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I'm sure you've fielded this Q many times. I don't wanna be a full-on hater of crypto. And I do wanna hear of use-cases that are relevant and intuitively under

I'm sure you've fielded this Q many times. I don't wanna be a full-on hater of crypto. And I do wanna hear of use-cases that are relevant and intuitively understandable or at baseline, usable, to laymen. What utility do you see – through all the noise and chaos and human flaws that taint all things – from crypto, that to you just makes sense and will prevail in light of all the deserved and undeserved criticism?

arch1e 4y ago
My country is cracking down on civil liberties (I'm not talking the ability to not take certain vaccines), I'm talking about religious freedom among other things and crypto like XMR gives me a way to make sure I am able to buy stuff like Mullvad VPN (again for privacy) without going through a centralized payment processor. This is just one instance though, I even get domains from njall.la now with XMR/crypto and enjoy a lot of privacy benefits (coming from godaddy)
- m00dy 4y ago
  you are not alone...
- okasaki 4y ago
  Ah ok, the use case is breaking the law.
  - brookst 4y ago
    I read it as maintaining privacy while doing legal things that a corrupt government might punish despite their legality. What led you to think laws are being broken in those scenarios?
  - keyme 4y ago
    Yes. Or, in other words, maintaining morality despite laws.
  - andrepd 4y ago
    Yes, it may surprise you that the women in Iran, for instance, are breaking the law. And so did the people who founded the USA, in another example. Law ≠ moralityb
    - okasaki 4y ago
      It's beautiful when people you like doing things you approve of are breaking the law. Let's say someone uses crypto to buy weapons or explosives and your loved one dies in the attack. Are you still going to support it?
      - smcn 4y ago
        That's quite the response. Are you suggesting that weapons or explosives can only be bought with crypto?
        lmm 4y ago
        Crypto makes it easier to buy things that are illegal to buy. That's exactly what's being touted as a benefit here. Being outside the law cuts both ways.
        smcn 4y ago
        Crypto is a new innovation. People have been able to buy prohibited items as far back as there has been prohibited items. Crypto doesn't change anything there. Finding out that somebody used crypto to buy something that harmed your family shouldn't make you dislike crypto. Bad people will get a hold of weapons regardless.
        lmm 4y ago
        > Crypto is a new innovation. People have been able to buy prohibited items as far back as there has been prohibited items. Crypto doesn't change anything there. If it didn't change anything then by the same token it wouldn't help people in oppressive regimes. > Finding out that somebody used crypto to buy something that harmed your family shouldn't make you dislike crypto. Bad people will get a hold of weapons regardless. Security is always a tradeoff. You can't make it impossible to get hold of weapons, but you can make it harder, and that matters at the margin.
  - dnissley 4y ago
    Yes
- andrepd 4y ago
  It's pretty telling that Monero, a project with actual utility, underperforms in terms of value/attention compared to pump and dump scams or useless NFTs / tokens.
  - pcthrowaway 4y ago
    You're comparing its market cap, when that's not that important. People know what Monero is, and it's likely one of the most important cryptos for many people. It's also in a legally tenuous area in many jurisdictions, and therefore perhaps not considered as 'safe' for people who just want to speculate on price. It's still massive, and a 2.6 billion $ market cap is nothing to sneeze at. Not sure why we need to compare everything to the price of other projects in the space. The fact that people inevitably place so much emphasis on 'price' (as denominated in USD of course), is really the most negative consequence of the space.
- chollida1 4y ago
  > civil liberties (I'm not talking the ability to not take certain vaccines), I'm talking about religious freedom Interesting framing. I would have thought the ability to control what goes into a person's body, ie bodily autonomy would have far outweigh religious freedom. If I had to give one up, and I don't think anyone should have to give up either, I would give up religious freedom long before having to give up control over my own body. I guess that goes hand in hand with the abortion debate, you're either in the religious freedoms camp or the bodily autonomy camp. it's good to see there are other's who think the opposite. I appreciate the differing opinion.
  - anikom15 4y ago
    Considering the most popular religions fundamentally reject bodily autonomy, it shouldn’t be a surprise.
  - dbfx 4y ago
    He is probably trying to stop the inevitable derailment once someone mentions(or believes is referring to) vaccines in any way that is not unequivocal and blind support.
    - chollida1 4y ago
      Ah, that makes sense. Appreciate your help!!
  - hudon 4y ago
    > you're either in the religious freedoms camp or the bodily autonomy camp An abortion kills a baby by directly attacking his or her body (dismemberment, lethal injection, etc.). You can firmly be in the bodily autonomy camp and in the religious freedoms camp at the same time.
    - cpgxiii 4y ago
      You can't claim to be in the "bodily autonomy" camp and believe in compelling actual living people to use their bodies to carry a fetus to term.
danielvf 4y ago
Two good articles from the last few weeks on what has made the cut over the last few years and proven to be useful : https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/12/05/excited.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/12/05/excited.html https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-im-less-than-infinitely-hostile https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-im-less-than-infin... I won't summarize, beyond agreeing with the second that a lot of the view that "all of crypto is a scam" is driven by the fact that essentially all public facing crypto advertisements are for scams. However behind the scenes there are open decentralized system that do move billions of dollars smoothly and safely for millions of people.
- corv 4y ago
  Very much agree, the post by Scott Alexander is nuanced and well worth the read
  - jeffreyrogers 4y ago
    In most of the cases Scott cites the underlying thing being facilitated can be done via a normal financial system, some countries just don't have one that functions very well. So I don't see the benefits of crypto as much as I see the benefits of having a well functioning financial system. Crypto just outsources that from local regulators, banks, etc., to crypto developers. Might be a good tradeoff for those countries. The personal example Scott gives of sending money to Russians is probably illegal and circumvents currency controls that the Russian government has deliberately put in place, so not really a demonstration for crypto as much as it is an example that people find these types of transactions useful for various reasons.
    - wmf 4y ago
      It would be interesting if the US set up some kind of Freedom Bank specifically for people in China, Russia, Venezuela, Argentina, Nigeria, etc. to access US dollars and dollar-based investments. Those countries wouldn't appreciate it though so I'd expect a lot of diplomatic blowback. Until then, there's crypto for better or worse. [Insert conspiracy theory here about Tether being a CIA op to dollarize the developing world.]
LatteLazy 4y ago
(not op) I stayed with a friend in Zimbabwe at the height of their hyperinflation. His house was filled with petrol (gas) because he'd been paid and he had to buy something the same day that would keep for a month and hold it's value or his money would evaporate. So we sat in his house praying there wasn't a fire. That's the use case for Bitcoin: currency of final resort. It's the same as gold only better (can't be faked, hard to steal etc). I think in countries with stable currencies and after 2 decades of low interest and inflation, that's underrated as a use case... I also believe (forgive the digression into my weird conspiracy theories) that one reason the US has made so much progress on legalised weed is because crypto and the dark web basically mean you can get whatever you want delivered right to your door. But that's just my own weird world view.
- greenthrow 4y ago
  Considering how few world currencies are less stable than BTC this doesn't make a lot of sense. Plus if you have the ability to turn arbitrary currency X into BTC, you can certainly change it into USD, which is far more stable than BTC. So, nope. This is not a good use for BTC.
  - stickfigure 4y ago
    How does a Zimbabwean convert ZWR to USD? How does a Venezuelan convert bolivars to USD?
    - maria2 4y ago
      They usually go to a black market currency dealer and keep the money under their mattress, or at least that's how they did it in the USSR.
    - WeylandYutani 4y ago
      There are unofficial "shadow banks" that are run by powerful people with criminal and corrupt politician's backing. With enough time passing you have an entire underground economy- conveniently denominated in dollars.
dogman144 4y ago
Technical: - transfer of provably discrete (and sometimes fully private) values between machines, without a central intermediary. It takes what HTTP/S, FTP, all the information protocols that opened up the internet to what it became, and adds the ability to know that packet_a is the only packet_a out there. - it's on the back 30-40 years of research of the same computer scientists that brought you consumer cryptography, Tor, and many other consequential innovations. As in, it didn't just pop out of SBF's head. - Think of what non-discrete digital information transmission did to everything. Now we have discrete digital information transmission. This is where the "money of the internet" terminology comes from IMO. - "but we have Google/ApplePay, Venmo, etc!:" look at the protocols that govern the internet and similar examples like linux. how many of them are "owned" by a central party like digital payments currently are? yes, some have heavy influence, and ICANN, DNS, etc are somewhat centralized when you really get down to it. But there is no vendor-specific HTTPs. Not technical: - simply put: people, governments, financial institutions, and on and on are using it. The opinion pieces and select loud voices in government and HN would make you believe that only criminals or techies putting the dotcom bubble to shame are using it. However, hand on the bible, it has penetration across quite a lot of use cases as a digital, international currency, beyond NFTs and moonCoins. Bank of International Settlements just let member banks deposit 2% of their holdings in BTC. This is not a small event, and its one of many out there. While Senators, ECB, and coworkers in HN are shaming it, it's getting adopted by their peers. And normal folk who don't know better see it as an open question still or fraud somehow. - payment censorship: The largest capital outflows from CN where when crypto was legal there, and then subsequently banned. Ok though, "it could never happen here" is often thought if you live in the West. People saw Julian Assange's cut off from payment rails and rightfully so perhaps dismissed it. But then what about OnlyFans last year almost having to change its entire product because someone didn't like porn and pressured enough investors/payment providers in the West to cut them off? Mindgeek (Pornhub) lost payment providers access as well last year. Ok though, "well that's porn." When you combine the march of digital payment censorship based on the values of the day, combined with the digitization of cash and limitations around paper currency, that's a trend to note. What about abortion? What about pro-life funding? What about...? What about Equifax selling your compensation history to competitors, and your lack of opt-out from that system because you get paid in USD via digital banks? In short, digital currency is not currently trustless and censorship-less in the same way paper currency more or less is and has been for centuries, crypto is the only (perhaps imperfect!) alternative out there right now. - inflation: 8% inflation in the US is one thing, but I know for a fact restaurants where I live (normal town, US) have faced 100% raw ingredient prices YoY. money printing == inflation is irresponsibly simplifying it, but where is your right to have a currency backup that at least has some boundaries around the monetary policy of the day, enables to you exist and spend online, and aligns with your incentives to spend or not spend? Dgital currencies built in CN have test trial "expiration dates" on them to spend for instance. The US is in the middle of similar tech. "It could never happen here" but if you dig in and read some Keynes which our monetary policy is based on... it certainly could.
digitaltrees 4y ago
The ledger. I think people are so caught up with it being a currency or investment asset that they miss the real revolutionary ideas. Triple entry bookkeeping. When double entry accounting emerged in the renaissance it revolutionized commercial activity. I think there are use cases where being able to publicly verify transactions and history would be immensely beneficial. I worked as a lawyer in NYC unwinding many of the 2008 financial crises bankruptcies and can tell you that billions of dollars of mortgages, home deeds, commercial loans, etc are traded with bankers sending each other excel files. Which means that the property ownership is literally a spreadsheet (often with a date in the file name). It was shocking but how it was done. There are massive third party organizations that are tasked with tracking those transactions MERS. The commodities exchanges etc but they weren’t much better organized. Lots of excel files. So if there could be a common accounting ledger that could be verified it would be a big improvement. The question is though would that be 10x better? Or rather enough to get the various stakeholders to adopt the ledger. So far. No.
- belter 4y ago
  https://aws.amazon.com/qldb/?nc1=h_ls https://aws.amazon.com/qldb/?nc1=h_ls
- elliekelly 4y ago
  What about triple entry accounting requires the blockchain? Or how does triple entry accounting benefit from being on the blockchain? Or a distributed ledger in general? The shitty book keeping you encountered will always be cheaper, faster, and easier than the “better” alternative. The people like SBF with a black hole of excel nonsense as their “accounting system” aren’t going to be persuaded to take up triple entry accounting— on the Blockchain or otherwise.
  - strangattractor 4y ago
    I don't think is does - but exposing too much data is a problem. The block chain can be public and still maintain a certain anonymity. If people see a lot of money going into a particular wallet they can ask the city to clarify where/why the money if being spent. It might be nice to see exactly how money is being spent for schools (payroll, facilities etc) for example. Block chain seem made for such a thing is all.
JoshTko 4y ago
If you disagree with your govt. either financial policies (taxation, currency controls etc.) or political. You can use Bitcoin to maintain control your assets. For example, if the government suddenly decides to restrict capital leaving the country, BTC would be free from that restriction. If your govt. decides your political activity is now criminal and wants to freeze all your assets domestically as well with international partners, BTC would not be frozen. This is not a problem that most people in the US will face. But if you are a Russian or Chinese citizen then BTC's utility would be much more real.
- cduzz 4y ago
  That's an interesting theory. In practice, maintaining anonymous ownership of your assets on BTC is excruciatingly hard, because it's a public record. The organizations that monopolize violence ("governments", typically) have ways of compelling people that simply ignore some magic number in a distributed database. Please do a thing or we'll do a thing to someone you care about. I suspect even Satochi would happily give up the private keys to avoid a visit to Lubyanka... That's not to say that there's no value to these things, but real life violence trumps imaginary freedom.
  - Bilal_io 4y ago
    the idea boils down to: If the government can see what's your bank account in details, and can seize it, and the government can see what's in your Bitcoin wallet but not with full transparency and cannot seize it, which is better?
    - lolinder 4y ago
      Does it really matter that they can't seize your crypto if they can disappear you? I guess you can take some cold comfort in the fact that your assets won't belong to the government, but they won't do you any good either.
  - valcron1000 4y ago
    Well, I use crypto to bypass currency controls so there's your "imaginary freedom"
darawk 4y ago
I'll give this a shot. I've written variants of this comment a billion times on HN, but I sort of enjoy trying to create the perfect articulation of what it is that I like about crypto, so I'll try again: Crypto is an alternative financial system. Financial systems, on their own, are castles in the air. They provide no value to anyone. Financial systems derive their fundamental economic value by being wired to the real world in some way. That is, efficiently allocating capital to productive enterprises, cheaply translating capital between different forms (e.g. currencies, but also product <-> currency), and transferring risk from those who don't want it to those who do. This is why finance exists, and what it is for. The cryptocurrency financial system as it exists now is only very weakly connected to the real economy, and only in a few places of marginal or possibly negative social value (e.g. drugs, gambling, prostitution, ransomware). However, there are a few places that actually use crypto fairly heavily for legitimate, socially useful transactions, such as Vietnam, Ukraine and Venezuela. Most people here tend not to find those examples particularly convincing, and neither do I - but they are important to mention. But what crypto represents is an alternative model for how a financial system could operate. It is a financial system that offers many of the same features that our existing system does, but is different in some ways. Asking "What good is crypto?" is a bit like asking "What good is Linux when we already have Windows?". They both do very similar things, but they do them differently, and most critically, they imply different distributions of power. If you build your business around Microsoft products, that's fine, but in several important senses that makes you beholden to Microsoft. If you want to build a financial business in the traditional financial economy, you will probably have to go to one of the major money center banks, hat in hand, and ask them to let you do whatever it is that you want to do (or an intermediary that has done this). Depending on what it is you want to do, you may have to go to all of them and ask this. Crypto is different. If you want to build a financial business in crypto, you simply write the code and deploy it. You don't ask anyone for permission, and there is nobody on earth that can tell you "no". Even the US Treasury hasn't shut down Tornado cash, they've merely sanctioned it. The drawbacks of this approach should be obvious, but so too should the benefits. Whether you like the approach crypto offers is simply a question of values. But it is, in my opinion, undeniable that it is meaningfully different while being capable (in principle) of offering most of what traditional finance does. The fact that crypto has not yet been wired to the real economy is the reason that it has not yet provided much in the way of concrete utility in most developed markets. The reason it hasn't been wired to the real economy is that regulators and lawmakers mostly have not allowed it. And I agree with them! I would like to see a little more experimentation in that direction, but crypto is fairly obviously not ready for prime time in this sense - not yet, and maybe never. Many things would need to happen first. However, don't mistake the absence of this connection for the theoretical inability to create it. It hasn't been created because people are cautious about things this important, as they should be. There is nothing in principle right now preventing anyone from tokenizing a house, or a corporate debt instrument. And even if you think "nobody has done those things because they're stupid and crypto is just worse than traditional finance", you may be right! But it should be obvious that there are enough crypto believers out there that this would have been done if it were legal to do so, even if it were a bad idea. Hence, given their total non-existence, it should be clear that the reason it hasn't happened is regulatory, not fundamental capability. You will know crypto has failed if and when there are a few real estate titles, car titles, equity shares, bond instruments, and other assorted things from the traditional financial realm that have been tokenized, but nobody cares about them. Assets placed there by a few true believers, traded for a bit, and then forgotten. That is how you will know crypto has nothing to offer. But for now nobody has done those things, because the traditional legal system (correctly!) won't respect them sufficiently. EDIT: To extend the Linux metaphor a bit, Linux was created in the early 90s, but I would argue it didn't become clearly economically significant until the late 2000s. Prior to that it was a toy for nerds and anyone serious used "real products" built by "real companies" and purchased for money[1]. Crypto is FOSS for finance, and maybe the traditional world is right this time, and when it comes to money walled gardens and closed ecosystems are best. But it's not the world that I personally want to live in. [1] The exact timelines here are obviously fuzzy and certainly you can argue with whether it was late or mid or early 2000s, but what is inarguable is that Linux went through a long "just a toy" phase in the minds of most people
Quarrelsome 4y ago
Crypto is really good for buying drugs given that most traditional payment systems do not tend to cater for the black market.
yieldcrv 4y ago
Being used for financial services isn't controversial, many onlookers and disillusioned crypto proponents seem to think trade and speculation doesn't count as utility. Something that more so reflects complete segregation of how our society works and the largest sector in said society. Non-permissioned financial services is valuable, it represents pent up interest that has been muted for decades, while we pretended that only ivy league quants who also had lots capital could do anything with financial services. it was never true, just the capital barrier was high and the industry was protectionist Even if you just look at whatever actions that the gatekept financial services are ostensibly trying to prevent, that undeniably has a value, and now that the gates are down many people transfer value this way because its fun and lucrative and quick. It serves everyone that shows up. And most importantly: it doesn't have to be the best technological solution. nobody using it cares that a managed database could run the whole platform, people care that a managed database is permissioned and under many arbitrary whims of advertisers, shareholders, executives, and governments. Mitigating that undermines the performance. Not that controversial.
Grimburger 4y ago
> I do wanna hear of use-cases that are relevant and intuitively understandable or at baseline, usable, to laymen irrevocable timestamping of information
Paradigma11 4y ago
I am mostly interested in proof of stake chains with smart contracts. I think of them as decentralized, open protocol\source clouds for financial services and transactions. That seems pretty useful to me. With all the VC money that pored into defi ponzi schemes gone now, we will hopefully see more sustainable products and growth now. There just was no oxygen left to compete with those Ponzi schemes.
hervature 4y ago
I'm not going to attempt to answer this question in the context of "Web3". Personally, I think that anything with that moniker is doomed to be associated with charlatans now. But, for a fleeting moment, it seemed like Hayek was going to be right: “I don’t believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can’t take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can’t stop.” – F.A. Hayek 1984
SkyMarshal 4y ago
This is a pretty good analysis from Scott Alexander and discussion of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33914469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33914469
Zpalmtree 4y ago
Programmable money
csomar 4y ago
It's fine to see no utility in crypto. It's not fine, however, to restrict people from using crypto how they see fit. Ponzi schemes will always exist (they are not a new phenomena) and scammers will leverage whatever mean (stock market, real products, etc..) to create their schemes. Should we also shutdown the stock market, or restrict the sale of products?
helloworld11 4y ago
A bit late to the reply party, but for me it's simple: Crypto offers an imperfect but refinable digital means by which people can exchange perceived value with each other worldwide without middlemen or arbiters of what should be permitted or not. Sure, many people use centralized systems for this now even with crypto and thus miss out on that fundamental aim of these blockchain systems, but the idea itself is doable even in its current form and needed for many edge cases, and for basic financial privacy without often idiotic restrictions and snooping. I know many people here will hate on that because they're firm believers in the twin gospels of KYC and AML, but so many of these laws are utter abominations in their intrusiveness that i'm glad to see at least something exists which can eventually be made to circumvent them more broadly. Most of us are not terrorist money laundering cyber criminal drug dealers, and don't deserve to be treated as such with presumptions of guilt and zero privacy rights just because we'd like to spend and move money around without being pried into as if we were little children spending their piggy bank change. Paper/metal cash used to widely, nearly universally allow for this without so much hand wringing, but sadly, it's slowly going the way of the dodo, and something needs to take its place that isn't loaded with moralizing, puritanical scumbaggery such as that found with credit card companies and banks, or the utter mondstrosity that would be CBDC if implemented as some regulators are planning.

arch1e 4y ago

My country is cracking down on civil liberties (I'm not talking the ability to not take certain vaccines), I'm talking about religious freedom among other things and crypto like XMR gives me a way to make sure I am able to buy stuff like Mullvad VPN (again for privacy) without going through a centralized payment processor. This is just one instance though, I even get domains from njall.la now with XMR/crypto and enjoy a lot of privacy benefits (coming from godaddy)

m00dy 4y ago
you are not alone...
okasaki 4y ago
Ah ok, the use case is breaking the law.
- brookst 4y ago
  I read it as maintaining privacy while doing legal things that a corrupt government might punish despite their legality. What led you to think laws are being broken in those scenarios?
- keyme 4y ago
  Yes. Or, in other words, maintaining morality despite laws.
- andrepd 4y ago
  Yes, it may surprise you that the women in Iran, for instance, are breaking the law. And so did the people who founded the USA, in another example. Law ≠ moralityb
  - okasaki 4y ago
    It's beautiful when people you like doing things you approve of are breaking the law. Let's say someone uses crypto to buy weapons or explosives and your loved one dies in the attack. Are you still going to support it?
    - smcn 4y ago
      That's quite the response. Are you suggesting that weapons or explosives can only be bought with crypto?
      - lmm 4y ago
        Crypto makes it easier to buy things that are illegal to buy. That's exactly what's being touted as a benefit here. Being outside the law cuts both ways.
        smcn 4y ago
        Crypto is a new innovation. People have been able to buy prohibited items as far back as there has been prohibited items. Crypto doesn't change anything there. Finding out that somebody used crypto to buy something that harmed your family shouldn't make you dislike crypto. Bad people will get a hold of weapons regardless.
        lmm 4y ago
        > Crypto is a new innovation. People have been able to buy prohibited items as far back as there has been prohibited items. Crypto doesn't change anything there. If it didn't change anything then by the same token it wouldn't help people in oppressive regimes. > Finding out that somebody used crypto to buy something that harmed your family shouldn't make you dislike crypto. Bad people will get a hold of weapons regardless. Security is always a tradeoff. You can't make it impossible to get hold of weapons, but you can make it harder, and that matters at the margin.
- dnissley 4y ago
  Yes
andrepd 4y ago
It's pretty telling that Monero, a project with actual utility, underperforms in terms of value/attention compared to pump and dump scams or useless NFTs / tokens.
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  You're comparing its market cap, when that's not that important. People know what Monero is, and it's likely one of the most important cryptos for many people. It's also in a legally tenuous area in many jurisdictions, and therefore perhaps not considered as 'safe' for people who just want to speculate on price. It's still massive, and a 2.6 billion $ market cap is nothing to sneeze at. Not sure why we need to compare everything to the price of other projects in the space. The fact that people inevitably place so much emphasis on 'price' (as denominated in USD of course), is really the most negative consequence of the space.
chollida1 4y ago
> civil liberties (I'm not talking the ability to not take certain vaccines), I'm talking about religious freedom Interesting framing. I would have thought the ability to control what goes into a person's body, ie bodily autonomy would have far outweigh religious freedom. If I had to give one up, and I don't think anyone should have to give up either, I would give up religious freedom long before having to give up control over my own body. I guess that goes hand in hand with the abortion debate, you're either in the religious freedoms camp or the bodily autonomy camp. it's good to see there are other's who think the opposite. I appreciate the differing opinion.
- anikom15 4y ago
  Considering the most popular religions fundamentally reject bodily autonomy, it shouldn’t be a surprise.
- dbfx 4y ago
  He is probably trying to stop the inevitable derailment once someone mentions(or believes is referring to) vaccines in any way that is not unequivocal and blind support.
  - chollida1 4y ago
    Ah, that makes sense. Appreciate your help!!
- hudon 4y ago
  > you're either in the religious freedoms camp or the bodily autonomy camp An abortion kills a baby by directly attacking his or her body (dismemberment, lethal injection, etc.). You can firmly be in the bodily autonomy camp and in the religious freedoms camp at the same time.
  - cpgxiii 4y ago
    You can't claim to be in the "bodily autonomy" camp and believe in compelling actual living people to use their bodies to carry a fetus to term.

danielvf 4y ago

Two good articles from the last few weeks on what has made the cut over the last few years and proven to be useful : https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/12/05/excited.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/12/05/excited.html https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-im-less-than-infinitely-hostile https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-im-less-than-infin... I won't summarize, beyond agreeing with the second that a lot of the view that "all of crypto is a scam" is driven by the fact that essentially all public facing crypto advertisements are for scams. However behind the scenes there are open decentralized system that do move billions of dollars smoothly and safely for millions of people.

corv 4y ago
Very much agree, the post by Scott Alexander is nuanced and well worth the read
- jeffreyrogers 4y ago
  In most of the cases Scott cites the underlying thing being facilitated can be done via a normal financial system, some countries just don't have one that functions very well. So I don't see the benefits of crypto as much as I see the benefits of having a well functioning financial system. Crypto just outsources that from local regulators, banks, etc., to crypto developers. Might be a good tradeoff for those countries. The personal example Scott gives of sending money to Russians is probably illegal and circumvents currency controls that the Russian government has deliberately put in place, so not really a demonstration for crypto as much as it is an example that people find these types of transactions useful for various reasons.
  - wmf 4y ago
    It would be interesting if the US set up some kind of Freedom Bank specifically for people in China, Russia, Venezuela, Argentina, Nigeria, etc. to access US dollars and dollar-based investments. Those countries wouldn't appreciate it though so I'd expect a lot of diplomatic blowback. Until then, there's crypto for better or worse. [Insert conspiracy theory here about Tether being a CIA op to dollarize the developing world.]

LatteLazy 4y ago

(not op) I stayed with a friend in Zimbabwe at the height of their hyperinflation. His house was filled with petrol (gas) because he'd been paid and he had to buy something the same day that would keep for a month and hold it's value or his money would evaporate. So we sat in his house praying there wasn't a fire. That's the use case for Bitcoin: currency of final resort. It's the same as gold only better (can't be faked, hard to steal etc). I think in countries with stable currencies and after 2 decades of low interest and inflation, that's underrated as a use case... I also believe (forgive the digression into my weird conspiracy theories) that one reason the US has made so much progress on legalised weed is because crypto and the dark web basically mean you can get whatever you want delivered right to your door. But that's just my own weird world view.

greenthrow 4y ago
Considering how few world currencies are less stable than BTC this doesn't make a lot of sense. Plus if you have the ability to turn arbitrary currency X into BTC, you can certainly change it into USD, which is far more stable than BTC. So, nope. This is not a good use for BTC.
- stickfigure 4y ago
  How does a Zimbabwean convert ZWR to USD? How does a Venezuelan convert bolivars to USD?
  - maria2 4y ago
    They usually go to a black market currency dealer and keep the money under their mattress, or at least that's how they did it in the USSR.
  - WeylandYutani 4y ago
    There are unofficial "shadow banks" that are run by powerful people with criminal and corrupt politician's backing. With enough time passing you have an entire underground economy- conveniently denominated in dollars.

dogman144 4y ago

Technical: - transfer of provably discrete (and sometimes fully private) values between machines, without a central intermediary. It takes what HTTP/S, FTP, all the information protocols that opened up the internet to what it became, and adds the ability to know that packet_a is the only packet_a out there. - it's on the back 30-40 years of research of the same computer scientists that brought you consumer cryptography, Tor, and many other consequential innovations. As in, it didn't just pop out of SBF's head. - Think of what non-discrete digital information transmission did to everything. Now we have discrete digital information transmission. This is where the "money of the internet" terminology comes from IMO. - "but we have Google/ApplePay, Venmo, etc!:" look at the protocols that govern the internet and similar examples like linux. how many of them are "owned" by a central party like digital payments currently are? yes, some have heavy influence, and ICANN, DNS, etc are somewhat centralized when you really get down to it. But there is no vendor-specific HTTPs. Not technical: - simply put: people, governments, financial institutions, and on and on are using it. The opinion pieces and select loud voices in government and HN would make you believe that only criminals or techies putting the dotcom bubble to shame are using it. However, hand on the bible, it has penetration across quite a lot of use cases as a digital, international currency, beyond NFTs and moonCoins. Bank of International Settlements just let member banks deposit 2% of their holdings in BTC. This is not a small event, and its one of many out there. While Senators, ECB, and coworkers in HN are shaming it, it's getting adopted by their peers. And normal folk who don't know better see it as an open question still or fraud somehow. - payment censorship: The largest capital outflows from CN where when crypto was legal there, and then subsequently banned. Ok though, "it could never happen here" is often thought if you live in the West. People saw Julian Assange's cut off from payment rails and rightfully so perhaps dismissed it. But then what about OnlyFans last year almost having to change its entire product because someone didn't like porn and pressured enough investors/payment providers in the West to cut them off? Mindgeek (Pornhub) lost payment providers access as well last year. Ok though, "well that's porn." When you combine the march of digital payment censorship based on the values of the day, combined with the digitization of cash and limitations around paper currency, that's a trend to note. What about abortion? What about pro-life funding? What about...? What about Equifax selling your compensation history to competitors, and your lack of opt-out from that system because you get paid in USD via digital banks? In short, digital currency is not currently trustless and censorship-less in the same way paper currency more or less is and has been for centuries, crypto is the only (perhaps imperfect!) alternative out there right now. - inflation: 8% inflation in the US is one thing, but I know for a fact restaurants where I live (normal town, US) have faced 100% raw ingredient prices YoY. money printing == inflation is irresponsibly simplifying it, but where is your right to have a currency backup that at least has some boundaries around the monetary policy of the day, enables to you exist and spend online, and aligns with your incentives to spend or not spend? Dgital currencies built in CN have test trial "expiration dates" on them to spend for instance. The US is in the middle of similar tech. "It could never happen here" but if you dig in and read some Keynes which our monetary policy is based on... it certainly could.

digitaltrees 4y ago

The ledger. I think people are so caught up with it being a currency or investment asset that they miss the real revolutionary ideas. Triple entry bookkeeping. When double entry accounting emerged in the renaissance it revolutionized commercial activity. I think there are use cases where being able to publicly verify transactions and history would be immensely beneficial. I worked as a lawyer in NYC unwinding many of the 2008 financial crises bankruptcies and can tell you that billions of dollars of mortgages, home deeds, commercial loans, etc are traded with bankers sending each other excel files. Which means that the property ownership is literally a spreadsheet (often with a date in the file name). It was shocking but how it was done. There are massive third party organizations that are tasked with tracking those transactions MERS. The commodities exchanges etc but they weren’t much better organized. Lots of excel files. So if there could be a common accounting ledger that could be verified it would be a big improvement. The question is though would that be 10x better? Or rather enough to get the various stakeholders to adopt the ledger. So far. No.

belter 4y ago
https://aws.amazon.com/qldb/?nc1=h_ls https://aws.amazon.com/qldb/?nc1=h_ls
elliekelly 4y ago
What about triple entry accounting requires the blockchain? Or how does triple entry accounting benefit from being on the blockchain? Or a distributed ledger in general? The shitty book keeping you encountered will always be cheaper, faster, and easier than the “better” alternative. The people like SBF with a black hole of excel nonsense as their “accounting system” aren’t going to be persuaded to take up triple entry accounting— on the Blockchain or otherwise.
- strangattractor 4y ago
  I don't think is does - but exposing too much data is a problem. The block chain can be public and still maintain a certain anonymity. If people see a lot of money going into a particular wallet they can ask the city to clarify where/why the money if being spent. It might be nice to see exactly how money is being spent for schools (payroll, facilities etc) for example. Block chain seem made for such a thing is all.

JoshTko 4y ago

If you disagree with your govt. either financial policies (taxation, currency controls etc.) or political. You can use Bitcoin to maintain control your assets. For example, if the government suddenly decides to restrict capital leaving the country, BTC would be free from that restriction. If your govt. decides your political activity is now criminal and wants to freeze all your assets domestically as well with international partners, BTC would not be frozen. This is not a problem that most people in the US will face. But if you are a Russian or Chinese citizen then BTC's utility would be much more real.

cduzz 4y ago
That's an interesting theory. In practice, maintaining anonymous ownership of your assets on BTC is excruciatingly hard, because it's a public record. The organizations that monopolize violence ("governments", typically) have ways of compelling people that simply ignore some magic number in a distributed database. Please do a thing or we'll do a thing to someone you care about. I suspect even Satochi would happily give up the private keys to avoid a visit to Lubyanka... That's not to say that there's no value to these things, but real life violence trumps imaginary freedom.
- Bilal_io 4y ago
  the idea boils down to: If the government can see what's your bank account in details, and can seize it, and the government can see what's in your Bitcoin wallet but not with full transparency and cannot seize it, which is better?
  - lolinder 4y ago
    Does it really matter that they can't seize your crypto if they can disappear you? I guess you can take some cold comfort in the fact that your assets won't belong to the government, but they won't do you any good either.
- valcron1000 4y ago
  Well, I use crypto to bypass currency controls so there's your "imaginary freedom"

darawk 4y ago

I'll give this a shot. I've written variants of this comment a billion times on HN, but I sort of enjoy trying to create the perfect articulation of what it is that I like about crypto, so I'll try again: Crypto is an alternative financial system. Financial systems, on their own, are castles in the air. They provide no value to anyone. Financial systems derive their fundamental economic value by being wired to the real world in some way. That is, efficiently allocating capital to productive enterprises, cheaply translating capital between different forms (e.g. currencies, but also product <-> currency), and transferring risk from those who don't want it to those who do. This is why finance exists, and what it is for. The cryptocurrency financial system as it exists now is only very weakly connected to the real economy, and only in a few places of marginal or possibly negative social value (e.g. drugs, gambling, prostitution, ransomware). However, there are a few places that actually use crypto fairly heavily for legitimate, socially useful transactions, such as Vietnam, Ukraine and Venezuela. Most people here tend not to find those examples particularly convincing, and neither do I - but they are important to mention. But what crypto represents is an alternative model for how a financial system could operate. It is a financial system that offers many of the same features that our existing system does, but is different in some ways. Asking "What good is crypto?" is a bit like asking "What good is Linux when we already have Windows?". They both do very similar things, but they do them differently, and most critically, they imply different distributions of power. If you build your business around Microsoft products, that's fine, but in several important senses that makes you beholden to Microsoft. If you want to build a financial business in the traditional financial economy, you will probably have to go to one of the major money center banks, hat in hand, and ask them to let you do whatever it is that you want to do (or an intermediary that has done this). Depending on what it is you want to do, you may have to go to all of them and ask this. Crypto is different. If you want to build a financial business in crypto, you simply write the code and deploy it. You don't ask anyone for permission, and there is nobody on earth that can tell you "no". Even the US Treasury hasn't shut down Tornado cash, they've merely sanctioned it. The drawbacks of this approach should be obvious, but so too should the benefits. Whether you like the approach crypto offers is simply a question of values. But it is, in my opinion, undeniable that it is meaningfully different while being capable (in principle) of offering most of what traditional finance does. The fact that crypto has not yet been wired to the real economy is the reason that it has not yet provided much in the way of concrete utility in most developed markets. The reason it hasn't been wired to the real economy is that regulators and lawmakers mostly have not allowed it. And I agree with them! I would like to see a little more experimentation in that direction, but crypto is fairly obviously not ready for prime time in this sense - not yet, and maybe never. Many things would need to happen first. However, don't mistake the absence of this connection for the theoretical inability to create it. It hasn't been created because people are cautious about things this important, as they should be. There is nothing in principle right now preventing anyone from tokenizing a house, or a corporate debt instrument. And even if you think "nobody has done those things because they're stupid and crypto is just worse than traditional finance", you may be right! But it should be obvious that there are enough crypto believers out there that this would have been done if it were legal to do so, even if it were a bad idea. Hence, given their total non-existence, it should be clear that the reason it hasn't happened is regulatory, not fundamental capability. You will know crypto has failed if and when there are a few real estate titles, car titles, equity shares, bond instruments, and other assorted things from the traditional financial realm that have been tokenized, but nobody cares about them. Assets placed there by a few true believers, traded for a bit, and then forgotten. That is how you will know crypto has nothing to offer. But for now nobody has done those things, because the traditional legal system (correctly!) won't respect them sufficiently. EDIT: To extend the Linux metaphor a bit, Linux was created in the early 90s, but I would argue it didn't become clearly economically significant until the late 2000s. Prior to that it was a toy for nerds and anyone serious used "real products" built by "real companies" and purchased for money[1]. Crypto is FOSS for finance, and maybe the traditional world is right this time, and when it comes to money walled gardens and closed ecosystems are best. But it's not the world that I personally want to live in. [1] The exact timelines here are obviously fuzzy and certainly you can argue with whether it was late or mid or early 2000s, but what is inarguable is that Linux went through a long "just a toy" phase in the minds of most people

Quarrelsome 4y ago

Crypto is really good for buying drugs given that most traditional payment systems do not tend to cater for the black market.

yieldcrv 4y ago

Being used for financial services isn't controversial, many onlookers and disillusioned crypto proponents seem to think trade and speculation doesn't count as utility. Something that more so reflects complete segregation of how our society works and the largest sector in said society. Non-permissioned financial services is valuable, it represents pent up interest that has been muted for decades, while we pretended that only ivy league quants who also had lots capital could do anything with financial services. it was never true, just the capital barrier was high and the industry was protectionist Even if you just look at whatever actions that the gatekept financial services are ostensibly trying to prevent, that undeniably has a value, and now that the gates are down many people transfer value this way because its fun and lucrative and quick. It serves everyone that shows up. And most importantly: it doesn't have to be the best technological solution. nobody using it cares that a managed database could run the whole platform, people care that a managed database is permissioned and under many arbitrary whims of advertisers, shareholders, executives, and governments. Mitigating that undermines the performance. Not that controversial.

Grimburger 4y ago

> I do wanna hear of use-cases that are relevant and intuitively understandable or at baseline, usable, to laymen irrevocable timestamping of information

Paradigma11 4y ago

I am mostly interested in proof of stake chains with smart contracts. I think of them as decentralized, open protocol\source clouds for financial services and transactions. That seems pretty useful to me. With all the VC money that pored into defi ponzi schemes gone now, we will hopefully see more sustainable products and growth now. There just was no oxygen left to compete with those Ponzi schemes.

hervature 4y ago

I'm not going to attempt to answer this question in the context of "Web3". Personally, I think that anything with that moniker is doomed to be associated with charlatans now. But, for a fleeting moment, it seemed like Hayek was going to be right: “I don’t believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can’t take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can’t stop.” – F.A. Hayek 1984

SkyMarshal 4y ago

This is a pretty good analysis from Scott Alexander and discussion of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33914469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33914469

Zpalmtree 4y ago

Programmable money

csomar 4y ago

It's fine to see no utility in crypto. It's not fine, however, to restrict people from using crypto how they see fit. Ponzi schemes will always exist (they are not a new phenomena) and scammers will leverage whatever mean (stock market, real products, etc..) to create their schemes. Should we also shutdown the stock market, or restrict the sale of products?

helloworld11 4y ago

A bit late to the reply party, but for me it's simple: Crypto offers an imperfect but refinable digital means by which people can exchange perceived value with each other worldwide without middlemen or arbiters of what should be permitted or not. Sure, many people use centralized systems for this now even with crypto and thus miss out on that fundamental aim of these blockchain systems, but the idea itself is doable even in its current form and needed for many edge cases, and for basic financial privacy without often idiotic restrictions and snooping. I know many people here will hate on that because they're firm believers in the twin gospels of KYC and AML, but so many of these laws are utter abominations in their intrusiveness that i'm glad to see at least something exists which can eventually be made to circumvent them more broadly. Most of us are not terrorist money laundering cyber criminal drug dealers, and don't deserve to be treated as such with presumptions of guilt and zero privacy rights just because we'd like to spend and move money around without being pried into as if we were little children spending their piggy bank change. Paper/metal cash used to widely, nearly universally allow for this without so much hand wringing, but sadly, it's slowly going the way of the dodo, and something needs to take its place that isn't loaded with moralizing, puritanical scumbaggery such as that found with credit card companies and banks, or the utter mondstrosity that would be CBDC if implemented as some regulators are planning.