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Has it, really, though? What percentage of worldwide crypto traffic represents paying for goods and services (or doing some kind of meaningful product interacti

Has it, really, though? What percentage of worldwide crypto traffic represents paying for goods and services (or doing some kind of meaningful product interaction for non-financial applications) and how much of it is just trading?

bouncycastle 5y ago
This is kind of like being on the internet in 1996 and asking what percentage of the internet is used for e-commerce and how much of it is just hobbyists making their "under construction" Geocities websites. We are still in very early stages. What most likely will happen is that crypto will start to become the "backend" of the financial systems and the regular people will be using it without even knowing it, similar to the way they use Linux powered phones now. Crypto has applications beyond finance too, some things that may end up being disrupted are art and DNS (for example)
- imtringued 5y ago
  Or someone wakes up and fixes the current fiat system. People thought of solutions 80 years ago.
  - bouncycastle 5y ago
    We can't even know the exact total amount of USD in circulation and we cannot verify ourselves how much is being printed unless we trust the few people in power. I think if we fixed that, we would already be making great strides! On the blockchain, these trivial questions are resolved with a simple database query.
- hocuspocus 5y ago
  > We are still in very early stages. Bitcoin is 12 years old. Comparing cryptocurrencies to the early days of internet and the web is beyond ridiculous. There's still zero evidence of what will most likely happen, except for more of what we've seen so far: speculation, extortion, money laundering.
  - bouncycastle 5y ago
    Did I say bitcoin? Forget about bitcoin! It's going to be a tiny part of crypto in the future. Bitcoin is 12 years old, but that's the reason why things haven't progressed as much in the last decade. We're slowly getting over speculation & wild-west phaze and moving to the next phase, and discovering many new uses along the way, which I've listed in my parent post. Why I say it's still early? Currently most of the projects are infrastructure and protocol development - kind of like when the internet was still developing. We're still on something like HTTP 1.0 and HTML 2.0 when it comes to crypto. The internet wasn't built in a single decade. It took multiple decades to get to where it is now, this is exactly the same thing playing out now. The amount of building and development is only intensifying. I'd urge you to take a look at what a16a has been investing in https://a16z.com/crypto/ https://a16z.com/crypto/
    - cinquemb 5y ago
      > We're still on something like HTTP 1.0 and HTML 2.0 when it comes to crypto. I agree, and even though avalanche (one of a16z investments in ava-labs works on this) seems to have solved the consensus problem, I have yet to see an l1 tackle the state growth issues similarly. I think it will require some novel ways of information compression, mapping and/or storage/revival, and I suspect at least one l1 way will be related to the the DAG approach with avalanche however with the relationship between prior blocks (if you consider a block a matrix related to it block size limit at max) a series of transformations such that block x_n = sum of block transformations from 0 to n (this will be heavily reliant upon group theory) so instead of storing blocks themselves, you store the transformation matrices mapped to the hashes (sacrificing some compute for less storage). [0] https://thecontrol.co/state-growth-a-look-at-the-problem-and-its-solutions-6de9d7634b0b https://thecontrol.co/state-growth-a-look-at-the-problem-and...
  - dot1x 5y ago
    Bitcoin != DeFi. If you don't know that, why even comment?

bouncycastle 5y ago

This is kind of like being on the internet in 1996 and asking what percentage of the internet is used for e-commerce and how much of it is just hobbyists making their "under construction" Geocities websites. We are still in very early stages. What most likely will happen is that crypto will start to become the "backend" of the financial systems and the regular people will be using it without even knowing it, similar to the way they use Linux powered phones now. Crypto has applications beyond finance too, some things that may end up being disrupted are art and DNS (for example)

imtringued 5y ago
Or someone wakes up and fixes the current fiat system. People thought of solutions 80 years ago.
- bouncycastle 5y ago
  We can't even know the exact total amount of USD in circulation and we cannot verify ourselves how much is being printed unless we trust the few people in power. I think if we fixed that, we would already be making great strides! On the blockchain, these trivial questions are resolved with a simple database query.
hocuspocus 5y ago
> We are still in very early stages. Bitcoin is 12 years old. Comparing cryptocurrencies to the early days of internet and the web is beyond ridiculous. There's still zero evidence of what will most likely happen, except for more of what we've seen so far: speculation, extortion, money laundering.
- bouncycastle 5y ago
  Did I say bitcoin? Forget about bitcoin! It's going to be a tiny part of crypto in the future. Bitcoin is 12 years old, but that's the reason why things haven't progressed as much in the last decade. We're slowly getting over speculation & wild-west phaze and moving to the next phase, and discovering many new uses along the way, which I've listed in my parent post. Why I say it's still early? Currently most of the projects are infrastructure and protocol development - kind of like when the internet was still developing. We're still on something like HTTP 1.0 and HTML 2.0 when it comes to crypto. The internet wasn't built in a single decade. It took multiple decades to get to where it is now, this is exactly the same thing playing out now. The amount of building and development is only intensifying. I'd urge you to take a look at what a16a has been investing in https://a16z.com/crypto/ https://a16z.com/crypto/
  - cinquemb 5y ago
    > We're still on something like HTTP 1.0 and HTML 2.0 when it comes to crypto. I agree, and even though avalanche (one of a16z investments in ava-labs works on this) seems to have solved the consensus problem, I have yet to see an l1 tackle the state growth issues similarly. I think it will require some novel ways of information compression, mapping and/or storage/revival, and I suspect at least one l1 way will be related to the the DAG approach with avalanche however with the relationship between prior blocks (if you consider a block a matrix related to it block size limit at max) a series of transformations such that block x_n = sum of block transformations from 0 to n (this will be heavily reliant upon group theory) so instead of storing blocks themselves, you store the transformation matrices mapped to the hashes (sacrificing some compute for less storage). [0] https://thecontrol.co/state-growth-a-look-at-the-problem-and-its-solutions-6de9d7634b0b https://thecontrol.co/state-growth-a-look-at-the-problem-and...
- dot1x 5y ago
  Bitcoin != DeFi. If you don't know that, why even comment?