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The issue with crypto is that reasonable use cases are early, and don’t attract attention except for niche communities. There’s a few big ones, for example, fi

by flaque 5y ago

The issue with crypto is that reasonable use cases are early, and don’t attract attention except for niche communities. There’s a few big ones, for example, filecoin right now has created a commodity market for storage that is currently 10,000 cheaper than S3 in some instances. (See file.app for stats) But realistically, the interesting projects are very small and hard to find. However, scams and ponzi schemes, by their nature are very public, easy to find, and have lots of people talking about them (often for financial gain). Everyone building anything sane is so tired of having to explain that their thing isn’t a ponzi, isn’t an nft thing, and isn’t shilling proof of work, that they don’t post to hacker news, and so they exist outside of your bubble. Crypto is like the story of the blind scientists studying an elephant. The first one touches its trunk and says “it’s a snake!”, the next one touches its tusk and says “it’s a spear!”, the next one touches its side and says “it’s a wall!”. None have the correct answer, because no single party has a full view. The crypto skeptics are as irrational as the crypto optimists: firm believers in their own view, based on an incomplete information.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
Yeah, it sucks. Monero for example is an actual privacy coin that's usable as currency but nobody seems to care. Very demoralizing. Bitcoin is obsolete technology at this point. It's continued existence does more harm than good to the cryptocurrency space because everyone gravitates towards it instead of better projects.
- eoo 5y ago
  Bitcoin is as obsolete as POSIX. It's ossified, and not changing is a feature.
  - imachine1980_ 5y ago
    Not exacly posix isn't 100 times slower and 100 more expensive that other is more inconvenient standard, becouse is simply old standard, bitcoing is a product in itself not a protocol,and this product don't fulfill the need for fiat currency becouse is expensive to transact, and slow te best you can say is that is difficult to make changes but bitcoin isn't exactly the one of 10 years ago, protocol change to acomodate for more transactions and most votes are concentrated in few minority of big stakeholder, making kmposiblw to reduce comitions or change significantlythe protocol.
  - jakupovic 5y ago
    Terrible POSIX, 50+ years later it's everywhere. Any project can only hope yo be as successful
    - zamfi 5y ago
      …that was the parent poster’s point, I think?
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      It is actually terrible and outdated, and very few systems implement all of it.
      - jakupovic 5y ago
        Systems such as Linux, MacOS and windows? All terribly broken and unusable. Seriously you need better sources or more experience. POSIX is alive and doing better than ever.
        dmitriid 5y ago
        > Systems such as Linux, MacOS and windows? Of them, only MacOS implements POSIX fully. Windows doesn't. Linux implements a subset.
        jakupovic 5y ago
        Now we're splitting hairs, Linux is POSIX compliant, but not certified as certification costs money. Windows is also compliant through Linux subsystem. On Linux side there are also distributions which are POSIX certified which then makes Linux certified as well. It's just the windows, which also was certified at one point, early 1990s and air force. So that makes me right?
        dmitriid 5y ago
        Linux is mostly compliant, which doesn't mean fully compliant (but there are distributions that are fully compliant). Windows isn't compliant, and "compliant through WSL" doesn't really make it compliant. So that makes me right. Your opinion may differ, of course.
  - rattlesnakedave 5y ago
    On the contrary, Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency innovating right now.
  - legutierr 5y ago
    Bitcoin isn't POSIX, it's UNIVAC.
- Liron 5y ago
  Yes Monero is great as private digital cash… as long as its usage level remains relatively low-profile so that governments keep allowing sites like Kraken to legally act as fiat on and off ramps, voluntarily handicapping their ability to track money laundering. This is why Monero today is useful for tech-savvy people and motivated black-market buyers/sellers, but we will never see a user-friendly Monero market for the masses.
  - f7ebc20c97 5y ago
    You think TPTB want to handicap the ability to launder money?
- rattlesnakedave 5y ago
  Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency doing any innovation.
- generalizations 5y ago
  I imagine that by its nature, the people who do care about monero are the ones who won't talk about it.
Aunche 5y ago
>There’s a few big ones, for example, filecoin right now has created a commodity market for storage that is currently 10,000 cheaper than S3 in some instances. (See file.app for stats) First of all, 63 PB is nothing in terms of cloud storage, so I wouldn't exactly call it a commodity market. Also, I doubt that Amazon is making 99.9% profit margins, so it's more likely that miners are just subsidizing the cost of storage to speculate.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- chockchocschoir 5y ago
  > First of all, 63 PB is nothing in terms of cloud storage Not sure why you would compare it to cloud storage, because it's not. Storing files in Filecoin is more like making deals with people who offer space on their hard drives (which as far as I know, doesn't exists besides Filecoin). It also doesn't make sense to compare it to something like S3 as again, it is not cloud storage.
  - davenaff 5y ago
    I do think Filecoin is closer to cloud storage than 'free hard drive space'. The hardware requirements for miners (storage providers) are pretty significant and pretty much guarantee that miners are running dedicated hardware. While I'm sure some storage providers operate out of data centers, I don't think a server needs to be located in a data center to be called cloud storage.
    - chockchocschoir 5y ago
      > I do think Filecoin is closer to cloud storage than 'free hard drive space'. But I never said it was "free hard drive space", I explicitly mentioned "deals with people who offer space". No matter where the data is ultimately stored (in a data center or not), the method for you getting your files to X is not the same in Filecoin as in S3. With S3 you simply upload your file to S3 and you're done. With Filecoin you need to first make a deal with a miner, then you use that deal to store files within the deal you've made, which is vastly different.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rvz 5y ago
The only 'NFT' that has a use-case so far is ENS [0] and domain names on the blockchain. The JPEG NFTs (which don't have a use-case) have captured the hype of the critics and that will likely collapse in the long term and those NFTs are what the critics will just keep talking about. There is a product that is using it for identities already: [1][2] I can see businesses using ENS or similar solutions as a way to replace those long hexadecimal names into something readable, so that say; merchants can use it for users to donate / pay towards verified names e.g: (myshopname.eth) and not accidentally pay to a random address like 0x123..cdef. I won't be surprised to see even reputable payment services like Stripe, BitPay and Coinbase Commerce use something like ENS for the verification part and do the same thing in the future. [0] https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/ [1] https://www.skiff.org/ https://www.skiff.org/ [2] https://www.skiff.org/updates/skiff-ens https://www.skiff.org/updates/skiff-ens
- Jimmc414 5y ago
  Using NFTs for generating concert tickets or supply chain logistics & tracking seems like it could be economically viable. I'd bet the biggest use case for NFTs at present is money laundering. It's hard to imagine someone having the talent to acquire $800,000 yet still being gullible enough to spend it all on a hyperlink of a hand drawn monkey with the expectation that they bought an appreciable asset.
  - Animats 5y ago
    Doesn't make much sense for concert tickets, unless you want to enable scalping. The lifetime of a ticket is short.
    - seanhunter 5y ago
      There are people starting to use NFTs for tickets precisely to circumvent scalpers and allow a legitimate secondary market to exist in which the primary artist benefits from resales. There are real reasons for a secondary market to exist (eg you've got concert tickets and suddenly get sick and can't go or something) the problem right now is that the existing secondary market is broken so prices are insane for the real fans and the artist themselves don't see any of the revenue. Additionally, with NFT tickets you can add utility to them after the event. "You went to my concert, now you can get into a special channel on my discord/get early access to my album etc". These are things which are easy to do with NFTs that are operationally complex or expensive to do with conventional tickets.
bawolff 5y ago
People always say the same thing when someone is critical of crypto. Its too early! I mean after all, we are only 13 years in. Or: there is a lot of bullshit but the interesting things are outside of your echo chamber. But then never link to such counter examples. At best people talk about filecoin, which does pass the bar of not being a literal scam, but still makes no sense from a product-market fit (storage has 3 metrics to judge by: price, retrieval latency, reliability. Filecoin is order of magnitudes worse than competitiors on all metrics). I don't think i am irrationally biased against bitcoin & friends, i actually think the original paper was quite ingenious. However its been over a decade - we're well past the "benefit of the doubt" stage and into the "put up or shut up" stage when it comes to cryptocurrency.
- sneak 5y ago
  https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/03/09/ukraine-has-received-close-to-100-million-in-crypto-donations/ https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/03/09/ukraine-has-rec... This happened primarily in a matter of hours. In cash. Across borders. Without being subject to sanctions or restrictions by any country. It may not be your use case, but it has definitely "put up".
  - sgift 5y ago
    It obviously isn't cash, it isn't even money - that's the reason the amount received is stated in something else, namely dollars, which this has to be exchanged into to be useful. What happened here is a wire transfer, not different from me sending money from my bank account to someone else bank account. Just with two additional transformation steps (make money into whatever crypto, make whatever crypto back into money).
    - sneak 5y ago
      It is very different than you sending money via an intermediary bank. I dare you to describe a method of wire transfer to Kyiv that works in that quantity and timescale and is practically usable by the recipient that quickly and cannot be blocked by your local government's policies. There simply isn't anything close to that. People that think that this is the same as a wire via a regulated bank are ignorant of the specifics of each type of payment. Cryptocurrency is indeed cash, and is useful the same way cash is useful.
xaxaxb 5y ago
The crypto skeptics are as irrational as the crypto optimists: firm believers in their own view, based on an incomplete information. This.
- xaxaxb 5y ago
  Don't understand the rationale behind downvoting when I am simply quoting the highest rated comment. Very cryptic.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
> The crypto skeptics are as irrational as the crypto optimists: firm believers in their own view, based on an incomplete information. Please don't discount that a large number of us do in fact understand what the elephant is, in every inch, and shape our views as a result. It's extremely patronizing to have informed criticism dismissed this way.

by flaque 5y ago

matheusmoreira 5y ago

Yeah, it sucks. Monero for example is an actual privacy coin that's usable as currency but nobody seems to care. Very demoralizing. Bitcoin is obsolete technology at this point. It's continued existence does more harm than good to the cryptocurrency space because everyone gravitates towards it instead of better projects.

eoo 5y ago
Bitcoin is as obsolete as POSIX. It's ossified, and not changing is a feature.
- imachine1980_ 5y ago
  Not exacly posix isn't 100 times slower and 100 more expensive that other is more inconvenient standard, becouse is simply old standard, bitcoing is a product in itself not a protocol,and this product don't fulfill the need for fiat currency becouse is expensive to transact, and slow te best you can say is that is difficult to make changes but bitcoin isn't exactly the one of 10 years ago, protocol change to acomodate for more transactions and most votes are concentrated in few minority of big stakeholder, making kmposiblw to reduce comitions or change significantlythe protocol.
- jakupovic 5y ago
  Terrible POSIX, 50+ years later it's everywhere. Any project can only hope yo be as successful
  - zamfi 5y ago
    …that was the parent poster’s point, I think?
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    It is actually terrible and outdated, and very few systems implement all of it.
    - jakupovic 5y ago
      Systems such as Linux, MacOS and windows? All terribly broken and unusable. Seriously you need better sources or more experience. POSIX is alive and doing better than ever.
      - dmitriid 5y ago
        > Systems such as Linux, MacOS and windows? Of them, only MacOS implements POSIX fully. Windows doesn't. Linux implements a subset.
        jakupovic 5y ago
        Now we're splitting hairs, Linux is POSIX compliant, but not certified as certification costs money. Windows is also compliant through Linux subsystem. On Linux side there are also distributions which are POSIX certified which then makes Linux certified as well. It's just the windows, which also was certified at one point, early 1990s and air force. So that makes me right?
        dmitriid 5y ago
        Linux is mostly compliant, which doesn't mean fully compliant (but there are distributions that are fully compliant). Windows isn't compliant, and "compliant through WSL" doesn't really make it compliant. So that makes me right. Your opinion may differ, of course.
- rattlesnakedave 5y ago
  On the contrary, Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency innovating right now.
- legutierr 5y ago
  Bitcoin isn't POSIX, it's UNIVAC.
Liron 5y ago
Yes Monero is great as private digital cash… as long as its usage level remains relatively low-profile so that governments keep allowing sites like Kraken to legally act as fiat on and off ramps, voluntarily handicapping their ability to track money laundering. This is why Monero today is useful for tech-savvy people and motivated black-market buyers/sellers, but we will never see a user-friendly Monero market for the masses.
- f7ebc20c97 5y ago
  You think TPTB want to handicap the ability to launder money?
rattlesnakedave 5y ago
Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency doing any innovation.
generalizations 5y ago
I imagine that by its nature, the people who do care about monero are the ones who won't talk about it.

Aunche 5y ago

>There’s a few big ones, for example, filecoin right now has created a commodity market for storage that is currently 10,000 cheaper than S3 in some instances. (See file.app for stats) First of all, 63 PB is nothing in terms of cloud storage, so I wouldn't exactly call it a commodity market. Also, I doubt that Amazon is making 99.9% profit margins, so it's more likely that miners are just subsidizing the cost of storage to speculate.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
chockchocschoir 5y ago
> First of all, 63 PB is nothing in terms of cloud storage Not sure why you would compare it to cloud storage, because it's not. Storing files in Filecoin is more like making deals with people who offer space on their hard drives (which as far as I know, doesn't exists besides Filecoin). It also doesn't make sense to compare it to something like S3 as again, it is not cloud storage.
- davenaff 5y ago
  I do think Filecoin is closer to cloud storage than 'free hard drive space'. The hardware requirements for miners (storage providers) are pretty significant and pretty much guarantee that miners are running dedicated hardware. While I'm sure some storage providers operate out of data centers, I don't think a server needs to be located in a data center to be called cloud storage.
  - chockchocschoir 5y ago
    > I do think Filecoin is closer to cloud storage than 'free hard drive space'. But I never said it was "free hard drive space", I explicitly mentioned "deals with people who offer space". No matter where the data is ultimately stored (in a data center or not), the method for you getting your files to X is not the same in Filecoin as in S3. With S3 you simply upload your file to S3 and you're done. With Filecoin you need to first make a deal with a miner, then you use that deal to store files within the deal you've made, which is vastly different.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rvz 5y ago

The only 'NFT' that has a use-case so far is ENS [0] and domain names on the blockchain. The JPEG NFTs (which don't have a use-case) have captured the hype of the critics and that will likely collapse in the long term and those NFTs are what the critics will just keep talking about. There is a product that is using it for identities already: [1][2] I can see businesses using ENS or similar solutions as a way to replace those long hexadecimal names into something readable, so that say; merchants can use it for users to donate / pay towards verified names e.g: (myshopname.eth) and not accidentally pay to a random address like 0x123..cdef. I won't be surprised to see even reputable payment services like Stripe, BitPay and Coinbase Commerce use something like ENS for the verification part and do the same thing in the future. [0] https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/ [1] https://www.skiff.org/ https://www.skiff.org/ [2] https://www.skiff.org/updates/skiff-ens https://www.skiff.org/updates/skiff-ens

Jimmc414 5y ago
Using NFTs for generating concert tickets or supply chain logistics & tracking seems like it could be economically viable. I'd bet the biggest use case for NFTs at present is money laundering. It's hard to imagine someone having the talent to acquire $800,000 yet still being gullible enough to spend it all on a hyperlink of a hand drawn monkey with the expectation that they bought an appreciable asset.
- Animats 5y ago
  Doesn't make much sense for concert tickets, unless you want to enable scalping. The lifetime of a ticket is short.
  - seanhunter 5y ago
    There are people starting to use NFTs for tickets precisely to circumvent scalpers and allow a legitimate secondary market to exist in which the primary artist benefits from resales. There are real reasons for a secondary market to exist (eg you've got concert tickets and suddenly get sick and can't go or something) the problem right now is that the existing secondary market is broken so prices are insane for the real fans and the artist themselves don't see any of the revenue. Additionally, with NFT tickets you can add utility to them after the event. "You went to my concert, now you can get into a special channel on my discord/get early access to my album etc". These are things which are easy to do with NFTs that are operationally complex or expensive to do with conventional tickets.

bawolff 5y ago

People always say the same thing when someone is critical of crypto. Its too early! I mean after all, we are only 13 years in. Or: there is a lot of bullshit but the interesting things are outside of your echo chamber. But then never link to such counter examples. At best people talk about filecoin, which does pass the bar of not being a literal scam, but still makes no sense from a product-market fit (storage has 3 metrics to judge by: price, retrieval latency, reliability. Filecoin is order of magnitudes worse than competitiors on all metrics). I don't think i am irrationally biased against bitcoin & friends, i actually think the original paper was quite ingenious. However its been over a decade - we're well past the "benefit of the doubt" stage and into the "put up or shut up" stage when it comes to cryptocurrency.

sneak 5y ago
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/03/09/ukraine-has-received-close-to-100-million-in-crypto-donations/ https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/03/09/ukraine-has-rec... This happened primarily in a matter of hours. In cash. Across borders. Without being subject to sanctions or restrictions by any country. It may not be your use case, but it has definitely "put up".
- sgift 5y ago
  It obviously isn't cash, it isn't even money - that's the reason the amount received is stated in something else, namely dollars, which this has to be exchanged into to be useful. What happened here is a wire transfer, not different from me sending money from my bank account to someone else bank account. Just with two additional transformation steps (make money into whatever crypto, make whatever crypto back into money).
  - sneak 5y ago
    It is very different than you sending money via an intermediary bank. I dare you to describe a method of wire transfer to Kyiv that works in that quantity and timescale and is practically usable by the recipient that quickly and cannot be blocked by your local government's policies. There simply isn't anything close to that. People that think that this is the same as a wire via a regulated bank are ignorant of the specifics of each type of payment. Cryptocurrency is indeed cash, and is useful the same way cash is useful.

xaxaxb 5y ago

The crypto skeptics are as irrational as the crypto optimists: firm believers in their own view, based on an incomplete information. This.

xaxaxb 5y ago
Don't understand the rationale behind downvoting when I am simply quoting the highest rated comment. Very cryptic.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago

> The crypto skeptics are as irrational as the crypto optimists: firm believers in their own view, based on an incomplete information. Please don't discount that a large number of us do in fact understand what the elephant is, in every inch, and shape our views as a result. It's extremely patronizing to have informed criticism dismissed this way.