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I kinda have to agree, can anyone elaborate on the uses of crypto, what does it actually solve? I understand blockchains offer a decentralized system. but how a

I kinda have to agree, can anyone elaborate on the uses of crypto, what does it actually solve? I understand blockchains offer a decentralized system. but how about crypto?

im3w1l 4y ago
During the trucker protest in Canada, the government froze the bank accounts of participants. That the government can do this, shut down movements it doesn't like with the click of a button, is a dangerous centralization of power. Crypto (at its best) safeguards democracy by serving as a check on such power. This still leaves the option of shutting down dangerous protests using the police which requires the cooperation of a lot of people - thus less dangerous, striking a better balance between freedom and safety.
derbOac 4y ago
So... I am not at all trying to advocate for crypto here, but the putative value is in having an anarchic currency that is easily exchangeable. That is, if you had money and wanted to convey it digitally outside of traditional regulated institutions, how would you do it? There's gold, art, etc but that's not easily movable. Now, there's lots of issues here, like how you translate the crypto into other traditional regulated assets if need be, or traceability, or energy use, or security, but that's the putative value: easily moving value outside traditional governmental boundaries. To be fair, if you've ever looked into buying something grey or black market online, I think the value of some sort of cryptocurrency in theory is apparent? I'm not sure any crypto at the moment checks all the boxes, though, and some of the assumptions about use seem a little naive or disingenuous, but I can see the idealized use case value. I could in the abstract imagine some kind of decentralized accounting system taking on the role of currency, probably de facto, but I'm not sure current cryptocurrencies are that.
theelous3 4y ago
Nothing really. A nice vehicle to strip retail investors that don't understand money or tech, or the tech of money. Funnily enough, the only thing I see any value in are NFTs. (Remember crypto currencies are essentially just the T in NFT). But not the url asset nonsense. Rather as a distrubuted authentication system. Concert tickets, system access etc. are all viable.
- Nursie 4y ago
  I’m seeing the concert ticket thing around lately as something this space could “solve”. But why would NFTs or a blockchain be good here? We have an identifiable central authority, the ticket issuer, so… why do we need a decentralised record for that? I mean, you could issue tickets to an event as NFTs, and it would probably work ok, but why bother?
  - Eji1700 4y ago
    They absolutely aren't. Or at least not in the way people think. IF the tech has value it won't "Kill ticketmaster". It'll be adopted BY ticketmaster to make sure they have to pay fewer people on the front line to strip money from your wallet. The, in theory, idea is that you can tie an NFT to an account, and make sure it can't be resold, but you could also tie a ticket to an ID, and that'd probably work better because it's not hard to spin up a wallet, get the "ticket" nft, and then sell the whole wallet.
  - soneil 4y ago
    It's a nice idea in theory, but only in theory. So the idea as I understand it is that tickets as NFTs would allow you to prove your ownership of the ticket. With tickets being increasingly electronically-issued, there's currently no way to prove you've been sold a genuine ticket, or the only copy of a genuine ticket - until you get to the gate, they read your barcode, and turn you away. So we have a second-hand market that runs through ticketmaster currently, which solves this trust issue by interacting with the issuer directly. Tickets via NFTs would help remove this dependency on ticketmaster, so we could have a healthy, trustworthy second-hand market that doesn't just feel like ticketmaster encouraging bots so they can sell the same ticket twice. So the question is - does this benefit ticketmaster in the slightest? What problems does this solve for them? Because without them issuing the tickets as NFTs in the first place, and recognising them at the gates - it simply doesn't happen. As you say - from the issuer's POV, "why bother?" As far as I can tell, everyone hates the current system - except the people that control it. The solution to this isn't some wonderful modern technology, it's plain and simple competition. So it mostly exists as an example of why you'd want to be able to prove ownership of a unique token. Everyone can see the problem if I print my ticket 10 times and sell it to 10 people, it's easy to explain. The telling question is why we don't have a good example of an implementation.
Eji1700 4y ago
A lot of people seem to have an outdated concept of what crypto is and what advantages it offers. For the record my stance is "some of this will probably stick around, but most of it is junk". There's stuff like bitcoin, which is basically a digital asset. There's stuff like monero, which is basically a digital asset that's very hard/impossible to track. So anything blackmarket/anti governmental. There's stuff like USDC (stablecoins), which is literally supposed to be pegged to the US Dollar, and "supposedly" backed to some % (depends on the coin. Tether is an infamous nightmare waiting to happen to most people in and out of the scene). The main use being that it's VERY cheap and easy to move stable coins(not just for crypto trading but say if you want to send someone money), and you can get great interest rates on them by staking (6-8% compared to the average savings account of "fuck you for asking"). And then there's basically everything etherium spawned with smart contracts, which is just a token that can execute actions based on programmatic conditions. None of that is "new" so to speak. Any code/database can already do something like that, but the quasi decentralized nature mixed with certain features does open some theoretically interesting opportunities. It gets complicated from there and EVERYTHING above is filled with caveats and issues and other problems, but it certainly seems to have stuck around for quite some time, and had quite a lot of legit business use, for a "scam". There is 0 doubt that something like 90% of the coins out there are scams, and of the remaining 10% probably 99% of those will fail for some reason or the other, and of that remaining % a LOT of this will probably wind up abstracted waaaaaaaaay out like IP addresses are for the modern user, but yeah there's probably something there.
throwaway239058 4y ago
There are cases where crypto solves a problem better than anything else, but they're pretty niche. I used to live in China. Many of my friends still do, or did until recently. China makes it very, very difficult to legally transfer money abroad, even if that money was earned legally and had all required taxes paid on it. It is trivial, though, to buy Bitcoin in China, and trivial to immediately sell it elsewhere. You are not exposed to much risk, because you can execute the transaction quickly, and although you're breaking the law in China, because you're circumventing their capital controls, you're not breaking the law anywhere else — the money was earned legally and all required taxes were paid on it. So Bitcoin is pretty popular as a way to get money out of China if you are not living there any more (or are comfortable with the risk, if you are living there). I imagine there are many other places where it's also useful in this way.

I kinda have to agree, can anyone elaborate on the uses of crypto, what does it actually solve? I understand blockchains offer a decentralized system. but how about crypto?

im3w1l 4y ago

During the trucker protest in Canada, the government froze the bank accounts of participants. That the government can do this, shut down movements it doesn't like with the click of a button, is a dangerous centralization of power. Crypto (at its best) safeguards democracy by serving as a check on such power. This still leaves the option of shutting down dangerous protests using the police which requires the cooperation of a lot of people - thus less dangerous, striking a better balance between freedom and safety.

derbOac 4y ago

So... I am not at all trying to advocate for crypto here, but the putative value is in having an anarchic currency that is easily exchangeable. That is, if you had money and wanted to convey it digitally outside of traditional regulated institutions, how would you do it? There's gold, art, etc but that's not easily movable. Now, there's lots of issues here, like how you translate the crypto into other traditional regulated assets if need be, or traceability, or energy use, or security, but that's the putative value: easily moving value outside traditional governmental boundaries. To be fair, if you've ever looked into buying something grey or black market online, I think the value of some sort of cryptocurrency in theory is apparent? I'm not sure any crypto at the moment checks all the boxes, though, and some of the assumptions about use seem a little naive or disingenuous, but I can see the idealized use case value. I could in the abstract imagine some kind of decentralized accounting system taking on the role of currency, probably de facto, but I'm not sure current cryptocurrencies are that.

theelous3 4y ago

Nothing really. A nice vehicle to strip retail investors that don't understand money or tech, or the tech of money. Funnily enough, the only thing I see any value in are NFTs. (Remember crypto currencies are essentially just the T in NFT). But not the url asset nonsense. Rather as a distrubuted authentication system. Concert tickets, system access etc. are all viable.

Nursie 4y ago
I’m seeing the concert ticket thing around lately as something this space could “solve”. But why would NFTs or a blockchain be good here? We have an identifiable central authority, the ticket issuer, so… why do we need a decentralised record for that? I mean, you could issue tickets to an event as NFTs, and it would probably work ok, but why bother?
- Eji1700 4y ago
  They absolutely aren't. Or at least not in the way people think. IF the tech has value it won't "Kill ticketmaster". It'll be adopted BY ticketmaster to make sure they have to pay fewer people on the front line to strip money from your wallet. The, in theory, idea is that you can tie an NFT to an account, and make sure it can't be resold, but you could also tie a ticket to an ID, and that'd probably work better because it's not hard to spin up a wallet, get the "ticket" nft, and then sell the whole wallet.
- soneil 4y ago
  It's a nice idea in theory, but only in theory. So the idea as I understand it is that tickets as NFTs would allow you to prove your ownership of the ticket. With tickets being increasingly electronically-issued, there's currently no way to prove you've been sold a genuine ticket, or the only copy of a genuine ticket - until you get to the gate, they read your barcode, and turn you away. So we have a second-hand market that runs through ticketmaster currently, which solves this trust issue by interacting with the issuer directly. Tickets via NFTs would help remove this dependency on ticketmaster, so we could have a healthy, trustworthy second-hand market that doesn't just feel like ticketmaster encouraging bots so they can sell the same ticket twice. So the question is - does this benefit ticketmaster in the slightest? What problems does this solve for them? Because without them issuing the tickets as NFTs in the first place, and recognising them at the gates - it simply doesn't happen. As you say - from the issuer's POV, "why bother?" As far as I can tell, everyone hates the current system - except the people that control it. The solution to this isn't some wonderful modern technology, it's plain and simple competition. So it mostly exists as an example of why you'd want to be able to prove ownership of a unique token. Everyone can see the problem if I print my ticket 10 times and sell it to 10 people, it's easy to explain. The telling question is why we don't have a good example of an implementation.

Eji1700 4y ago

A lot of people seem to have an outdated concept of what crypto is and what advantages it offers. For the record my stance is "some of this will probably stick around, but most of it is junk". There's stuff like bitcoin, which is basically a digital asset. There's stuff like monero, which is basically a digital asset that's very hard/impossible to track. So anything blackmarket/anti governmental. There's stuff like USDC (stablecoins), which is literally supposed to be pegged to the US Dollar, and "supposedly" backed to some % (depends on the coin. Tether is an infamous nightmare waiting to happen to most people in and out of the scene). The main use being that it's VERY cheap and easy to move stable coins(not just for crypto trading but say if you want to send someone money), and you can get great interest rates on them by staking (6-8% compared to the average savings account of "fuck you for asking"). And then there's basically everything etherium spawned with smart contracts, which is just a token that can execute actions based on programmatic conditions. None of that is "new" so to speak. Any code/database can already do something like that, but the quasi decentralized nature mixed with certain features does open some theoretically interesting opportunities. It gets complicated from there and EVERYTHING above is filled with caveats and issues and other problems, but it certainly seems to have stuck around for quite some time, and had quite a lot of legit business use, for a "scam". There is 0 doubt that something like 90% of the coins out there are scams, and of the remaining 10% probably 99% of those will fail for some reason or the other, and of that remaining % a LOT of this will probably wind up abstracted waaaaaaaaay out like IP addresses are for the modern user, but yeah there's probably something there.

throwaway239058 4y ago

There are cases where crypto solves a problem better than anything else, but they're pretty niche. I used to live in China. Many of my friends still do, or did until recently. China makes it very, very difficult to legally transfer money abroad, even if that money was earned legally and had all required taxes paid on it. It is trivial, though, to buy Bitcoin in China, and trivial to immediately sell it elsewhere. You are not exposed to much risk, because you can execute the transaction quickly, and although you're breaking the law in China, because you're circumventing their capital controls, you're not breaking the law anywhere else — the money was earned legally and all required taxes were paid on it. So Bitcoin is pretty popular as a way to get money out of China if you are not living there any more (or are comfortable with the risk, if you are living there). I imagine there are many other places where it's also useful in this way.