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> you’d be an idiot to ignore the realistic and adopted use-cases Ignoring the hostility, what would you list as the realistic and adopted use-cases for crypto
by sk0g 4y ago
> you’d be an idiot to ignore the realistic and adopted use-cases
Ignoring the hostility, what would you list as the realistic and adopted use-cases for crypto?
- OmahaBoy69 4y agoOnline poker and buying drugs on the dark web
- WFHRenaissance 4y agoThis and more :)
- patmcc 4y agoBuying drugs, laundering money, ransomware, there are literally dozens. Oh, did you want legal ones?
- bogota 4y agoYep that is it. It’s certainly not massively easier to do cross country transactions with it and much cheaper… Its massively telling how much this and other forums completely neglect that a world outside the west exists.
- WFHRenaissance 4y agoShouts out to bogota
- tluyben2 4y agoPeople buy illegal prescription drugs with their credit cards. Almost no one uses crypto.
- latchkey 4y agoNah, USD is still king there.
- tristanMatthias 4y agoThis. All Fait. All one has to do is look into the history…
- WFHRenaissance 4y agoSee reply
- DeRock 4y agoMore specifically, it is > Buying drugs, laundering money, ransomware over the internet. And I’m only being slightly facetious, these are serious industries. Bringing the coordination and scale of the internet to these activities is big business.
- WFHRenaissance 4y agoYeah a lot of weird morality policing— these are massive industries being served by the crypto space rn
- beebmam 4y agoSuper weird reading comments like this, when you're saying that being opposed to these industries is "morality policing": - illegal drug trafficking/sales - sex trafficking - immigration trafficking - child sexual abuse material sales - contract killing If being opposed to these industries makes me into the "morality police", then I think you're delusional. You could make the same argument for any crime; that all laws are "morality policing". These industries destroy an enormous number of lives and we should be crushing the people who profit from them.
- gingkoguy 4y agoAbsolutely! These are also industries. Maybe our morals are not aligned with it but it is one of the biggest industry.
- razemio 4y agoYou would be really stupid to buy anything illegal with Bitcoin or any other non anonymous crypto. Cash / Fiat is king there.
- dang 4y agoPlease don't be snarky on HN or take threads into predictable flamewars. There are ways to make substantive points about this topic, but this way just leads to yet another tedious conflagration. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- gwicks56 4y agoDo you think SciHub has a reason or right to exist? Financial censorship is real and growing.
- WFHRenaissance 4y agoVery good point
- honkler 4y agoscihub exists because it is protected by russian firepower, not cryptoponzi schemes.
- tluyben2 4y agoIs that not actually worse?
- eternalban 4y agoAging kinda sucks too, but alas it is biological reality. "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" - Mao The infrastructure required to support these schemes - networks, energy, hardware - are all firmly under the control of those who have a firmer grasp on political realities on planet Earth than 'crypto' enthusiasts. Seriously hate to break these facts to you, but past/present/future reality is about systems of "authority", and not systems of "trust". An 'authority' gives you a digital ID, a social security card, a driver's license, etc. And this authority has political power and as to how it maintains its power, what Mao said. [p.s. Let's grant that Unicorns are 'prettier' than generic horses. Fine. That does not alter the fact that unicorns are fictional. And no, sticking a paper mache horn colored in hashes on a horse does not make it a unicorn. (see 'scam', 'fraud', 'snake oil' for related matters.)]
- nickv 4y agoDuh, it's the realistic and adopted use-cases!
- WFHRenaissance 4y agoSee reply
- razemio 4y agoYou can proof that a digital file existed at a given time and hasn't been altered since. It is something that I use on a daily basis.
- woodruffw 4y agoWe've been able to do this for decades. It's a core part of our PKI ecosystem.
- WFHRenaissance 4y agoSurely, but PKI still relies on cert authorities which have been compromised before
- woodruffw 4y agoDeFi is, after all, notably devoid of serious compromises :-) More seriously: there are cryptographically sound schemes (like CT) that address CA compromise.
- WFHRenaissance 4y agoCT is cool, but who is writing/submitting those logs?
- woodruffw 4y agoThere are multiple, independent entities both maintaining and submitting to the logs. The short answer: CAs submit precertificates to the logs; the logs respond with signed certificate timestamps that are embedded within the ultimate certificate rendered to the user. User agents (i.e., browsers) cross-check against the logs using the SCTs. Third parties ("monitors") additionally watch the logs for suspicious events (unexpected issuances, unusual certificates being signed for, etc.) There's a nice visualization here[1]. [1]: https://certificate.transparency.dev/howctworks/#stepby https://certificate.transparency.dev/howctworks/#stepby
- WFHRenaissance 4y agoSmart contracts, DAOs, payments, self-sovereign identity, tokenization of real world assets, a few security use-cases, operating markets for prediction and asset-trade outside the control of external authorities (libertarian wet dream stuff), insurance and legal arbitration outside of the control of external authorities (more wet dreaming, but it’s happening), supply chain / provenance of assets… All of these could probably be done using a database, but it’s more about the trust aspect than the mechanics of storing data. Crypto will succeed because the rich among us want it to. Crypto will succeed because the corrupt among us want it to. Crypto will succeed because the libertarians among us want it to. Crypto will succeed because it makes exit a reality. How big of a success will it be? We’ll see.
- woodruffw 4y agoI'm not aware of any serious supply chain or asset provenance efforts that rely on cryptocurrencies or DeFi. Lots of serious work uses Merkle constructions, but it would be a remarkable distortion to spin something like Certificate Transparency as a form of DeFi.
- WFHRenaissance 4y agoI’m aware of a use case where person/asset location is being determined using a distributively owned set of radio transmitters so that proof-of-location can be established without use of GPS. Plenty of supply chain use cases already exist using private chains/ledgers — this will skew more toward public chains or hybrid solutions as demands for transparency amp up.
- woodruffw 4y ago> I’m aware of a use case where person/asset location is being determined using a distributively owned set of radio transmitters so that proof-of-location can be established without use of GPS. ...why?
- WFHRenaissance 4y ago
- latchkey 4y agoDeFi
- lalaland1125 4y agoThe main uses of crypto are illegal activity. The thing to keep in mind for crypto is that the inherent inefficiency leads to high transaction costs that tend to make it a less viable option for legal activities.
- LightMachine 4y agoYou can have virtual game worlds (like a MMORPG) that can't ever be turned off, by nobody. That means your items will last forever. 50 years from now, your sword will still be on your backpack. Can't say that for company-hosted MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, because these companies might go bankrupt, close servers, update items, etc. Not a cure-the-cancer colonize-mars hype level, of course, but it is still an interesting neat thing you can do with blockchains.
- thfuran 4y ago>You can have virtual game worlds (like a MMORPG) that can't ever be turned off, by nobody. How?
- m3adow 4y agoI guess they meant that you can have a persistent and eternal database of the game state stored in a blockchain which everybody could host a game server with.
- thfuran 4y agoI guess you might be able to find a way to handle non-player actions but I think performance is going to be unresolvably terrible and scale quite limited.
- MafellUser 4y ago
- ehutch79 4y agoIn 50 years who's running the servers that are required for the game. It's not like the characters movement will be on the block chain. You're not spending eth every time you attack a mob. It's not like everyone else's computers are running the ai for mobs. Are all the cinematics on the blockchain? How the hell do you use an item from one game in another. It's not like the functionality from game in another. Whats to stop someone from publishing their own super-OP sword to the block chain and just ruining any game that supports it. This makes zero sense when you spend any thought on it.