a proxy for survival mechanisms. Give most people want they need and a little of what they want and you'll find most greed driven behaviors largely disappear except for a select few who I'd argue have dysfunctions or lack basic social maturity.
    - ed25519FUUU 6y ago
      The Mouse Utopia study from the 1960's suggest otherwise. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-utopias-1960s-led-grim-predictions-humans-180954423/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-utopias-...
- omginternets 6y ago
  >if it was actually true do you think people would have stopped posting about crypto in the past six years or so? I think crypto posts continue to appear because the idea is sexy, but I also think the parent poster is correct: the realized applications are not. Crypto captures the imagination, but it's a disappointment in practice.
- a_hard_time 6y ago
  The top comment on every crypto thread always dismisses blockchain as a failed technology (ignoring cryptocurrency) and smart contracts as having no killer app (ignoring decentralised finance). These comments never come with substance. They are essentially declarations of the poster's own lack of insight and understanding. I'm open to criticisms of crypto and smart contracts, but the comment above provides nothing in the way of meaningful criticism. It is trash.
paulintrognon 6y ago
Isn't cryptocurrencies used all over the Darknet ? I know that is not "the masses" but it is still a non-negligeable usage which is unlikely to stop, no?
duckfang 6y ago
The hardest pill to swallow is that we already had a very low cost of moving money around between hostile nation-states. And it's been around since the 8th century - read 700ACE-800ACE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala Its money dealer to money dealer, and the money dealers keep scrips. Average fees are from 0.2% to 0.5% . It's definitely un-sexy since its not technology based. No chains of blocks or programmers needed. Fees are low, so the money transferrers can make a living, but not allow speculation or other hazardous acts. And the only reason why it's not more massively used is because of the US's adherence that it's "terrorism". I'd imagine that the terrorism angle is more of a "allows people to ignore central banks ran by USA and Europe"... as the US didn't much care when HSBC was financing drug cartels, terrorists, and the like ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2012/07/16/hsbc-helped-terrorists-iran-mexican-drug-cartels-launder-money-senate-report-says/?sh=498c27545712 https://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2012/07/16/hsbc-h... )
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  >And the only reason why it's not more massively used is because of the US's adherence that it's "terrorism". I don’t think so. A system with clear record keeping, auditable by third parties, and subject to the judiciary is far better than below: > Trust and extensive use of connections are the components that distinguish it from other remittance systems. Hawaladar networks are often based on membership in the same family, village, clan, or ethnic group, and cheating is punished by effective excommunication and "loss of honour"—leading to severe economic hardship.[3] Technology has obviated the need for unnecessary levels of allegiance to your tribe, as required in the above system.
  - duckfang 6y ago
    > I don’t think so. A system with clear record keeping, auditable by third parties, and subject to the judiciary is far better than below: And we've learned that record-keeping has its own very strong negative side. It alone can establish ties between people, and serve to eliminate privacy all in the names of "transparency". (And I can hear it now too - "Why want privacy if you have done nothing wrong?"). I think we're only at the beginning of crypto-fraud arrests, because the ledger is the log - and that's a liability. And the auditability is primarily a governmental requirement, usually based around fraud, financing terrorists, or the like. If cheating occurs, the excommunication from the network is the punishment - you are removed from your position of power. And frankly, we can look at our systems of how auditability doesnt stop the various failure modes: blatant financing of terrorism/HBSC, billions of $ transferred away from citizens with usurious fines, overleveraging finance side affecting savings/loan. In the end, auditability is just a way to assign blame. And that blame is never directed towards those at the top who manufacture and use illegal techniques - it is used to blame the rank and file; the cashier, the teller, the engineer, the low middle manager. And subject to the judiciary is an interesting case you bring up... Because transfers in (I believe) all cryptocurrency is not subject to the judiciary. And in many more popular cryptosystems, that is seen as a strong anti-government bonus, and not a malus. And Point being, is that the Hawala is the last millenium's Bitcoin.. And when compared to BTC or ETH now, is still strictly better. (And we haven't discussed the barrier to entry, wasted electrical power, e-waste, etc.)
Taylor_OD 6y ago
The crypto killer app is using the money to buy illegal drugs. It always has been. Most of the people I knew who were into crypto early used it to buy weed online, not as an investment.
- UShouldBWorking 6y ago
  Exactly it is cash, as the the white paper says. Everything else is a distraction.
- diego_moita 6y ago
  > The crypto killer app is using the money to buy illegal drugs. Meeh! Not even that, anymore. In Brazil there was a brief moment in 2014 when you could buy marijuana and cocaine with bitcoins. But now, with all this volatility, transfer costs and low liquidity, not even drug dealers want crypto currency.
- fullshark 6y ago
  Don't forget ransomware payoffs
- jcpham2 6y ago
  Mining/Trading BTC over the counter since 2011. I've never used a darknet market. I read an article on slashdot in 2011 called "Bitcoin Mining for fun and profit" I bought a graphics card, it paid itself off in 21 days. I bought 12 more graphics cards and sucked down 3kW for 24 months. I do not regret this and every single person here that doesn't understand proof of work, doesn't understand a deflating asset with 8 (10 million) decimal places of trading precision against fiat currencies with only 2 decimal places... Well I can't help people on the internet do math and make money, no one pays me to do that.
  - Taylor_OD 6y ago
    I don't think one could claim mining bitcoin is the killer app of bitcoin. That's a reason why people would support bitcoin.
berryjerry 6y ago
In countries with working currencies like EU and US, yes almost all crypto is speculation. BUT, countries that have poor banking system a poorly managed/trusted economy don't have access to even banks, let alone investments and stocks. Crypto lets those people participate in the global market.
drcode 6y ago
The alternative is building on AWS or whatever, where a big company can just decide arbitrarily to kill your startup at any arbitrary moment by shutting down your access, or confiscating your funds. This happens all the time.
bookmarkable 6y ago
This is really short sighted thinking. The web had no "killer app" in the first 10+ years. It was obscure technology with thousands of naysayers laughing at us "web nerds" because we thought it would change everything. Cryptocurrency is very young. While its hard to say if BTC or ETH or something yet to be invented will be part of the digital money future, it is absolutely reasonable to expect this technology will have a role in the world. Of course people will make and lose "quick dough" but that's like saying the web failed because some idiot made or lost money on Pets.com or AOL stock. Trade volume just means that the idea is in circulation, people of many walks of life are seeing what is there. Feel free to ignore those people, but to write off the entire concept as "about making quick dough" is asinine.
- shuckles 6y ago
  Bloomberg and Wired went online 4 years after the invention of the World Wide Web. In the first ten years, Amazon, eBay, Google, and PayPal were all founded. Technology adoption curves have only gotten steeper since then (e.g. iPhone/Android was basically the dominant consumer computing platform 10 years after its introduction).
  - bookmarkable 6y ago
    You are comparing touchscreen mobile phones with a technology delving into what both gold / hard value stores AND cash do for society. That is not a typical technology adoption cycle. I’m not an extremist to say Bitcoin will eat the world or even replace any existing system entirely, but I still disagree with those that say it has no utility beyond get rich quick scheme. Referencing Wired as the killer app of the early Internet is good comedy. Bloomberg terminals were already connected, just not by this new tech.
    - shuckles 6y ago
      M-Pesa was used by over 90% of Kenyan households in about 2 years after its launch. I could go on. Mobile computing has changed the entire world; it’s not plainly obvious that cryptocurrency would change it even more or is substantially more difficult to execute on.
ab_testing 6y ago
I think that if you come across some well known crypto, it is better you just hold on to it and pray for appreciation due to high demand rather than trading in and out of it frequently.
slickrick216 6y ago
Decentralisation is itself the killer app. If you live in the developed world all your life you’ll have a skewed view of this and not understand the true benefit here. As trust decays in the 1st world I sincerely hope you are open minded enough to change your opinion. Some more killer apps; - RENVM decentralized darkpools - Chainlink decentralized oracles - Deco by chainlink labs decentralized private information sharing - NFTs and NFT marketplaces. This one is going to be huge. - The entire defi space is pretty remarkable from Dexes to Bancor and Yearn to keeperdao Respectfully comments like yours and others in this thread seem like people saying the internet wouldn’t take off in the 80s/90s. I don’t know how a technical audience like the one here doesn’t get it. Sure there’s greed but that’s a feature of humans not crypto. We are most definitely in a bubble but the dot com bubble bore seeds which grew into trees that were mighty.
- AnonsLadder 6y ago
  Yep RenVM is a big deal. Iirc they had something called Cafe which demonstrated turning your bitcoins into a privacy coin, ZEC. I remember when REN was only 5 cents. Amazing how much it costs to run a darknode now! Truly a successful project. Also another cool dApp is DyDx, margin trading platform
Bakary 6y ago
The inherent tension in the crypto space is that for early adopters crypto is the best thing imaginable: figuratively winning enormous sums with little to no effort. For anyone else, it is not only a generator of envy and bitterness but a burden on energy production, GPUs and whatnot. The ideological aspect of crypto as a defense against the big bad system is dead in the water since early adopters are so massively powerful within the hypothetical new system, and nobody really wants to use it as a currency as opposed to a pyramid scheme.
CryptoPunk 6y ago
Trading assets is a fundamental cooperative human activity that allows us to coordinate our actions at scale to reach much higher levels of collective productivity. The idea that profit-motivated exchange and investment is a useless human activity is a layman's understanding of economics.
jsutton 6y ago
The article states plainly: “What’s Ethereum’s killer app?” we asked ourselves not long ago. Now we know. It’s the world’s best publicly-accessible settlement platform for financial transactions. In a way, that’s exciting. The markets think so too.

Synaesthesia 6y ago

Great way to put it. Yes I got excited for crypto when it came out but long ago realised there's nothing emancipatory about it.

Taek 6y ago
You'll be back. The fundamentals are strong and the technology is genuinely interesting, and real world use cases like Sia's Skynet are starting to finally hit stride. The get rich quick crowd overwhelmed everything else but didn't suffocate it, just merely put it way in the background.
- DominikD 6y ago
  You're missing the point, which was "there's nothing for the masses". Interesting technology is not a selling point for the masses. Strong fundamentals are not a selling point for the masses. Whether there's a get rich quick crowd around crypto (or not) is not a selling point for the masses.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    The haber process feeds 4 billion people, and most don't know it exists. Not everything needs to be sold and popularised to the masses.
    - DominikD 6y ago
      Again, that's not the point. The point isn't that something has to be for the masses but that there's nothing in crypto that's appealing for the masses. ASN.1 is used by everyone but that doesn't mean it's appealing to the masses.
      - CryptoPunk 6y ago
        What about browser-based payments? Fast forward 2 years, and assume Ethereum has implemented POS/sharding, and zkRollups have been adapted to fully utilize the data this makes available to them. In this scenario, the world can execute 100-200,000 transactions per second on Ethereum, and people are able to execute these transactions from any software interface, including a browser wallet extension. This would make electronic payments cheap - on order of costing $0.01 in fees - and you would be able to send a payment in a stablecoin, like USDC or DAI which track the value of 1 USD. In this scenario, you could send micro-payments to any party on the internet, without having a pre-existing relationship with or divulging personal information to them, and without both parties relying on the same trusted third party payment system. Imagine thousands of news sites all around the world offering short-term browsing access, like a 1 day browsing pass for $0.05, and all of these offerings being accessible with just one browser-based wallet. This can become even more amenable to metered payments when combined with other scalability solutions, like Plasma chains and payment channel networks. In such scenarios, fees would decline orders magnitude of more, making it possible to send fractions of a cent in value for consuming tiny amounts of goods/services. For instance, you pay 0.25 cents worth of a crypto asset to access one paywalled article. This can be done behind the scenes, with you simply pressing 'okay' on a consent form. No registration, or the divulging of private identification information or credit card details necessary. A single peer-to-peer transfer of electronic cash suffices. Suddenly content providers have a massive new source of revenue apart from advertising that can sustain them, leading to the production of more quality content, and information consumers can avail themselves of this content with much greater convenience and privacy, and without the financial risk of laying our $20 for a subscription they may not use.
- audunw 6y ago
  > You'll be back. The fundamentals are strong and the technology is genuinely interesting, and real world use cases like Sia's Skynet are starting to finally hit stride. Skynet feels more like the next step in P2P solutions like BitTorrent, than what most people think of when talking about blockchain solutions. It kind of also confirms that the only real use-cases of decentralized trustless solutions are relatively trivial problems like those involving purely digital assets (files, domains, etc) I don't think anyone will claim that the technology isn't interesting. I think it's super interesting. But I think there's way too much hype, especially on the financial side (currencies, DeFi, etc)
- Synaesthesia 6y ago
  The people who got the initial bitcoin and held onto it still have the majority of it. I don't see that changing. It's not healthy for the monetary system having most people try to just get rich by holding onto the currency.
  - 4b11b4 6y ago
    I'm not disagreeing with you, but this isn't the first time. The people who made the first money held onto that, and then used it to control their environment and make more money. When the British queen invested in that first wooden ship to bring back riches, she made a ton of money. Then she started the East India Company. I don't see those first BTC holders as worse?
    - Synaesthesia 6y ago
      The East India company which ruined Bengal, enriched a few English elite. Yeah sounds about right.

Barrin92 6y ago

>Face it, there is no sexy killer app for the masses. It's not only the volatility but also the inefficiency which is the price that has to be paid for the decentralization. I really have trouble coming up with an app where the constant fees that have to be paid for actions are justified compared to a centralized solution.

milansuk 6y ago
> where the constant fees that have to be paid for actions I agree, this has to change. I see Ethereum fees as the early days of the internet when we paid for every freaking minute! Today you can have high-speed internet with no bandwidth limit with a fixed monthly fee. The only limit is maximum download/upload speed and that's probably the key question: What is "maximum speed" for Ethereum? Instead of paying for every action, we would pay fixed daily/weekly/monthly fee, but it would be limited by that "maximum speed".
zionic 6y ago
Decentralized uncensorable currency exchange is a real use case that is live today. Billions in real value change hands on DEXes run on ETH every day.

loceng 6y ago

That "for some reason" is that's obvious abd straight forward to anyone being honest and not trying to push propaganda is that Bitcoin, and other blockchains structures like it, are MLM schemes - and that it's decentralized and on a global scale is why it's been able to pick up so much energy - aligning people and industrial complexes globally to bring it mainstream. Design a blockchain system where it's agreed upon consensus and use/adoption is voluntary through democratically elected processes (save regulatory capture), and we'll have a good system that's not unnecessarily and unreasonably transferring wealth from later adopters to earlier adopters. You won't be able to make a fortune on it by buying it and pumping it to make its value goes up, nor will you be able to make money selling shovels to desperate or greedy or gullible people once they catch wind of the "gold rush." The one major benefit of all if this craziness is that the flood of money into blockchains has meant technology development and many more engineers with experience; whether there are engineers who'd work on non-Pyramid/MLM-Ponzi scheme blockchains though, if they're financially incentivized/aligned with Bitcoin et al, that's TBD.

louwrentius 6y ago
Can you point to a legitimate problem that “blockchain” can solve, which can’t be solved with existing tools? I think every smart person working on any kind of blockchain-related tech is seriously wasting their talent and life.
- mirekrusin 6y ago
  System that can't be shut down by governments?
  - louwrentius 6y ago
    You mean that government that just shuts down internet, making your 'system' totally useless? Yes, right! You can't fix societal problems with tech.
    - dgellow 6y ago

lopatin 6y ago

Largely agree. It's what makes Bitcoin different. Bitcoin's killer app is the network itself. The fact that you can send money/transfer wealth instantly without a bank to tell you what you can and can't do IS the value of Bitcoin and why it's not some purely speculative ponzhi scheme. As far as I understand, you can't reaaally use Ethereum for the same purpose because of high fees.

dgellow 6y ago
That's one of the point that makes little sense to me. The government/bank regulation kicks in when you try to convert to your local currency. They now have your full history of transactions and can decide to refuse your bitcoins or find you guilty of fraud or whatever illegal thing you tried to hide. Regulations will always be present at the edge.
- lopatin 6y ago
  I didn't say that it has to be for illegal things or avoiding regulation. I said it's a trust-less global payment infrastructure. Say I need to send $500k to a relative in a third world country at 12AM on a Sunday. A completely legal transfer of money that I plan to disclose to the government. 100% regulated. But I need the transaction to go through very quickly. What are my options? Chase? Paypal? Western Union? What if Paypal decides this transaction is fraudulent and says "no". What if Western Union decides to limit my account? What if Chase wire transfer to third world bank takes 5 days? With Bitcoin, you can just send the money, legally, but without a private third party as a middleman. There is value in that.
  - dgellow 6y ago
    I agree. The "without a bank to tell you what you can and can't do" made me believe that you were hinting to non-regulated transactions, my bad then.
    - lopatin 6y ago
      Gotcha, yep I could have phrased that better.

mouzogu 6y ago

> "that is primarily used as highly volatile financial speculation instrument " How is that different from any other asset; stocks, land, property. It's all speculation nowadays. From what I've read there are pretty much three use cases: 1. store of value akin to gold (bitcoin) 2. decentralised privacy money (monero etc, to avoid taxes?) 3. a platform on which to build decentralised technologies (ethereum, ada, thorchain...countless others - some with specific niches: gaming, streaming etc) I think your evaluation is bit unfair and shortsighted. Maybe we are not "there" yet, but why should we be? It is still a nascent technology and I think it would be foolish, and history has shown that, to dismiss it. Of course, like other asset classes, crypto is now infested with shills, scammers and their jargon designed to confuse and obfuscate in order to take money from the naive.

aabbcc1241 6y ago
I don't want to call cryptocurrency as money because they're not circulating as you'd expect from money. Globally limited transaction rate, relatively long confirmation time, and few adoption.
- Consultant32452 6y ago
  An ACH transfer through my bank takes multiple days. I've only made a few transactions on crypto, but confirmation was more like seconds to minutes.
  - aabbcc1241 6y ago
    I was imagining paying subway for my lunch using money.
    - Consultant32452 6y ago
      Most people use debit/credit cards which batch process in the evening and the store doesn't get the funds until some time after that. And the fees to merchants on those cards are in the range of 2%.

martin_a 6y ago

After all those years, there's still not a single useful blockchain application around. These days I see lots companies telling me, they put their "supply chain on blockchain" and while I understand what they probably want to tell me ("you can't tamper with where our stuff comes from") I don't see the point in that. If you've got trust issues with your subcontractors you should fix those and not "seal" the willingly wrong information in a blockchain. Maybe we should just declare blockchain a "failed technology".

mirekrusin 6y ago
I think it's being declared "failed technology" at least once a month since inception, no?
- martin_a 6y ago
  Not sure, but we should act more like that then.
- boh 6y ago
  I mean it "works", but so do steam powered cars. The problem is most people don't actually use it, just trade it. The space used to mostly involve people who actually wanted to decentralize currencies, now it's almost exclusively "hodl $$$$$ to the moon etc". This article is articulating what's been clear to many people who really believed in the promise of decentralized currency: crypto in its current iteration has essentially failed. Time to try something else.
  - touristtam 6y ago
    Nevermind article like this one then: https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/05/03/jp-morgan-microsoft-ethereum-quorum-blockchain/ https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/05/03/jp-morgan-microso...
    - boh 6y ago
      Exactly. Nevermind this article because Bitcoin and a blockchain from JP Morgan have nothing in common (also JP's enthusiasm for blockchains have been steadily waning and their earlier attempts are already dead on the vine). People have no interest in the tech, just gainz, bcs blockchain finance, consensus, future, JP Morgan and whatever word cloud pumpers want to use to get you excited don't actually reflect realities. If you have so much faith in the tech, start using it for real-world transactions, which you can do right now. If you're just hodling with some vague assumptions of moon money, you're not supporting the actual purpose of crypto. But let's be honest, most people aren't really supporting it or have any interest in actually using it, that's why crypto has been failing (even though it technically "works").

mirekrusin 6y ago

Can you give better examples of funding your idea to change the internet/world/whatever? Taking aside if your idea is great or dumb.

natmaka 6y ago

> Building something useful on something that is primarily used What is built on something often determines the way it is used.

dgellow 6y ago

What about a voting system? That's the only application of a public, decentralized ledger that can kind of makes sense to me. I'm from Switzerland, every few months we have a public voting for various changes to the federal or cantonal laws. I currently do not have a way to be certain that my vote is taken in account. With a public ledger I can check and be sure that my vote is correct. I'm generally opposed to software voting because I have a complete distrust for such systems, but a public ledger (preferably not based on proof of work, so not ethereum) has interesting characteristics. And the price or inefficiency isn't an issue in this context. Edit: people commenting seem to misunderstand the proposition. I'm perfectly aware of the privacy around voting and not advocating against it. It should be possible to have a system where your vote is registered publicly as a transaction between your wallet and a "referendum" wallet, in that case unless you have a way to link the public identity of a wallet to an identity (meaning people would somehow leak their public address somewhere) you do not have a way to know my vote. The only thing you could know is the number of total votes and their choice. You can of course generate a new wallet per voting as a way to not have a history. Edit 2: the plausibility deniability is a fair point, I concede.

1337shadow 6y ago
> I currently do not have a way to be certain that my vote is taken in account. That is something we do a lot of R&D on @Electis, along with the fine fellows from InfernoRed, Microsoft and others. Because the value of an election is the thrust that voters have in it! It is part of what the homomorphic encryption protocol we use (electionguard) aims at solving. Your ballot is encrypted with a joint public key, and all the "artifacts" of the election are published after it closes. You can verify that your encrypted ballot is present in the artifacts, and that the whole artifacts archive verifies mathematically. https://www.electionguard.vote/ https://www.electionguard.vote/ https://electionguard-python.readthedocs.io/ https://electionguard-python.readthedocs.io/ https://www.electis.io/ https://www.electis.io/ https://electeez.com/ https://electeez.com/
- dgellow 6y ago
  That's great, thanks for sharing. That could be its own HN submission!

carlbarrdahl 6y ago

Could be an antidote to spam and ai generated content? It could be used as a signal in the noise because of skin in the game for the participants in the network. One could look at it as a common backend for anyone to build clients that combine and present these feeds. Perhaps we're not seeing the forest because we're looking at the monetization capabilities in the wood.

UncleMeat 6y ago
Micropayments to prevent spam has been attempted a number of times in the past and it has never really worked.

saadalem 6y ago

Yes but, bet on BLOCKCHAIN not a cryptocurrency(at least for now?) Satoshi Nakamoto created something truly revolutionary; a complex method of processing and recording data in a system, quickly began to overturn everything. Microsoft Word was the dominant word processing software for over a decade, with the creation of this new system, however, something similar arrived: Google Docs, Instead of one person editing a document, and being locked out when the other person began to edit, multiple people could now edit documents. That opened an entire world of possibility, from collaborative conferences online to fiction writing with both people online, using Google Docs. Microsoft Word was obsolete(even if still many people use it). Blockchain is a technology that outshines the concept of Google Docs collaboration like a spark versus a star. Blockchain runs on a principle similar to the collaborative ability of Google Docs, by having multiple computers check to ensure that digital information is recorded accurately, millions of computers, called nodes, check this data and record it perfectly, trying to hack Blockchain is like trying to write swears in Google Docs: Everyone notices immediately. Blockchain-based businesses are growing exponentially as the technology improves. Blockchain technologies are not dominated by large industries yet. The entire industry of Blockchain technology is empty except for a few small yet growing businesses. Anyone can use this technology, and anyone can learn about it. In fact, by creating a startup focused on some sort of Blockchain transaction, whether it’s for transporting value across the internet, or general information, or financial records, you’re democratizing the entire process and keeping it away from FAANG or even Govs. Blockchain has been compared to the Internet. The Internet was extremely profitable and Blockchain arguably has the potential to be more so, simply by upgrading the existing framework. The person who sets their mind to creating a Blockchain technology has the potential to be unbelievably successful beyond simply creating a profitable niche industry.

payne92 6y ago

There is a killer app for crypto: international money laundering and untraceable transfers.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
Crypto transfers are the opposite of untraceable. I’m not sure why that sentiment is so prevalent.

hoka-one-one 6y ago

This same comment appears on every single crypto post. if it was actually true do you think people would have stopped posting about crypto in the past six years or so?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
Greed is perhaps one of the most powerful motivators known to man.
- Frost1x 6y ago
  Probably because it largely acts as a proxy for survival mechanisms. Give most people want they need and a little of what they want and you'll find most greed driven behaviors largely disappear except for a select few who I'd argue have dysfunctions or lack basic social maturity.
  - ed25519FUUU 6y ago
    The Mouse Utopia study from the 1960's suggest otherwise. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-utopias-1960s-led-grim-predictions-humans-180954423/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-utopias-...
omginternets 6y ago
>if it was actually true do you think people would have stopped posting about crypto in the past six years or so? I think crypto posts continue to appear because the idea is sexy, but I also think the parent poster is correct: the realized applications are not. Crypto captures the imagination, but it's a disappointment in practice.
a_hard_time 6y ago
The top comment on every crypto thread always dismisses blockchain as a failed technology (ignoring cryptocurrency) and smart contracts as having no killer app (ignoring decentralised finance). These comments never come with substance. They are essentially declarations of the poster's own lack of insight and understanding. I'm open to criticisms of crypto and smart contracts, but the comment above provides nothing in the way of meaningful criticism. It is trash.

paulintrognon 6y ago

Isn't cryptocurrencies used all over the Darknet ? I know that is not "the masses" but it is still a non-negligeable usage which is unlikely to stop, no?

duckfang 6y ago

The hardest pill to swallow is that we already had a very low cost of moving money around between hostile nation-states. And it's been around since the 8th century - read 700ACE-800ACE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala Its money dealer to money dealer, and the money dealers keep scrips. Average fees are from 0.2% to 0.5% . It's definitely un-sexy since its not technology based. No chains of blocks or programmers needed. Fees are low, so the money transferrers can make a living, but not allow speculation or other hazardous acts. And the only reason why it's not more massively used is because of the US's adherence that it's "terrorism". I'd imagine that the terrorism angle is more of a "allows people to ignore central banks ran by USA and Europe"... as the US didn't much care when HSBC was financing drug cartels, terrorists, and the like ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2012/07/16/hsbc-helped-terrorists-iran-mexican-drug-cartels-launder-money-senate-report-says/?sh=498c27545712 https://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2012/07/16/hsbc-h... )

lotsofpulp 6y ago
>And the only reason why it's not more massively used is because of the US's adherence that it's "terrorism". I don’t think so. A system with clear record keeping, auditable by third parties, and subject to the judiciary is far better than below: > Trust and extensive use of connections are the components that distinguish it from other remittance systems. Hawaladar networks are often based on membership in the same family, village, clan, or ethnic group, and cheating is punished by effective excommunication and "loss of honour"—leading to severe economic hardship.[3] Technology has obviated the need for unnecessary levels of allegiance to your tribe, as required in the above system.
- duckfang 6y ago
  > I don’t think so. A system with clear record keeping, auditable by third parties, and subject to the judiciary is far better than below: And we've learned that record-keeping has its own very strong negative side. It alone can establish ties between people, and serve to eliminate privacy all in the names of "transparency". (And I can hear it now too - "Why want privacy if you have done nothing wrong?"). I think we're only at the beginning of crypto-fraud arrests, because the ledger is the log - and that's a liability. And the auditability is primarily a governmental requirement, usually based around fraud, financing terrorists, or the like. If cheating occurs, the excommunication from the network is the punishment - you are removed from your position of power. And frankly, we can look at our systems of how auditability doesnt stop the various failure modes: blatant financing of terrorism/HBSC, billions of $ transferred away from citizens with usurious fines, overleveraging finance side affecting savings/loan. In the end, auditability is just a way to assign blame. And that blame is never directed towards those at the top who manufacture and use illegal techniques - it is used to blame the rank and file; the cashier, the teller, the engineer, the low middle manager. And subject to the judiciary is an interesting case you bring up... Because transfers in (I believe) all cryptocurrency is not subject to the judiciary. And in many more popular cryptosystems, that is seen as a strong anti-government bonus, and not a malus. And Point being, is that the Hawala is the last millenium's Bitcoin.. And when compared to BTC or ETH now, is still strictly better. (And we haven't discussed the barrier to entry, wasted electrical power, e-waste, etc.)

Taylor_OD 6y ago

The crypto killer app is using the money to buy illegal drugs. It always has been. Most of the people I knew who were into crypto early used it to buy weed online, not as an investment.

UShouldBWorking 6y ago
Exactly it is cash, as the the white paper says. Everything else is a distraction.
diego_moita 6y ago
> The crypto killer app is using the money to buy illegal drugs. Meeh! Not even that, anymore. In Brazil there was a brief moment in 2014 when you could buy marijuana and cocaine with bitcoins. But now, with all this volatility, transfer costs and low liquidity, not even drug dealers want crypto currency.
fullshark 6y ago
Don't forget ransomware payoffs
jcpham2 6y ago
Mining/Trading BTC over the counter since 2011. I've never used a darknet market. I read an article on slashdot in 2011 called "Bitcoin Mining for fun and profit" I bought a graphics card, it paid itself off in 21 days. I bought 12 more graphics cards and sucked down 3kW for 24 months. I do not regret this and every single person here that doesn't understand proof of work, doesn't understand a deflating asset with 8 (10 million) decimal places of trading precision against fiat currencies with only 2 decimal places... Well I can't help people on the internet do math and make money, no one pays me to do that.
- Taylor_OD 6y ago
  I don't think one could claim mining bitcoin is the killer app of bitcoin. That's a reason why people would support bitcoin.

berryjerry 6y ago

In countries with working currencies like EU and US, yes almost all crypto is speculation. BUT, countries that have poor banking system a poorly managed/trusted economy don't have access to even banks, let alone investments and stocks. Crypto lets those people participate in the global market.

drcode 6y ago

The alternative is building on AWS or whatever, where a big company can just decide arbitrarily to kill your startup at any arbitrary moment by shutting down your access, or confiscating your funds. This happens all the time.

bookmarkable 6y ago

This is really short sighted thinking. The web had no "killer app" in the first 10+ years. It was obscure technology with thousands of naysayers laughing at us "web nerds" because we thought it would change everything. Cryptocurrency is very young. While its hard to say if BTC or ETH or something yet to be invented will be part of the digital money future, it is absolutely reasonable to expect this technology will have a role in the world. Of course people will make and lose "quick dough" but that's like saying the web failed because some idiot made or lost money on Pets.com or AOL stock. Trade volume just means that the idea is in circulation, people of many walks of life are seeing what is there. Feel free to ignore those people, but to write off the entire concept as "about making quick dough" is asinine.

shuckles 6y ago
Bloomberg and Wired went online 4 years after the invention of the World Wide Web. In the first ten years, Amazon, eBay, Google, and PayPal were all founded. Technology adoption curves have only gotten steeper since then (e.g. iPhone/Android was basically the dominant consumer computing platform 10 years after its introduction).
- bookmarkable 6y ago
  You are comparing touchscreen mobile phones with a technology delving into what both gold / hard value stores AND cash do for society. That is not a typical technology adoption cycle. I’m not an extremist to say Bitcoin will eat the world or even replace any existing system entirely, but I still disagree with those that say it has no utility beyond get rich quick scheme. Referencing Wired as the killer app of the early Internet is good comedy. Bloomberg terminals were already connected, just not by this new tech.
  - shuckles 6y ago
    M-Pesa was used by over 90% of Kenyan households in about 2 years after its launch. I could go on. Mobile computing has changed the entire world; it’s not plainly obvious that cryptocurrency would change it even more or is substantially more difficult to execute on.

ab_testing 6y ago

I think that if you come across some well known crypto, it is better you just hold on to it and pray for appreciation due to high demand rather than trading in and out of it frequently.

slickrick216 6y ago

Decentralisation is itself the killer app. If you live in the developed world all your life you’ll have a skewed view of this and not understand the true benefit here. As trust decays in the 1st world I sincerely hope you are open minded enough to change your opinion. Some more killer apps; - RENVM decentralized darkpools - Chainlink decentralized oracles - Deco by chainlink labs decentralized private information sharing - NFTs and NFT marketplaces. This one is going to be huge. - The entire defi space is pretty remarkable from Dexes to Bancor and Yearn to keeperdao Respectfully comments like yours and others in this thread seem like people saying the internet wouldn’t take off in the 80s/90s. I don’t know how a technical audience like the one here doesn’t get it. Sure there’s greed but that’s a feature of humans not crypto. We are most definitely in a bubble but the dot com bubble bore seeds which grew into trees that were mighty.

AnonsLadder 6y ago
Yep RenVM is a big deal. Iirc they had something called Cafe which demonstrated turning your bitcoins into a privacy coin, ZEC. I remember when REN was only 5 cents. Amazing how much it costs to run a darknode now! Truly a successful project. Also another cool dApp is DyDx, margin trading platform

Bakary 6y ago

The inherent tension in the crypto space is that for early adopters crypto is the best thing imaginable: figuratively winning enormous sums with little to no effort. For anyone else, it is not only a generator of envy and bitterness but a burden on energy production, GPUs and whatnot. The ideological aspect of crypto as a defense against the big bad system is dead in the water since early adopters are so massively powerful within the hypothetical new system, and nobody really wants to use it as a currency as opposed to a pyramid scheme.

CryptoPunk 6y ago

Trading assets is a fundamental cooperative human activity that allows us to coordinate our actions at scale to reach much higher levels of collective productivity. The idea that profit-motivated exchange and investment is a useless human activity is a layman's understanding of economics.

jsutton 6y ago

The article states plainly: “What’s Ethereum’s killer app?” we asked ourselves not long ago. Now we know. It’s the world’s best publicly-accessible settlement platform for financial transactions. In a way, that’s exciting. The markets think so too.