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Ethereum is a financial platform, so its uses are going to be different than the internet's. So far, it has been used by the Ukrainian government to do fundrais

Ethereum is a financial platform, so its uses are going to be different than the internet's. So far, it has been used by the Ukrainian government to do fundraising: https://futurism.com/the-byte/ukraine-selling-nft-military https://futurism.com/the-byte/ukraine-selling-nft-military And to buy weapons/medical-supplies: https://twitter.com/nicksvyaznoy/status/1605248783192887298 https://twitter.com/nicksvyaznoy/status/1605248783192887298 It's used by artists to make a living: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/this-36-year-old-made-over-109000-in-about-9-months-selling-nfts.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/this-36-year-old-made-over-1... And it's used to transact with over a hundred billion dollars worth of stablecoins, in countries like Argentina where the currency is unreliable: https://cryptonews.com/news/stablecoins-lead-charge-as-crypto-buying-accelerates-argentina.htm https://cryptonews.com/news/stablecoins-lead-charge-as-crypt... And this is when it's in a primitive state, with very limited scalability, and zero privacy. Once the technology is more developed, to allow something substantially greater than 30 transactions to be processed per second, and to allow people to conduct transactions on the blockchain without revealing their financial assets and activity to the world, it will likely gain more adoption, especially in the realm of stablecoins.

acdha 4y ago
Yes, I’m aware there’s been some niche usage but it’s still quite limited because it doesn’t outperform the alternatives on almost any task - yes, it’s cool that Ukraine gets so money but it’s a tiny fraction of the total. The real question is how much margin you can save: anyone can transfer money, the question is whether you’re cheaper, safer, etc. If the pitch is “like PayPal but 10% cheaper” that really caps the total growth potential. Similarly, the privacy things are both a huge change and something only needed due to having built the system on the wrong architecture. Solving that problem means very expensively reaching the point where its competitors started.
- ETH_start 4y ago
  >>Solving that problem means very expensively reaching the point where its competitors started. Adding privacy makes transactions on the order of 4X more computationally expensive. Once Ethereum has EIP-4844 and EIP-4444, such a transaction would cost less than a penny in fees on a Rollup. Stablecoin payments would be substantially better than centralized e-wallet payments for many mainstream use-cases if Ethereum developers pull off these upgrades and if crypto advocates manage to convince the major powers to legalize the zk-proof cryptographic methods needed to provide blockchain transactions with privacy.

acdha 4y ago

Yes, I’m aware there’s been some niche usage but it’s still quite limited because it doesn’t outperform the alternatives on almost any task - yes, it’s cool that Ukraine gets so money but it’s a tiny fraction of the total. The real question is how much margin you can save: anyone can transfer money, the question is whether you’re cheaper, safer, etc. If the pitch is “like PayPal but 10% cheaper” that really caps the total growth potential. Similarly, the privacy things are both a huge change and something only needed due to having built the system on the wrong architecture. Solving that problem means very expensively reaching the point where its competitors started.

ETH_start 4y ago
>>Solving that problem means very expensively reaching the point where its competitors started. Adding privacy makes transactions on the order of 4X more computationally expensive. Once Ethereum has EIP-4844 and EIP-4444, such a transaction would cost less than a penny in fees on a Rollup. Stablecoin payments would be substantially better than centralized e-wallet payments for many mainstream use-cases if Ethereum developers pull off these upgrades and if crypto advocates manage to convince the major powers to legalize the zk-proof cryptographic methods needed to provide blockchain transactions with privacy.