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> Crypto is successful at being money. If you don't believe me, then I'm happy to sell you the laptop I'm writing this on for 1,000 ETH instead of 1,000 USD. U

> Crypto is successful at being money. If you don't believe me, then I'm happy to sell you the laptop I'm writing this on for 1,000 ETH instead of 1,000 USD. Utterly absurd and yet even still seems to make the exact opposite point. 1000 ETH can be sold for over USD1m, if ETH were successful money surely you would be indifferent to receiving $1000 and $1000 worth of ETH. Not to mention this seems to imply everything is ‘money’, I’d swap my phone for an RTX3090 so I guess it’s money too. In some sense maybe but this is so broad that the word ‘money’ ceases to have much use discussing. This piece is ridiculous. It accuses people who believe there are no use cases of making a bad faith statement while interpreting it in the most literal way possible. They aren’t saying you can’t do anything at all with crypto. Many crypto projects are interesting from a purely technical perspective, but mass market adoption isn’t driven by admiration of a technical implementation. It presents several technologies most of which have been developed as a crypto version of an existing technology for which a use case exists. In this circumstance the ‘use-case’ sceptics refer to is a feature that dominates the existing products for a price users are willing to pay. For the novel ones it's still unknown, but scepticism here is obviously warranted. I’m not even wedded to my scepticism of crypto. I have an interest in distributed systems and seeing ways people try to design byzantine fault tolerant systems. But I’m yet to see a project that I would use at all and I semi-regularly look. Even the final claim to cut out middlemen is false. To the end user transaction fees paid to miners don't feel any different to a fee charged by a bank on a transfer except maybe in magnitude. edited: said USD instead of ETH

whatisweb3 4y ago
> Many crypto projects are interesting from a purely technical perspective, but mass market adoption isn’t driven by admiration of a technical implementation. BitTorrent and Tor are interesting and useful but lack mainstream mass market adoption, but these do not make daily rounds on HN front page with dozens of “this technology is good for nothing” comments. I disagree with the author - ETH might be money-like but it’s use cases are broader than that, and the assets including stablecoins are more like shares or digital gold than state money. To those who use crypto a lot, all of these are just different assets with different uses and degrees of custody, be it fiat or crypto or stocks or physical gold. > To the end user transaction fees paid to miners don't feel any different to a fee charged by a bank on a transfer except maybe in magnitude. Part of this is lack of education. In ETH part of each fee is burned, providing value to all ETH holders by reducing supply. In PoS chains, the fees are redistributed to all staking validators - with delegation it means all users can also be, over long time periods, beneficiaries of these protocol fees.

whatisweb3 4y ago

> Many crypto projects are interesting from a purely technical perspective, but mass market adoption isn’t driven by admiration of a technical implementation. BitTorrent and Tor are interesting and useful but lack mainstream mass market adoption, but these do not make daily rounds on HN front page with dozens of “this technology is good for nothing” comments. I disagree with the author - ETH might be money-like but it’s use cases are broader than that, and the assets including stablecoins are more like shares or digital gold than state money. To those who use crypto a lot, all of these are just different assets with different uses and degrees of custody, be it fiat or crypto or stocks or physical gold. > To the end user transaction fees paid to miners don't feel any different to a fee charged by a bank on a transfer except maybe in magnitude. Part of this is lack of education. In ETH part of each fee is burned, providing value to all ETH holders by reducing supply. In PoS chains, the fees are redistributed to all staking validators - with delegation it means all users can also be, over long time periods, beneficiaries of these protocol fees.