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> This is not unique to crypto - see, for example, HTTP, or HDMI… HTTP and HDMI provided actually useful things to regular people despite their shortcomings. C

by yed 5y ago

> This is not unique to crypto - see, for example, HTTP, or HDMI… HTTP and HDMI provided actually useful things to regular people despite their shortcomings. Crypto has been solving technical problem after technical problem for over a decade but has yet to offer anything useful to a non-enthusiast. > Another issue is that the goalpost is ever-shifting. We have truly distributed apps. And the only thing they are useful for is moving crypto around between enthusiasts. "Make something useful for regular people" should not be difficult goalpost for something that claims to be world changing.

yawnxyz 5y ago
Enough tooling has been built (IPFS, Polygon, etc) that we're starting to use these tools for computational biology, as part of @lab_dao This wasn't possible 2 years ago! So I think they have made strides; it's just hard to see
nemothekid 5y ago
>Crypto has been solving technical problem after technical problem for over a decade but has yet to offer anything useful to a non-enthusiast. This is too dismissive of Crypto. I’m not a crypto bro but Bitcoin did actually solve a real problem: a completely digital decentralized immutable record. I hesitate to call it a currency, but it created something that was digitally scarce . The economic value it created can be seen in the Silk Road or in ransomware. At one point the internet was also a problem looking for a solution too so I don’t think it’s a fair criticism of the technology.
- yed 5y ago
  > Bitcoin did actually solve a real problem: a completely digital decentralized immutable record. That doesn't describe a problem though, it describes a technical solution. > I hesitate to call it a currency, but it created something that was digitally scarce. My comment was about web3 really and the associated hype, not so much cryptocurrencies themselves. I agree there's something there, though not entirely convinced it won't always be illegal sales or scams. > At one point the internet was also a problem looking for a solution too so I don’t think it’s a fair criticism of the technology. I see this repeated a lot but it's just not accurate. E-mail was invented within like 2 years of the internet and immediately allowed universities to exchange messages with one another. It doesn't take a networking enthusiast to see the value in sending a textual message instantly across the globe. Meanwhile I've never seen even a description of a web3 product that doesn't rely on architecture or politics to explain why it's useful.
  - p1esk 5y ago
    As a non-enthusiast I agree with your points. I’ve heard a lot about cryptocurrencies since 2010 and I’ve never had a need to use them. Paying for goods or services on a black market might be a valid use case, but I, like vast majority of people, have never needed to do that. Smart contracts sound like an interesting concept, but again, I don’t really have anything in my life that could use them in the foreseeable future.
  - grog454 5y ago
    > That doesn't describe a problem though, it describes a technical solution. I'll present a problem that that solution solves. That cryptographically backed record establishes a closer approximation to the abstract idea of "ownership" than anything has before. I was a pretty naïve first-time home owner in that I was surprised to learn about something called "property tax". "property rent" would be a better description, since its not a one time fee (like most taxes) but something you have to pay to a government entity in perpetuity. Don't feel like paying it? You get booted off "your" "property". Title theft and fraud are also a thing, and we even have "title insurance" to help mitigate falling victim to it. Neither of these things is possible on a cryptographic blockchain (eviction or theft). Ownership of the NFT cannot physically be altered without the owner's volition. Establishing a link between the NFT and the underlying asset is certainly a problem, but it's not one that blockchains are attempting to solve.
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      > Ownership of the NFT cannot physically be altered without the owner's volition. Until you own a house on the NFT and realize that NFTs has literally zero relationship between you and the object you "own".
    - p1esk 5y ago
      I'm sorry, I still don't get it. What is the problem with a house ownership that crypto would solve? Would it eliminate the property tax? Would it eliminate an eviction if I don't pay the property tax? Would it eliminate one type of ownership fraud without introducing a new type of ownership fraud?
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > At one point the internet was also a problem looking for a solution 1. The internet was a solution to a very specific problem. Go and educate yourself on what ARPA was doing, will you? 2. Crypto peddlers keep equating cryptocurrencies to the internet. And never ever equating it to Juicero or Enron even if all signs point to that.
  - fastball 5y ago
    Juicero was something nobody wanted – clearly not true of crypto. Enron was a deliberate fraud where things were faked – certainly true of many (most?) crypto projects, but not true of the underlying technologies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc) and therefore not even close to being true for all projects in the space. Equating crypto to Enron is like equating Enron to the stock market – "the stock market allowed Enron make money off their fraud, therefore we should get rid of the stock market".
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      > Juicero was something nobody wanted People wanted it strongly enough to invest $120 million into it. > Enron was a deliberate fraud where things were faked – certainly true of many (most?) crypto projects Indeed. You're this close to getting the comparison > "the stock market allowed Enron make money off their fraud, therefore we should get rid of the stock market". Yes. Yes, we should. Stock market is pure speculation with little to no connection to the real world.
      - fastball 5y ago
        People thought other people wanted Juicero enough to invest $120M into it, but they were wrong. People actually want crypto, for various reasons. You're not going to get many people agreeing with you on the removal of stock markets, and therefore I think that conversation is outside the scope of this conversation about crypto.
  - nemothekid 5y ago
    >1. The internet was a solution to a very specific problem. Go and educate yourself on what ARPA was doing, will you? In the same way the original Bitcoin paper was a solution to a very specific problem. I was referring to the amount of useless companies that were created during the original dotcom. >2. Crypto peddlers keep equating cryptocurrencies to the internet. And never ever equating it to Juicero or Enron even if all signs point to that. Not sure what this has to do with my comment. My comment was specifically there is a decentralized solution to do commerce that is powered by crypto. To pretend that this doesn't exist is absurd. NFTs, and Defi are literally just asset speculation but at the very least there was a platform that transacted billions of dollars on top of Bitcoin (Silk Road). I can't say that Juicero ever created a million dollars of value for its customers.
nonima 5y ago
> Crypto has been solving technical problem after technical problem for over a decade but has yet to offer anything useful to a non-enthusiast. https://www.investopedia.com/news/hyperinflation-produces-surge-bitcoin-trading-venezuela/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/hyperinflation-produces-su... https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-venezuela-bitcoin-f7ccc4ea283746f28b261cabeaf8f0c5 https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-venezuela-bit... https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/turkeys-inflation-is-an-example-of-why-we-need-bitcoin https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/turkeys-inflation-is-an-exam... https://www.borgenmagazine.com/bitcoin-in-el-salvador/ https://www.borgenmagazine.com/bitcoin-in-el-salvador/

by yed 5y ago

yawnxyz 5y ago

Enough tooling has been built (IPFS, Polygon, etc) that we're starting to use these tools for computational biology, as part of @lab_dao This wasn't possible 2 years ago! So I think they have made strides; it's just hard to see

nemothekid 5y ago

>Crypto has been solving technical problem after technical problem for over a decade but has yet to offer anything useful to a non-enthusiast. This is too dismissive of Crypto. I’m not a crypto bro but Bitcoin did actually solve a real problem: a completely digital decentralized immutable record. I hesitate to call it a currency, but it created something that was digitally scarce . The economic value it created can be seen in the Silk Road or in ransomware. At one point the internet was also a problem looking for a solution too so I don’t think it’s a fair criticism of the technology.

yed 5y ago
> Bitcoin did actually solve a real problem: a completely digital decentralized immutable record. That doesn't describe a problem though, it describes a technical solution. > I hesitate to call it a currency, but it created something that was digitally scarce. My comment was about web3 really and the associated hype, not so much cryptocurrencies themselves. I agree there's something there, though not entirely convinced it won't always be illegal sales or scams. > At one point the internet was also a problem looking for a solution too so I don’t think it’s a fair criticism of the technology. I see this repeated a lot but it's just not accurate. E-mail was invented within like 2 years of the internet and immediately allowed universities to exchange messages with one another. It doesn't take a networking enthusiast to see the value in sending a textual message instantly across the globe. Meanwhile I've never seen even a description of a web3 product that doesn't rely on architecture or politics to explain why it's useful.
- p1esk 5y ago
  As a non-enthusiast I agree with your points. I’ve heard a lot about cryptocurrencies since 2010 and I’ve never had a need to use them. Paying for goods or services on a black market might be a valid use case, but I, like vast majority of people, have never needed to do that. Smart contracts sound like an interesting concept, but again, I don’t really have anything in my life that could use them in the foreseeable future.
- grog454 5y ago
  > That doesn't describe a problem though, it describes a technical solution. I'll present a problem that that solution solves. That cryptographically backed record establishes a closer approximation to the abstract idea of "ownership" than anything has before. I was a pretty naïve first-time home owner in that I was surprised to learn about something called "property tax". "property rent" would be a better description, since its not a one time fee (like most taxes) but something you have to pay to a government entity in perpetuity. Don't feel like paying it? You get booted off "your" "property". Title theft and fraud are also a thing, and we even have "title insurance" to help mitigate falling victim to it. Neither of these things is possible on a cryptographic blockchain (eviction or theft). Ownership of the NFT cannot physically be altered without the owner's volition. Establishing a link between the NFT and the underlying asset is certainly a problem, but it's not one that blockchains are attempting to solve.
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    > Ownership of the NFT cannot physically be altered without the owner's volition. Until you own a house on the NFT and realize that NFTs has literally zero relationship between you and the object you "own".
  - p1esk 5y ago
    I'm sorry, I still don't get it. What is the problem with a house ownership that crypto would solve? Would it eliminate the property tax? Would it eliminate an eviction if I don't pay the property tax? Would it eliminate one type of ownership fraud without introducing a new type of ownership fraud?
dmitriid 5y ago
> At one point the internet was also a problem looking for a solution 1. The internet was a solution to a very specific problem. Go and educate yourself on what ARPA was doing, will you? 2. Crypto peddlers keep equating cryptocurrencies to the internet. And never ever equating it to Juicero or Enron even if all signs point to that.
- fastball 5y ago
  Juicero was something nobody wanted – clearly not true of crypto. Enron was a deliberate fraud where things were faked – certainly true of many (most?) crypto projects, but not true of the underlying technologies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc) and therefore not even close to being true for all projects in the space. Equating crypto to Enron is like equating Enron to the stock market – "the stock market allowed Enron make money off their fraud, therefore we should get rid of the stock market".
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    > Juicero was something nobody wanted People wanted it strongly enough to invest $120 million into it. > Enron was a deliberate fraud where things were faked – certainly true of many (most?) crypto projects Indeed. You're this close to getting the comparison > "the stock market allowed Enron make money off their fraud, therefore we should get rid of the stock market". Yes. Yes, we should. Stock market is pure speculation with little to no connection to the real world.
    - fastball 5y ago
      People thought other people wanted Juicero enough to invest $120M into it, but they were wrong. People actually want crypto, for various reasons. You're not going to get many people agreeing with you on the removal of stock markets, and therefore I think that conversation is outside the scope of this conversation about crypto.
- nemothekid 5y ago
  >1. The internet was a solution to a very specific problem. Go and educate yourself on what ARPA was doing, will you? In the same way the original Bitcoin paper was a solution to a very specific problem. I was referring to the amount of useless companies that were created during the original dotcom. >2. Crypto peddlers keep equating cryptocurrencies to the internet. And never ever equating it to Juicero or Enron even if all signs point to that. Not sure what this has to do with my comment. My comment was specifically there is a decentralized solution to do commerce that is powered by crypto. To pretend that this doesn't exist is absurd. NFTs, and Defi are literally just asset speculation but at the very least there was a platform that transacted billions of dollars on top of Bitcoin (Silk Road). I can't say that Juicero ever created a million dollars of value for its customers.

nonima 5y ago

> Crypto has been solving technical problem after technical problem for over a decade but has yet to offer anything useful to a non-enthusiast. https://www.investopedia.com/news/hyperinflation-produces-surge-bitcoin-trading-venezuela/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/hyperinflation-produces-su... https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-venezuela-bitcoin-f7ccc4ea283746f28b261cabeaf8f0c5 https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-venezuela-bit... https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/turkeys-inflation-is-an-example-of-why-we-need-bitcoin https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/turkeys-inflation-is-an-exam... https://www.borgenmagazine.com/bitcoin-in-el-salvador/ https://www.borgenmagazine.com/bitcoin-in-el-salvador/