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Crypto (and NFTs in particular) remind me of the tale of The Emperor's New Clothes. I accept that maybe Ethereum could be valuable (I don't really understand s

Crypto (and NFTs in particular) remind me of the tale of The Emperor's New Clothes. I accept that maybe Ethereum could be valuable (I don't really understand smart contracts well enough to say..) and if they move to proof-of-stake that will make it more sustainable. Likewise, the sheer anonymity of something like Monero might be valuable for the black market. But everything else just seems like people seeking a "greater fool" to sell to.

prepend 5y ago
If etherium gets down to femtocents per transaction then that would be cool. A usable distributed ledger would be nice for many purposes. But at dollars per transaction, there’s no real use cases. Imagine if my sql db was free but charged me $10 for any write transaction. That would suck. When the price gets to an operational level, people will use it. I think the price it will eventually get to is Napster/BitTorrent-level.
- vmception 5y ago
  Charged me $10 *and doesn’t charge me for storage I dump a ton of crap on blockchains and just set the transaction fee low until someone takes it Also check out gas tokens as a concept, you can prebuy gas when gas prices are low and subsidize your future time sensitive transactions when gas prices are high
  - prepend 5y ago
    I’ve dumped stuff at low transaction fees and had it stay there forever. Try setting 1 cent as your transaction fee and see if anyone picks that up. This works great if you already prebought way back when, but is not suitable for any current use case I can think of. And certainly not usable by many. There’s not many situations where $10 for a few bytes is needed, even with the cool feature of free storage forever. For comparison, 1GB is 2 cents per year on AWS deep glacier. And I trust AWS to be around in a hundred years more than ethereum. Not to mention that storing 1GB costs a fortune in transaction fees.
FranchuFranchu 5y ago
Any trade of any thing with no inherent value is just people seeking a "greater fool".
- faeyanpiraat 5y ago
  You forgot an edge case where something has inherent value (like a cup) but has overblown valuation (used by some king), and is sold at an auction to bigger fools.
  - NoGravitas 5y ago
    It's almost as if use value and exchange value were two different things :thinking_marx:
SergeAx 5y ago
Smart contracts are really easy to understand: it is self-funding bug bounty program.

prepend 5y ago

If etherium gets down to femtocents per transaction then that would be cool. A usable distributed ledger would be nice for many purposes. But at dollars per transaction, there’s no real use cases. Imagine if my sql db was free but charged me $10 for any write transaction. That would suck. When the price gets to an operational level, people will use it. I think the price it will eventually get to is Napster/BitTorrent-level.

vmception 5y ago
Charged me $10 *and doesn’t charge me for storage I dump a ton of crap on blockchains and just set the transaction fee low until someone takes it Also check out gas tokens as a concept, you can prebuy gas when gas prices are low and subsidize your future time sensitive transactions when gas prices are high
- prepend 5y ago
  I’ve dumped stuff at low transaction fees and had it stay there forever. Try setting 1 cent as your transaction fee and see if anyone picks that up. This works great if you already prebought way back when, but is not suitable for any current use case I can think of. And certainly not usable by many. There’s not many situations where $10 for a few bytes is needed, even with the cool feature of free storage forever. For comparison, 1GB is 2 cents per year on AWS deep glacier. And I trust AWS to be around in a hundred years more than ethereum. Not to mention that storing 1GB costs a fortune in transaction fees.

FranchuFranchu 5y ago

Any trade of any thing with no inherent value is just people seeking a "greater fool".

faeyanpiraat 5y ago
You forgot an edge case where something has inherent value (like a cup) but has overblown valuation (used by some king), and is sold at an auction to bigger fools.
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  It's almost as if use value and exchange value were two different things :thinking_marx:

SergeAx 5y ago

Smart contracts are really easy to understand: it is self-funding bug bounty program.