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Blockchain, Decentralization and Smart Contracts have had nearly a decade to prove their value and disrupt the marketplace. So far nothing but whitepapers, pipe

Blockchain, Decentralization and Smart Contracts have had nearly a decade to prove their value and disrupt the marketplace. So far nothing but whitepapers, pipe dreams and exit scams - nothing my mother can use. What's the point? Nobody is using crypto as an alternative to fiat. Prove me wrong.

bpodgursky 5y ago
On January 29, 1886, Carl Benz applied for a patent for his “vehicle powered by a gas engine.” The patent – number 37435 – may be regarded as the birth certificate of the automobile. In July 1886 the newspapers reported on the first public outing of the three-wheeled Benz Patent Motor Car, model no. 1.
- mvzvm 5y ago
  What a strange response. Did you respond to the wrong comment?
  - foobar502 5y ago
    It takes time.
    - mvzvm 5y ago
      In his own example, it went from patent to useful in a few months. Blockchain has not gone from idea to useful at all yet.
      - tummybug 5y ago
        That is a really hard to achieve definition of useful.
      - Asraelite 5y ago
        Very very few people were using cars at that time. If you apply that same low threshold of usefulness to blockchain then it became useful just as fast, if not faster.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  Do quote everything, while you're at it. > The first production of automobiles was by Karl Benz in 1888 in Germany and, under license from Benz, in France by Emile Roger. There were numerous others, including tricycle builders Rudolf Egg, Edward Butler, and Léon Bollée. Bollée, using a 650 cc (40 cu in) engine of his own design, enabled his driver, Jamin, to average 45 kilometres per hour (28 mph) in the 1897 Paris-Tourville rally. By 1900, mass production of automobiles had begun in France and the United States. So, 11 years after production started, gas-powered cars were not only rather common, but there were rallies involving them. 11 years from introduction, no one has come up with a use-case for blockchain: https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100 https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-... and https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...
  - BeefWellington 5y ago
    > 11 years from introduction, no one has come up with a use-case for blockchain This seems an odd claim to make. Currently there's hundreds of Cryptocurrencies using blockchains as a foundation, and more than half a trillion dollars tied up in them. Right now it seems like they're at least speculative investments. If this does not count as a use-case then we'd better break the news to essentially all of finance. Years ago before the values jumped you could do plenty of actual currency things with cryptocurrencies: there were ATMs, you could buy beers at a pub or pay for server hosting (something I did myself), etc. Because of all of the speculation cryptocurrencies have generally become too volatile for that. Nobody wants to find out at the pub there was a market crash and they can't cover their outing. At the time though, it all worked and had incredibly low transaction fees. Then there's the applications for areas like logistics, supply chain, that are all under development. IMO it has absolutely established itself as a technology and like everything new people were quick to try to apply it to every problem and found it largely didn't fit most places. That doesn't mean it isn't useful.
    - vehementi 5y ago
      You can take any obscenely inefficient technology and apply it to anything and say "look, it's useful", but that doesn't make it a good idea or viable or really even not pointless. I heard it best put as: blockchain provides trustlessness at very high operational cost -- do we have a business case where trustlessness is a competitive advantage? If not, just use a database or equivalent So like yes, you can implement insurance and messaging and contracts with blockchain. Is there a need to do that? Does it make sense? Would that business work? (Zero percent of such businesses have worked) The sending money part is certainly a legitimate use. Unfortunately it's being totally broken by speculation on all the coins (not to mention high gas).
- idlewords 5y ago
  And over the following years the automobile improved rapidly, becoming more capable, reliable, and gaining users as it went. It didn't spend its first 13 years up on blocks while its supporters yelled at the skeptical and embezzled money from everyone else.
  - sthnblllII 5y ago
    Yea. Its closer to the first 30 years of its existence doing pretty much nothing but being sport for rich people.
    - idlewords 5y ago
      It was at least able to roll from point A to point B without consuming a small country's worth of power.
RobertDeNiro 5y ago
The original use case was for black markets such as silkroad. Then crypto made so much sense.
seibelj 5y ago
I have responded to a thousand versions of your comment on HN. No matter what I write the haters never change their minds. HN is not an enthusiastic place for blockchain devs.
- jeremycarter 5y ago
  I'm not a hater. I am just applying some critical thinking and design thinking to try to figure out where the value is in all of this to the customer. I am happy to say I'm wrong, and happy to backflip.
  - seibelj 5y ago
    Here is one of many comments I have written https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25641940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25641940 But again, to those reading this thread, HN is not a place where you will find a lot of people who patiently defend crypto and blockchain. It garners a lot of downvotes.
    - jeremycarter 5y ago
      I will read it without bias. Thank you.
    - kaladin_1 5y ago
      >> But again, to those reading this thread, HN is not a place where you will find a lot of people who patiently defend crypto and blockchain. It garners a lot of downvotes. Blockchain is a wonderful piece of technology. IMHO I do not think anyone really has personal beef with the technology. I think majority really want to understand, and if they're asking and posing questions it is because do not understand. There might be some that have their skin in it going south but I doubt that's the situation of many. People really want to understand its use case as money.
  - puranjay 5y ago
    Please see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27258671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27258671 some links to complement the comment: https://curve.fi/ https://curve.fi/ - for exchanging different tokenized stable coins (such as USDC > EURO). Already has over $300M in daily volume exchange. https://yearn.finance/ https://yearn.finance/ - a platform where anyone can code and deploy an investment strategy, provided it is voted on by people who hold the platform's governance tokens. Already has over $3B in assets locked in. Good idea to look at their governance platform as well: https://snapshot.org/#/yearn https://snapshot.org/#/yearn https://aave.com/ https://aave.com/ - a platform to borrow or lend your tokenized assets. Already has over $9B in assets invested
k__ 5y ago
I think, it will probably take another decade. I think, BC could go to 5 million before it stablizes.
- kgwgk 5y ago
  Or 42 trillion. Sky is the limit.
  - throwaway829 5y ago
    If america has Zimbabwean inflation maybe.
- wcoenen 5y ago
  The dynamics of mining make this impossible. If Bitcoin were worth millions, then miners could spend millions on electricity to find each block and still make a profit. And because they're competing with hashrate, they would do exactly that. If you do the math, you'll find that basically all electricity would go to mining. Before we would get to that point, the electricity price would start going up of course. For everybody. And guess what governments will do when the population starts rioting because they can't afford electricity? They'll ban all proof-of-work coins. Maybe all crypto just to be on the safe side.
  - k__ 5y ago
    I did some math and my idea was: If the max amount of Bitcoin is 21mio and we assume that a huge chunk of the economy will be payable with these Bitcoin. Then on Bitcoin has to be worth (at least) 1/21mio of that economy chunk.
    - wcoenen 5y ago
      That is one way to estimate a maximum possible value. My point is that by assuming "Bitcoin cannot consume more than X % of all electricity or there will be trouble", you can calculate another maximum value which turns out to be much lower. In fact, if you assume Bitcoin can consume no more than 1% of all electricity (before regulatory trouble starts brewing) and electricity costs 0.05 USD/kWh, then you get a maximum price which is pretty close to the current price. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.05+USD%2FkWh+*+10+minutes+*+2100+gigawatt+*+0.01+%2F+6.25 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.05+USD%2FkWh+*+10+mi...
Robotbeat 5y ago
Decentralization is good, but it’s almost by definition not profitable. It’s in centralization that you get profit (pre-mining is a bit like centralization). BitTorrent: good, somewhat decentralized. Not super profitable.
- ric2b 5y ago
  By definition? Can you expand?
puranjay 5y ago
Maybe I'm wrong but I see this perspective so often on HN. And I can't help but feel that this is because so many people on HN are already privileged - living in the first world, making software salaries, and generally have a world of opportunities available to them, especially when it comes to their money. But coming from a third world country, the promise of a decentralized, permissionless market seems extremely promising. Particularly if it doesn't restrict me because of my location or capital or identity. If the internet broke geographical barriers, this tech can break barriers of capital and identity and credentialsm. While I won't talk about the idealized vision of blockchains, smart contracts can automate away a large number of fairly complex interactions. There is already a pretty thriving decentralized financial market that anyone can access from any part of the world with any amount of capital - no KYC or questions asked. A very basic usage: using Curve.fi to swap between tokenized USD (USDC) and tokenized EURO (EURS) with minimal slippage and fees, all permissionless, all freely accessible. If I was an American and wanted to have Euro to spend on my vacation, would this not be a better way to go about it instead of going to the bank, dealing with someone, and paying their exorbitant fees? The only missing part is the ability to easily spend this tokenized EURO, but that - I'm hoping - will come later. The core tech - smart contracts, blockchains - work. A more advanced use case: deploy tokenized USD into a vault that lends it out according to a set strategy, earning the lender interest passively. The individual who created the strategy, in term, earns a fee based on their returns generated. Again, this individual can be from anywhere and doesn't have to have a fancy office and degrees to get investment "clients". Nor does the lender have to deal with anyone to lend out their money. If this tech allows Raj from India to build a "hedge fund", and for Joe from America to invest with as little as $1, and the two never have to know each other, and can interact entirely with a smart contract available 24x7, what's there not to be excited about? In the serious crypto world, there is a maxim: Code is Law. I would reckon that alone should make HN bullish on crypto. When was the last time you worked at a tech company where Code was truly the Law? ===== Some links if anyone wants to explore this further: 1. Uniswap.org - anyone can set up trading between any two tokenized assets. Want to trade between the price of gold and Venezuelan Bolivar? Sure, go ahead and use the price oracles from Chainlink to create these two tokens, set up a trading pair, and allow anyone to speculate on these two assets. Or you can just be a market maker (something only big funds can do in TradFi) and earn fees on the trades. 2. Curve.fi - swap between tokenized stable coins, such as EURO > USD, without ever having to visit the bank or paying their fees or doing their KYC. 3. AAVE.com - Lend or borrow between tokenized assets
Sleepytime 5y ago
The internet was around a lot longer than a decade before aol showed up and started pressing CDs.
- fo0manchu 5y ago
  Sources on that claim?
- idlewords 5y ago
  Imagine if after TCP/IP was invented, people hoarded IP addresses and they became worth millions of dollars, but no one used the internet. If you pointed this out, they got mad at you for being a luddite or a noiper. That's the situation we're in with crypto.
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    People use Ethereum.. https://etherscan.io/chart/gasused https://etherscan.io/chart/gasused
    - idlewords 5y ago
      They use it to speculate. In the words of Mark Cuban, "Traders borrow to buy Eth, used eth to borrow alt/stable coin, used that to LP a high APY Pair, took the SLPs and staked them to maxout yield." Whatever that means, this is the world they're building.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    The reverse is sort of happening with IPv4. ISPs are pushing more and more people behind CGNAT where multiple people share the same IPv4 address. This is a problem because some video games (Terraria) don't support IPv6.
- qeternity 5y ago
  Crypto relies on the internet. It benefits from its adoption. It should be much faster. YouTube, Facebook, Netflix, Spotify, App Stores, etc. All of these advancements experienced rapid growth. Hell, even PayPal. The internet built the network that made that rapid growth possible. Crypto is not reinventing the internet.
dehrmann 5y ago
> nothing my mother can use In developed countries, I can tap with my phone or card to pay instantly, there's Venmo, and fees are low-ish. Currently, no cryptocurrency has competitive advantages to traditional payments...unless it's illegal, but even then, certain cryptocurrences are a really bad choice. Supposedly phone apps are used for payments in developing countries, but I'm not entirely sure.
- scabarott 5y ago
  I'm a huge proponent of crypto and the many things it's going to make possible that were not previously possible. But the developing country angle is oversold usually by people just parroting it without really knowing what things are like in developing countries: 1. In many developing countries increasingly you can also use phone or card almost as conveniently as you can in the west. In fact some developing countries are more advanced as far as mobile payments go (out of necessity because of less developed banking systems) e.g Mpesa in Kenya. Generally visa/bank cards and payment apps are not as alien as you might think they are in many parts of Africa or India or South America 2. Using Bitcoins for transactions/moving money around with the current state of the art is a lot more difficult and less accessible than using western union and other financial services that are ubiquitous in these places. Since at present you can't really use Bitcoin for much you still have to convert it fiat which means using an exchange. Most exchanges have even more onerous kyc/id requirements than banks and many financial institutions in developing countries won't even touch bitcoin at all. And not even to talk of the relative technical sophistication required to use crypto services let alone maintain a wallet. As far as developing countries go crypto-currency at present is mostly a curiosity among the well-heeled and well-connected in the largest cities. It's going to be a long long time before the promise of crypto bringing salvation to the un-banked comes anywhere close to reality.
skinnyasianboi 5y ago
NFTs disrupted the digital art marketplace.
n0mad01 5y ago
This is a very limited and short-sighted view on the emergence and development of new technologies. From the first petrol engine (1879) to the Ford Model T (1908), the Arpanet (1969) to the Internet (1990), as also software development (Cyberpunk 2077 was developed over 8 years), these things have one thing in common: they need time. When one day your every breath (and its payment) is recorded on a blockchain then you should be aware that such a technology capable to do so does not exist yet, but its basic features do.
- jeremycarter 5y ago
  Yes I know it is very short sighted, but I am very open to being persuaded. I'm not trying to be negative, just trying to look for the real world "value".
- dmitriid 5y ago
  For some reason bitcoin apologists always use cars, and the internet, and other actual disruptive technologies and inventions. Even though with each passing day it looks more like radioactive health products [1] [1] https://interestingengineering.com/9-interesting-failed-inventions-past https://interestingengineering.com/9-interesting-failed-inve...
  - n0mad01 5y ago
    it is noticeably peculiar to compare one of the most significant technical inventions of our century with a half-baked hair dryer. such innovations only appear now and then, one should have the intuition to recognize them as such, otherwise he will miss the opportunities of such developments.
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      > one should have the intuition to recognize them as such, otherwise he will miss the opportunities of such developments. That's the narrative of scam artists since before time.
      - 5y ago
nootropicat 5y ago
Defi is only about 2-3 years old. It's indeed fair to say that bitcoin has completely failed in getting any adoption beyond speculation. >Nobody is using crypto as an alternative to fiat. Ethereum is the best way to save in dollars outside of the developed world. High single digit or double digit yields (powered by speculators borrowing to speculate) vs ~0% in the banking system. Also much safer. Not compared to an American bank, but to Russian/Lebanese/Brazilian etc.
- atweiden 5y ago
  > Defi is only about 2-3 years old The history of defi can be traced back to mid-2013 (mastercoin) or earlier (colored coins). And what the cool kids are calling “defi” today was called “appcoins” and “utility coins” several years ago. It’s all just marketing spin. > It's indeed fair to say that bitcoin has completely failed in getting any adoption beyond speculation. Digital gold is a euphemism for speculative store of value. Gold itself is a speculative SoV. For Bitcoin, that’s a sign of success — which is reflected in its market price. There is not one single cryptocurrency on the market today which isn’t a speculative store of value primarily by real world usage. Rather there is Bitcoin which is upfront about this, and then there are other coins whose skilled sophists promote it as being something other than a speculative store of value as a hollow front. Peak behind the curtain and you’ll find a speculative store of value in 100% of cases, absolutely without exception. If anything has failed here it’s the moral compass of altcoin promoters globally, and investors for being so easily misled by hype entrepreneurs.
  - nootropicat 5y ago
    >The history of defi can be traced back to mid-2013 (mastercoin) or earlier (colored coins). I disagree. Defi started with lending and borrowing dapps. If just tokens themselves are 'defi' then bitcoin itself is defi, which would make the definition pointless. Finance requires lending and borrowing. >Digital gold is a euphemism for speculative store of value. Gold itself is a speculative SoV. For Bitcoin, that’s a sign of success — which is reflected in its market price. The title of the bitcoin whitepaper is 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System' which means it objectively failed in its stated goal. Of course, it had to, as bitcoin is not backed by anything and money must be backed by something. Now it's just a ponzi scheme that continues to make people poorer while fooling them that they're getting rich. The only way to make a profit on bitcoin is to take someone else's wealth - it's zero sum by itself. On top of that there's mining, which ensures bitcoin continuously destroys wealth and makes bitcoin buyers poorer as a group compared to everyone else.
Geee 5y ago
I am using Bitcoin as money and there are a lot of people like me. Just by saving in Bitcoin is using it. The primary purpose of money is to save your purchasing power. From my viewpoint, it is inevitable that Bitcoin replaces fiat currencies. Given free markets, people will eventually choose the most sound money.
mattdesl 5y ago
I would argue that many NFT platforms (such as Hicetnunc.xyz[1]) have already successfully "disrupted" traditional artist marketplaces (such as Etsy, Shopify, Bandcamp, etc), despite being only popular for a short few months. I think many other participating artists would agree, if these decentralized platforms continue to be more profitable for creators than traditional options, there is no need to 'go back' to centralized fiat marketplaces. I think the real question is whether this will continue long-term, and whether decentralized paradigms (digital ownership, DAOs, trustless execution, etc) can still hold value for the average user even if there was no high economic return. [1] - https://restofworld.org/2021/inside-brazils-diy-nft-art-marketplace/ https://restofworld.org/2021/inside-brazils-diy-nft-art-mark...

bpodgursky 5y ago

On January 29, 1886, Carl Benz applied for a patent for his “vehicle powered by a gas engine.” The patent – number 37435 – may be regarded as the birth certificate of the automobile. In July 1886 the newspapers reported on the first public outing of the three-wheeled Benz Patent Motor Car, model no. 1.

mvzvm 5y ago
What a strange response. Did you respond to the wrong comment?
- foobar502 5y ago
  It takes time.
  - mvzvm 5y ago
    In his own example, it went from patent to useful in a few months. Blockchain has not gone from idea to useful at all yet.
    - tummybug 5y ago
      That is a really hard to achieve definition of useful.
    - Asraelite 5y ago
      Very very few people were using cars at that time. If you apply that same low threshold of usefulness to blockchain then it became useful just as fast, if not faster.
dmitriid 5y ago
Do quote everything, while you're at it. > The first production of automobiles was by Karl Benz in 1888 in Germany and, under license from Benz, in France by Emile Roger. There were numerous others, including tricycle builders Rudolf Egg, Edward Butler, and Léon Bollée. Bollée, using a 650 cc (40 cu in) engine of his own design, enabled his driver, Jamin, to average 45 kilometres per hour (28 mph) in the 1897 Paris-Tourville rally. By 1900, mass production of automobiles had begun in France and the United States. So, 11 years after production started, gas-powered cars were not only rather common, but there were rallies involving them. 11 years from introduction, no one has come up with a use-case for blockchain: https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100 https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-... and https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...
- BeefWellington 5y ago
  > 11 years from introduction, no one has come up with a use-case for blockchain This seems an odd claim to make. Currently there's hundreds of Cryptocurrencies using blockchains as a foundation, and more than half a trillion dollars tied up in them. Right now it seems like they're at least speculative investments. If this does not count as a use-case then we'd better break the news to essentially all of finance. Years ago before the values jumped you could do plenty of actual currency things with cryptocurrencies: there were ATMs, you could buy beers at a pub or pay for server hosting (something I did myself), etc. Because of all of the speculation cryptocurrencies have generally become too volatile for that. Nobody wants to find out at the pub there was a market crash and they can't cover their outing. At the time though, it all worked and had incredibly low transaction fees. Then there's the applications for areas like logistics, supply chain, that are all under development. IMO it has absolutely established itself as a technology and like everything new people were quick to try to apply it to every problem and found it largely didn't fit most places. That doesn't mean it isn't useful.
  - vehementi 5y ago
    You can take any obscenely inefficient technology and apply it to anything and say "look, it's useful", but that doesn't make it a good idea or viable or really even not pointless. I heard it best put as: blockchain provides trustlessness at very high operational cost -- do we have a business case where trustlessness is a competitive advantage? If not, just use a database or equivalent So like yes, you can implement insurance and messaging and contracts with blockchain. Is there a need to do that? Does it make sense? Would that business work? (Zero percent of such businesses have worked) The sending money part is certainly a legitimate use. Unfortunately it's being totally broken by speculation on all the coins (not to mention high gas).
idlewords 5y ago
And over the following years the automobile improved rapidly, becoming more capable, reliable, and gaining users as it went. It didn't spend its first 13 years up on blocks while its supporters yelled at the skeptical and embezzled money from everyone else.
- sthnblllII 5y ago
  Yea. Its closer to the first 30 years of its existence doing pretty much nothing but being sport for rich people.
  - idlewords 5y ago
    It was at least able to roll from point A to point B without consuming a small country's worth of power.

RobertDeNiro 5y ago

The original use case was for black markets such as silkroad. Then crypto made so much sense.

seibelj 5y ago

I have responded to a thousand versions of your comment on HN. No matter what I write the haters never change their minds. HN is not an enthusiastic place for blockchain devs.

jeremycarter 5y ago
I'm not a hater. I am just applying some critical thinking and design thinking to try to figure out where the value is in all of this to the customer. I am happy to say I'm wrong, and happy to backflip.
- seibelj 5y ago
  Here is one of many comments I have written https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25641940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25641940 But again, to those reading this thread, HN is not a place where you will find a lot of people who patiently defend crypto and blockchain. It garners a lot of downvotes.
  - jeremycarter 5y ago
    I will read it without bias. Thank you.
  - kaladin_1 5y ago
    >> But again, to those reading this thread, HN is not a place where you will find a lot of people who patiently defend crypto and blockchain. It garners a lot of downvotes. Blockchain is a wonderful piece of technology. IMHO I do not think anyone really has personal beef with the technology. I think majority really want to understand, and if they're asking and posing questions it is because do not understand. There might be some that have their skin in it going south but I doubt that's the situation of many. People really want to understand its use case as money.
- puranjay 5y ago
  Please see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27258671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27258671 some links to complement the comment: https://curve.fi/ https://curve.fi/ - for exchanging different tokenized stable coins (such as USDC > EURO). Already has over $300M in daily volume exchange. https://yearn.finance/ https://yearn.finance/ - a platform where anyone can code and deploy an investment strategy, provided it is voted on by people who hold the platform's governance tokens. Already has over $3B in assets locked in. Good idea to look at their governance platform as well: https://snapshot.org/#/yearn https://snapshot.org/#/yearn https://aave.com/ https://aave.com/ - a platform to borrow or lend your tokenized assets. Already has over $9B in assets invested

k__ 5y ago

I think, it will probably take another decade. I think, BC could go to 5 million before it stablizes.

kgwgk 5y ago
Or 42 trillion. Sky is the limit.
- throwaway829 5y ago
  If america has Zimbabwean inflation maybe.
wcoenen 5y ago
The dynamics of mining make this impossible. If Bitcoin were worth millions, then miners could spend millions on electricity to find each block and still make a profit. And because they're competing with hashrate, they would do exactly that. If you do the math, you'll find that basically all electricity would go to mining. Before we would get to that point, the electricity price would start going up of course. For everybody. And guess what governments will do when the population starts rioting because they can't afford electricity? They'll ban all proof-of-work coins. Maybe all crypto just to be on the safe side.
- k__ 5y ago
  I did some math and my idea was: If the max amount of Bitcoin is 21mio and we assume that a huge chunk of the economy will be payable with these Bitcoin. Then on Bitcoin has to be worth (at least) 1/21mio of that economy chunk.
  - wcoenen 5y ago
    That is one way to estimate a maximum possible value. My point is that by assuming "Bitcoin cannot consume more than X % of all electricity or there will be trouble", you can calculate another maximum value which turns out to be much lower. In fact, if you assume Bitcoin can consume no more than 1% of all electricity (before regulatory trouble starts brewing) and electricity costs 0.05 USD/kWh, then you get a maximum price which is pretty close to the current price. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.05+USD%2FkWh+*+10+minutes+*+2100+gigawatt+*+0.01+%2F+6.25 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.05+USD%2FkWh+*+10+mi...

Robotbeat 5y ago

Decentralization is good, but it’s almost by definition not profitable. It’s in centralization that you get profit (pre-mining is a bit like centralization). BitTorrent: good, somewhat decentralized. Not super profitable.

ric2b 5y ago
By definition? Can you expand?

puranjay 5y ago

Maybe I'm wrong but I see this perspective so often on HN. And I can't help but feel that this is because so many people on HN are already privileged - living in the first world, making software salaries, and generally have a world of opportunities available to them, especially when it comes to their money. But coming from a third world country, the promise of a decentralized, permissionless market seems extremely promising. Particularly if it doesn't restrict me because of my location or capital or identity. If the internet broke geographical barriers, this tech can break barriers of capital and identity and credentialsm. While I won't talk about the idealized vision of blockchains, smart contracts can automate away a large number of fairly complex interactions. There is already a pretty thriving decentralized financial market that anyone can access from any part of the world with any amount of capital - no KYC or questions asked. A very basic usage: using Curve.fi to swap between tokenized USD (USDC) and tokenized EURO (EURS) with minimal slippage and fees, all permissionless, all freely accessible. If I was an American and wanted to have Euro to spend on my vacation, would this not be a better way to go about it instead of going to the bank, dealing with someone, and paying their exorbitant fees? The only missing part is the ability to easily spend this tokenized EURO, but that - I'm hoping - will come later. The core tech - smart contracts, blockchains - work. A more advanced use case: deploy tokenized USD into a vault that lends it out according to a set strategy, earning the lender interest passively. The individual who created the strategy, in term, earns a fee based on their returns generated. Again, this individual can be from anywhere and doesn't have to have a fancy office and degrees to get investment "clients". Nor does the lender have to deal with anyone to lend out their money. If this tech allows Raj from India to build a "hedge fund", and for Joe from America to invest with as little as $1, and the two never have to know each other, and can interact entirely with a smart contract available 24x7, what's there not to be excited about? In the serious crypto world, there is a maxim: Code is Law. I would reckon that alone should make HN bullish on crypto. When was the last time you worked at a tech company where Code was truly the Law? ===== Some links if anyone wants to explore this further: 1. Uniswap.org - anyone can set up trading between any two tokenized assets. Want to trade between the price of gold and Venezuelan Bolivar? Sure, go ahead and use the price oracles from Chainlink to create these two tokens, set up a trading pair, and allow anyone to speculate on these two assets. Or you can just be a market maker (something only big funds can do in TradFi) and earn fees on the trades. 2. Curve.fi - swap between tokenized stable coins, such as EURO > USD, without ever having to visit the bank or paying their fees or doing their KYC. 3. AAVE.com - Lend or borrow between tokenized assets

Sleepytime 5y ago

The internet was around a lot longer than a decade before aol showed up and started pressing CDs.

fo0manchu 5y ago
Sources on that claim?
idlewords 5y ago
Imagine if after TCP/IP was invented, people hoarded IP addresses and they became worth millions of dollars, but no one used the internet. If you pointed this out, they got mad at you for being a luddite or a noiper. That's the situation we're in with crypto.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  People use Ethereum.. https://etherscan.io/chart/gasused https://etherscan.io/chart/gasused
  - idlewords 5y ago
    They use it to speculate. In the words of Mark Cuban, "Traders borrow to buy Eth, used eth to borrow alt/stable coin, used that to LP a high APY Pair, took the SLPs and staked them to maxout yield." Whatever that means, this is the world they're building.
- imtringued 5y ago
  The reverse is sort of happening with IPv4. ISPs are pushing more and more people behind CGNAT where multiple people share the same IPv4 address. This is a problem because some video games (Terraria) don't support IPv6.
qeternity 5y ago
Crypto relies on the internet. It benefits from its adoption. It should be much faster. YouTube, Facebook, Netflix, Spotify, App Stores, etc. All of these advancements experienced rapid growth. Hell, even PayPal. The internet built the network that made that rapid growth possible. Crypto is not reinventing the internet.

dehrmann 5y ago

> nothing my mother can use In developed countries, I can tap with my phone or card to pay instantly, there's Venmo, and fees are low-ish. Currently, no cryptocurrency has competitive advantages to traditional payments...unless it's illegal, but even then, certain cryptocurrences are a really bad choice. Supposedly phone apps are used for payments in developing countries, but I'm not entirely sure.

scabarott 5y ago
I'm a huge proponent of crypto and the many things it's going to make possible that were not previously possible. But the developing country angle is oversold usually by people just parroting it without really knowing what things are like in developing countries: 1. In many developing countries increasingly you can also use phone or card almost as conveniently as you can in the west. In fact some developing countries are more advanced as far as mobile payments go (out of necessity because of less developed banking systems) e.g Mpesa in Kenya. Generally visa/bank cards and payment apps are not as alien as you might think they are in many parts of Africa or India or South America 2. Using Bitcoins for transactions/moving money around with the current state of the art is a lot more difficult and less accessible than using western union and other financial services that are ubiquitous in these places. Since at present you can't really use Bitcoin for much you still have to convert it fiat which means using an exchange. Most exchanges have even more onerous kyc/id requirements than banks and many financial institutions in developing countries won't even touch bitcoin at all. And not even to talk of the relative technical sophistication required to use crypto services let alone maintain a wallet. As far as developing countries go crypto-currency at present is mostly a curiosity among the well-heeled and well-connected in the largest cities. It's going to be a long long time before the promise of crypto bringing salvation to the un-banked comes anywhere close to reality.

skinnyasianboi 5y ago

NFTs disrupted the digital art marketplace.

n0mad01 5y ago

This is a very limited and short-sighted view on the emergence and development of new technologies. From the first petrol engine (1879) to the Ford Model T (1908), the Arpanet (1969) to the Internet (1990), as also software development (Cyberpunk 2077 was developed over 8 years), these things have one thing in common: they need time. When one day your every breath (and its payment) is recorded on a blockchain then you should be aware that such a technology capable to do so does not exist yet, but its basic features do.

jeremycarter 5y ago
Yes I know it is very short sighted, but I am very open to being persuaded. I'm not trying to be negative, just trying to look for the real world "value".
dmitriid 5y ago
For some reason bitcoin apologists always use cars, and the internet, and other actual disruptive technologies and inventions. Even though with each passing day it looks more like radioactive health products [1] [1] https://interestingengineering.com/9-interesting-failed-inventions-past https://interestingengineering.com/9-interesting-failed-inve...
- n0mad01 5y ago
  it is noticeably peculiar to compare one of the most significant technical inventions of our century with a half-baked hair dryer. such innovations only appear now and then, one should have the intuition to recognize them as such, otherwise he will miss the opportunities of such developments.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    > one should have the intuition to recognize them as such, otherwise he will miss the opportunities of such developments. That's the narrative of scam artists since before time.
    - 5y ago

nootropicat 5y ago

Defi is only about 2-3 years old. It's indeed fair to say that bitcoin has completely failed in getting any adoption beyond speculation. >Nobody is using crypto as an alternative to fiat. Ethereum is the best way to save in dollars outside of the developed world. High single digit or double digit yields (powered by speculators borrowing to speculate) vs ~0% in the banking system. Also much safer. Not compared to an American bank, but to Russian/Lebanese/Brazilian etc.

atweiden 5y ago
> Defi is only about 2-3 years old The history of defi can be traced back to mid-2013 (mastercoin) or earlier (colored coins). And what the cool kids are calling “defi” today was called “appcoins” and “utility coins” several years ago. It’s all just marketing spin. > It's indeed fair to say that bitcoin has completely failed in getting any adoption beyond speculation. Digital gold is a euphemism for speculative store of value. Gold itself is a speculative SoV. For Bitcoin, that’s a sign of success — which is reflected in its market price. There is not one single cryptocurrency on the market today which isn’t a speculative store of value primarily by real world usage. Rather there is Bitcoin which is upfront about this, and then there are other coins whose skilled sophists promote it as being something other than a speculative store of value as a hollow front. Peak behind the curtain and you’ll find a speculative store of value in 100% of cases, absolutely without exception. If anything has failed here it’s the moral compass of altcoin promoters globally, and investors for being so easily misled by hype entrepreneurs.
- nootropicat 5y ago
  >The history of defi can be traced back to mid-2013 (mastercoin) or earlier (colored coins). I disagree. Defi started with lending and borrowing dapps. If just tokens themselves are 'defi' then bitcoin itself is defi, which would make the definition pointless. Finance requires lending and borrowing. >Digital gold is a euphemism for speculative store of value. Gold itself is a speculative SoV. For Bitcoin, that’s a sign of success — which is reflected in its market price. The title of the bitcoin whitepaper is 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System' which means it objectively failed in its stated goal. Of course, it had to, as bitcoin is not backed by anything and money must be backed by something. Now it's just a ponzi scheme that continues to make people poorer while fooling them that they're getting rich. The only way to make a profit on bitcoin is to take someone else's wealth - it's zero sum by itself. On top of that there's mining, which ensures bitcoin continuously destroys wealth and makes bitcoin buyers poorer as a group compared to everyone else.

Geee 5y ago

I am using Bitcoin as money and there are a lot of people like me. Just by saving in Bitcoin is using it. The primary purpose of money is to save your purchasing power. From my viewpoint, it is inevitable that Bitcoin replaces fiat currencies. Given free markets, people will eventually choose the most sound money.

mattdesl 5y ago

I would argue that many NFT platforms (such as Hicetnunc.xyz[1]) have already successfully "disrupted" traditional artist marketplaces (such as Etsy, Shopify, Bandcamp, etc), despite being only popular for a short few months. I think many other participating artists would agree, if these decentralized platforms continue to be more profitable for creators than traditional options, there is no need to 'go back' to centralized fiat marketplaces. I think the real question is whether this will continue long-term, and whether decentralized paradigms (digital ownership, DAOs, trustless execution, etc) can still hold value for the average user even if there was no high economic return. [1] - https://restofworld.org/2021/inside-brazils-diy-nft-art-marketplace/ https://restofworld.org/2021/inside-brazils-diy-nft-art-mark...