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> At the end of the day, crypto is mountain you can't ignore anymore Is it really? Is there anyone that can say that a company has suffered because it didn't a
by audunw 6y ago
> At the end of the day, crypto is mountain you can't ignore anymore
Is it really? Is there anyone that can say that a company has suffered because it didn't adopt crypto? It seems like it's perfectly safe to ignore crypto completely. You could gain a bit of advantage. You can use it as a marketing tool, or to attract certain kinds of investors, by cashing in on the blockchain hype. But I haven't seen that there's any advantage yet in using the technology itself.
Regarding the use-cases you mention:
> 1 store of value akin to gold (bitcoin)
Bitcoin is not a store of value. It's a destructor or sink of value. A store of value should have some reserves behind them or some physical asset. Something that has value to others that have not invested in it. Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrency only has value to those that hold them. The value of Bitcoin could crash to 0 tomorrow, and nobody except the investors would care at all. If the gold price crashed I'd be very interested. Would be cool to buy some gold just to play with. Maybe make my own jewelry. But WAY before that there'd be plenty of others buying it for a higher price, for jewelry or manufacturing.
> 2 decentralised privacy money (monero etc)
Aka a gift to crime. I mean, in an ideal world it'd be amazing to have a currency like this. But in practice it does more damage to good. Yes, IMO it's a bad thing even in corrupt countries where you might have legitimate reasons to hide from the state. Because having currency like that doesn't solve all the other problems with having a corrupt government, so it's really just a distraction from solving real problems.
> 3 a platform on which to build decentralised technologies
This is the only legitimate use-case IMO. But it has yet to be proven that using a platform like this has a real advantage.
I think the issue is that problems that you can solve with trustless decentralized algorithms are mostly very trivial. Who has ever had issues with a bank money transfer itself? Meanwhile, the problems we'd really like to solve around currencies, payment and financial services, are basically impossible to solve with trustless. The real problem in payment is to ensure that the seller delivers the product. The real problem in lending is to ensure that the borrower can afford the loan and uses the money on what he says he will.
So you really can't get rid of the human component in most of these applications, if you want a solution that's as good as what you're trying to replace. And in that case, the blockchain is just a fancy and expensive implementation detail that serves little to no practical purpose.
There may be some crossover point where these technologies provide some value. But I suspect it's a much smaller niche than most blockchain proponents would like to admit. I think settling international transactions between banks is one of the very few use-cases where it may be valuable.
- gh55 6y ago> The real problem in lending is to ensure that the borrower can afford the loan and uses the money on what he says he will. So the lender pays the money into a multisignature 2-of-3 wallet, gives 1 key to the borrower, and if when the borrower signs a transaction with that key to spend the funds is buying what they are authorised to buy, countersigns, else does not. And then you wrap this up in a smart contract, call it DeFi, have a liquidity pool for people to loan out a token for car financing, and if those people don't want to perform the check themselves, plug in an oracle like chainlink to deal with the real world part. On the repayment side, if repayment not made, a company can buy the debt and chase it, or can be hired to chase it. Wall torn down around car (insert asset here) financing..
- afiori 6y agoWhile it is interesting that you can implement this on block-chain this is a perfect example of how block-chain does not provide more than just being trustless. (personally I like having trusted third parties)
- UncleMeat 6y agoThe repossession is the hard part. Let’s say I lend ten grand to some wallet so they can buy a car. They do so. Now they’ve got a car. They now move all their wealth to other wallets or fiat and refuse to pay me back. I need some mechanism of repossessing their car, which only works if I have state infrastructure and a legal system attached to my contract. “Btc bounty hunters” isn’t a good enough explanation.
- EdwardDiego 6y agoNow I'm wondering if software contracts have ever been legally tested. I'd enjoy a lawyer reading out the relevant if statement to the court.
- UncleMeat 6y agoI certainly don't think it is impossible. But the "defi will let everybody make 8% on their savings accounts by loaning cash to people around the world with no barriers" folks need to provide some evidence that I'm not actually going to lose everything to people just refusing to pay me back.