6 ms·

This doesn't really change anything, I still cannot find any legitimate use cases for blockchain, Proof of Stake or not. I would happy to be proven wrong, but

This doesn't really change anything, I still cannot find any legitimate use cases for blockchain, Proof of Stake or not. I would happy to be proven wrong, but this is extremely rare as I can't find any legitimate actual useful use case since Bitcoin and Ethereum's existence.

miguelmota 4y ago
> I still cannot find any legitimate use cases for blockchain Blockchains solve the double-spend problem. Allows for scarcity in the digital realm. Ethereum is a platform for decentralized finance, anyone can borderlessly lend and borrow in seconds. Endless possibilities.
- talhof8 4y ago
  When will those endless possibilities meet reality though?
  - miguelmota 4y ago
    It's a reality to the people of Latin America who use stablecoins on Ethereum to hedge against their own country's inflation.
- geysersam 4y ago
  > allows for scarcity Sounds great...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kuschku 4y ago
  Since when do we want scarcity? One of the largest advantages of the web was that it allows for a digital post-scarcity economy.
- nly 4y ago
  > anyone can borderlessly lend and borrow in seconds. You can only do _secured_ lending and borrowing, and only where the security is, itself, a highly liquid digital token. Person A lending USDC to person B, taking ETH for security, isn't doing much for the world at large except allowing B to defer his capital gains tax. Unsecured lending, backed only by the faith or expectations we have around future cash flows, is how the world creates opportunity for true investment and growth... and impossible in a trustless and anonymous system like crypto. Hardly limitless possibilities
Kiro 4y ago
The use case is that it's fun and with PoS you don't need to feel guilty having fun at the expense of the environment.
TimJRobinson 4y ago
Have a look into DeFi and what A16Z is investing in is a good start. When many of the biggest SV firms are investing billions and you still don't understand it, don't you get curious and dig deeper?
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  We know why they're investing billions. Same reason they invest billions into start-ups - their capital gives them preferential terms that let them cash out at the expense of other investors, whether it be at IPO, or ICO.
  - TimJRobinson 4y ago
    I gave you a starting point, if you want to continue to dismiss a massive shift in society than that's on you.
    - EdwardDiego 4y ago
      I'll dismiss claims that it's a massive shift in society until it actually... causes a shift in society. Unless you consider "A new way for grifters to run ponzi schemes" a societal shift, then there's no evidence of any alleged shift, nevermind a massive one. But you choosing to believe that it is indeed a massive shift in society, well, that's on you, but more likely, that's _from_ you. You want to believe.
solumos 4y ago
the easiest use case to grok (and one that's being used right now) is a near-instant global settlement layer e.g. startups today are able to accept funds in USDC[0] without the hassle + cost of sending/receiving a wire transfer or waiting up to 2 weeks for an ACH to clear. Another interesting use case is tracking provenance for physical goods. e.g. the ownership history of a bottle of whiskey[1] or wine[2] [0] - https://help.venture.angel.co/hc/en-us/articles/6829493046925-How-do-I-fund-my-investments-with-USDC- https://help.venture.angel.co/hc/en-us/articles/682949304692... [1] - https://whiskeyraiders.com/bourbon/justins-house-bourbon-baxus-whiskey-authentication/ https://whiskeyraiders.com/bourbon/justins-house-bourbon-bax... [2] - https://www.decanter.com/premium/spotlight-on-blockchain-wine-nfts-to-help-guarantee-provenance-484573/ https://www.decanter.com/premium/spotlight-on-blockchain-win...
- kuschku 4y ago
  But why? Rolling out SEPA ICT globally would have benefit far more people in far better ways. The ability to send money instantly from any regular bank account to any other regular bank account, without any fees, that's what we should aim for. Cryptocurrencies do this worse than the existing banking tech (e.g., the mentioned SEPA ICT).
  - solumos 4y ago
    > But why? Mostly US bureaucracy and central banks + states having their own agendas. At this point, world governments have had how many years to figure this out? It's no better than 2009 in the US. Much of the world doesn't have SEPA ICT. And much of the world probably doesn't want to support a euro-centric system (e.g. Serbia). Also, about ~1B people in the world are unbanked. Decoupling the geopolitical aspects from the settlement layer is a big advantage to crypto. USDC/Circle is free to censor whomever they'd like, but the Ethereum blockchain isn't going to halt at the whims of the SEC or any other regulator.
- hocuspocus 4y ago
  [0] "A network fee of 2.5% (with a cap of $500) will be deducted from your investment amount for settlement, custody, and trading costs associated with your payment in USDC". Very cheap indeed. [1] [2] Blockchains offer no guarantees off-chain. Everything that happens in the real world boils down to the oracle problem. You need trusted third parties in supply chains, a cryptographic signature would essentially achieve the same thing.
syl_sau 4y ago
As someone pointed out to me recently when I argued the same thing, crypto and blockchain does have a use case: funding organizations and people through anonymous means as to circumvent the scope of the law/avoid the eyes of state or corporate authorities. This includes funding politically persecuted groups or terrorist groups as well as buying drugs or other more or less recommendable things. After all it's mostly what it's been used for so far (if we ignore speculation and various scams). I think it's hard to argue with this.
- herbst 4y ago
  No it's not. Our monetary systems depends on very few companies that restrict things that go way further than the law. You cant use credit cards for thousands of things you never thought about, PayPal is banning even more, wire transfer isn't international and banks may still complicate things, not even talking about how long these can take internationally and how that doesn't work for realtime services. There are dozens of things like perfect money, Payeer, Payoneer that could also be blamed because it is used for bad things. But reality is we need those to pay for things that visa doesn't want us to pay for. Crypto is one solution to this obvious problem. It's easy to say it's all drug money and money laundering but only if you never happen to be in a position where you have to trust untrustworthy russian credit card gateways because it's nearly impossible to charge for a skin colored dildo.
- thegginthesky 4y ago
  Another point is that crypto allows for easy transfer of money across borders. Say I want to hire a dev in Germany/Chile/Nigeria, I could go through the cumbersome and expensive process of wiring money, which incurs taxes on money being exchanged, broker fees in the form of a spread and so on, or I could use a cryptocurrency to just send the money and avoid all of that. Crypto is also a very powerful tool for people in countries with spiraling inflation, such as Venezuela, Turkey and Argentina. Instead of being 100% exposed to local currency or USD, now you have options on how to perform transactions even inside your own country.
  - hocuspocus 4y ago
yieldcrv 4y ago
Emphasis on you can’t find any uses and other people’s use cases aren't legitimate to you We’re past the point of playing with people’s goal posts
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  You could just list some great use cases that are happening right now, that'd be a very compelling argument.
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    Typically you, the person replied to, or someone else is simply primed to debate the use cases, in a classic dropbox-style moment about how some other combination of technologies nobody wants could do it, as opposed to diving into the technology itself and the opportunities presented by the platform For them its a quagmire because they cant find a reason to justify any time or mindshare on the technology, and are simply using any discussion to rationalize not doing that Its just past the point where they're relevant or the concept needs to be defended at all, its just not new or fragile enough anymore. Even politicians can debate nuanced aspects of 1 out of 100 use cases. And then there’s the reality that speculation is a use case, so obvious yet somehow so unacceptable to technology savants, as if the entire financial services industry doesn't exist with its own niche technology to facilitate it And then it derails into a relative utility argument, when someone points out the irony that nearly everyone here is working for a democracy destabilizing advertising conglomerate and getting paid in lottery tickets
    - EdwardDiego 4y ago
      So, I interpreted your comment as "No, there's no use cases currently identified that couldn't be done far more effectively without a blockchain, and well, that's a fair point". Here's the thing - I work with Kafka a lot. It's a complex piece of technology, people using it incur real costs, both financially and in terms of system complexity. But it's great for some use cases. And terrible for others. You could use it to replace RabbitMQ or ActiveMQ etc., but that would generally be a bad idea, a distributed log isn't a message queue. However, it has use cases where it shines. If you were to ask me about the use cases where Kafka is genuinely better than other technologies, I can easily provide them. I wouldn't say "Well, you've really got to dive into the technology itself and the opportunities presented by the platform". I'd just give you actual use cases where a distributed log is superior to other technologies. So, should be easy to do that for Web3 stuff right?
otabdeveloper4 4y ago
"Make nerds rich" is a fairly legitimate use case.
ilaksh 4y ago
The main use case for a block chain is to ensure that a ledger is valid and not tampered with. The reason we want public ledgers is to keep track of financial transactions securely. Why can't we just use a bank? At some level there needs to be security for the bank's database. Blockchains are generally considered the best way to do this. So when legacy financial databases are replaced in recent years blockchains are often considered. Public blockchains are even better because they ensure the validity of the overall system.
- LtWorf 4y ago
  Blockchains are certainly not the best way to do that. All the hash try and error is completely useless and put there just to create "value".
  - ilaksh 4y ago
    What do you think is a better way?
    - LtWorf 4y ago
      digital signatures
baby 4y ago
People have been using it for 10 years, yet it still doesn’t have any usecase. It’s like saying “I don’t get tiktok”
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  Using it for what. I see that 99% of use cases are "speculation to get rich on the basis of telling bigger fools to buy and HODL LOL". People have been using heroin for years, doesn't mean it's a good thing.
  - baby 4y ago
    What do people use tiktok for?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

miguelmota 4y ago

> I still cannot find any legitimate use cases for blockchain Blockchains solve the double-spend problem. Allows for scarcity in the digital realm. Ethereum is a platform for decentralized finance, anyone can borderlessly lend and borrow in seconds. Endless possibilities.

talhof8 4y ago
When will those endless possibilities meet reality though?
- miguelmota 4y ago
  It's a reality to the people of Latin America who use stablecoins on Ethereum to hedge against their own country's inflation.
geysersam 4y ago
> allows for scarcity Sounds great...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kuschku 4y ago
Since when do we want scarcity? One of the largest advantages of the web was that it allows for a digital post-scarcity economy.
nly 4y ago
> anyone can borderlessly lend and borrow in seconds. You can only do _secured_ lending and borrowing, and only where the security is, itself, a highly liquid digital token. Person A lending USDC to person B, taking ETH for security, isn't doing much for the world at large except allowing B to defer his capital gains tax. Unsecured lending, backed only by the faith or expectations we have around future cash flows, is how the world creates opportunity for true investment and growth... and impossible in a trustless and anonymous system like crypto. Hardly limitless possibilities

Kiro 4y ago

The use case is that it's fun and with PoS you don't need to feel guilty having fun at the expense of the environment.

TimJRobinson 4y ago

Have a look into DeFi and what A16Z is investing in is a good start. When many of the biggest SV firms are investing billions and you still don't understand it, don't you get curious and dig deeper?

EdwardDiego 4y ago
We know why they're investing billions. Same reason they invest billions into start-ups - their capital gives them preferential terms that let them cash out at the expense of other investors, whether it be at IPO, or ICO.
- TimJRobinson 4y ago
  I gave you a starting point, if you want to continue to dismiss a massive shift in society than that's on you.
  - EdwardDiego 4y ago
    I'll dismiss claims that it's a massive shift in society until it actually... causes a shift in society. Unless you consider "A new way for grifters to run ponzi schemes" a societal shift, then there's no evidence of any alleged shift, nevermind a massive one. But you choosing to believe that it is indeed a massive shift in society, well, that's on you, but more likely, that's _from_ you. You want to believe.

solumos 4y ago

the easiest use case to grok (and one that's being used right now) is a near-instant global settlement layer e.g. startups today are able to accept funds in USDC[0] without the hassle + cost of sending/receiving a wire transfer or waiting up to 2 weeks for an ACH to clear. Another interesting use case is tracking provenance for physical goods. e.g. the ownership history of a bottle of whiskey[1] or wine[2] [0] - https://help.venture.angel.co/hc/en-us/articles/6829493046925-How-do-I-fund-my-investments-with-USDC- https://help.venture.angel.co/hc/en-us/articles/682949304692... [1] - https://whiskeyraiders.com/bourbon/justins-house-bourbon-baxus-whiskey-authentication/ https://whiskeyraiders.com/bourbon/justins-house-bourbon-bax... [2] - https://www.decanter.com/premium/spotlight-on-blockchain-wine-nfts-to-help-guarantee-provenance-484573/ https://www.decanter.com/premium/spotlight-on-blockchain-win...

kuschku 4y ago
But why? Rolling out SEPA ICT globally would have benefit far more people in far better ways. The ability to send money instantly from any regular bank account to any other regular bank account, without any fees, that's what we should aim for. Cryptocurrencies do this worse than the existing banking tech (e.g., the mentioned SEPA ICT).
- solumos 4y ago
  > But why? Mostly US bureaucracy and central banks + states having their own agendas. At this point, world governments have had how many years to figure this out? It's no better than 2009 in the US. Much of the world doesn't have SEPA ICT. And much of the world probably doesn't want to support a euro-centric system (e.g. Serbia). Also, about ~1B people in the world are unbanked. Decoupling the geopolitical aspects from the settlement layer is a big advantage to crypto. USDC/Circle is free to censor whomever they'd like, but the Ethereum blockchain isn't going to halt at the whims of the SEC or any other regulator.
hocuspocus 4y ago
[0] "A network fee of 2.5% (with a cap of $500) will be deducted from your investment amount for settlement, custody, and trading costs associated with your payment in USDC". Very cheap indeed. [1] [2] Blockchains offer no guarantees off-chain. Everything that happens in the real world boils down to the oracle problem. You need trusted third parties in supply chains, a cryptographic signature would essentially achieve the same thing.

syl_sau 4y ago

As someone pointed out to me recently when I argued the same thing, crypto and blockchain does have a use case: funding organizations and people through anonymous means as to circumvent the scope of the law/avoid the eyes of state or corporate authorities. This includes funding politically persecuted groups or terrorist groups as well as buying drugs or other more or less recommendable things. After all it's mostly what it's been used for so far (if we ignore speculation and various scams). I think it's hard to argue with this.

herbst 4y ago
No it's not. Our monetary systems depends on very few companies that restrict things that go way further than the law. You cant use credit cards for thousands of things you never thought about, PayPal is banning even more, wire transfer isn't international and banks may still complicate things, not even talking about how long these can take internationally and how that doesn't work for realtime services. There are dozens of things like perfect money, Payeer, Payoneer that could also be blamed because it is used for bad things. But reality is we need those to pay for things that visa doesn't want us to pay for. Crypto is one solution to this obvious problem. It's easy to say it's all drug money and money laundering but only if you never happen to be in a position where you have to trust untrustworthy russian credit card gateways because it's nearly impossible to charge for a skin colored dildo.
thegginthesky 4y ago
Another point is that crypto allows for easy transfer of money across borders. Say I want to hire a dev in Germany/Chile/Nigeria, I could go through the cumbersome and expensive process of wiring money, which incurs taxes on money being exchanged, broker fees in the form of a spread and so on, or I could use a cryptocurrency to just send the money and avoid all of that. Crypto is also a very powerful tool for people in countries with spiraling inflation, such as Venezuela, Turkey and Argentina. Instead of being 100% exposed to local currency or USD, now you have options on how to perform transactions even inside your own country.
- hocuspocus 4y ago

yieldcrv 4y ago

Emphasis on you can’t find any uses and other people’s use cases aren't legitimate to you We’re past the point of playing with people’s goal posts

EdwardDiego 4y ago
You could just list some great use cases that are happening right now, that'd be a very compelling argument.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  Typically you, the person replied to, or someone else is simply primed to debate the use cases, in a classic dropbox-style moment about how some other combination of technologies nobody wants could do it, as opposed to diving into the technology itself and the opportunities presented by the platform For them its a quagmire because they cant find a reason to justify any time or mindshare on the technology, and are simply using any discussion to rationalize not doing that Its just past the point where they're relevant or the concept needs to be defended at all, its just not new or fragile enough anymore. Even politicians can debate nuanced aspects of 1 out of 100 use cases. And then there’s the reality that speculation is a use case, so obvious yet somehow so unacceptable to technology savants, as if the entire financial services industry doesn't exist with its own niche technology to facilitate it And then it derails into a relative utility argument, when someone points out the irony that nearly everyone here is working for a democracy destabilizing advertising conglomerate and getting paid in lottery tickets
  - EdwardDiego 4y ago
    So, I interpreted your comment as "No, there's no use cases currently identified that couldn't be done far more effectively without a blockchain, and well, that's a fair point". Here's the thing - I work with Kafka a lot. It's a complex piece of technology, people using it incur real costs, both financially and in terms of system complexity. But it's great for some use cases. And terrible for others. You could use it to replace RabbitMQ or ActiveMQ etc., but that would generally be a bad idea, a distributed log isn't a message queue. However, it has use cases where it shines. If you were to ask me about the use cases where Kafka is genuinely better than other technologies, I can easily provide them. I wouldn't say "Well, you've really got to dive into the technology itself and the opportunities presented by the platform". I'd just give you actual use cases where a distributed log is superior to other technologies. So, should be easy to do that for Web3 stuff right?

otabdeveloper4 4y ago

"Make nerds rich" is a fairly legitimate use case.

ilaksh 4y ago

The main use case for a block chain is to ensure that a ledger is valid and not tampered with. The reason we want public ledgers is to keep track of financial transactions securely. Why can't we just use a bank? At some level there needs to be security for the bank's database. Blockchains are generally considered the best way to do this. So when legacy financial databases are replaced in recent years blockchains are often considered. Public blockchains are even better because they ensure the validity of the overall system.

LtWorf 4y ago
Blockchains are certainly not the best way to do that. All the hash try and error is completely useless and put there just to create "value".
- ilaksh 4y ago
  What do you think is a better way?
  - LtWorf 4y ago
    digital signatures

baby 4y ago

People have been using it for 10 years, yet it still doesn’t have any usecase. It’s like saying “I don’t get tiktok”

EdwardDiego 4y ago
Using it for what. I see that 99% of use cases are "speculation to get rich on the basis of telling bigger fools to buy and HODL LOL". People have been using heroin for years, doesn't mean it's a good thing.
- baby 4y ago
  What do people use tiktok for?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]