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Nearly 14 years in, where exactly is this “ton of real world utility”? Surely someone somewhere would have a product providing this utility, even amidst the se

Nearly 14 years in, where exactly is this “ton of real world utility”? Surely someone somewhere would have a product providing this utility, even amidst the sea of fraud and grift. I still don’t see it. Some utility? Okay, sure. A ton? Not even close. Consider that the web launched in 1993. By 2007 (14 years later), virtually the entire planet had changed dramatically as a result. That is a technology with a ton of real world utility.

ru552 3y ago
While it may be hard to see in first world countries, imagine being in a third world country and having a place you can store value that can't be debased by your crackpot dictator. That's huge.
- ProjectArcturis 3y ago
  Why hasn't it been adopted in those places then?
- igsomething 3y ago
  It is always the same debate in any cryptocurrency thread. People from economically free countries cannot understand cryptocurrencies because they are not meant for them and label them as scam. They cannot understand what 85% income tax is, authoritarian governments freezing (or emptying!) bank accounts for no reason, etc.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I disagree. I think people in economically free countries can and do understand this. But, as you point out, cryptocurrencies don't have a great deal of utility to people who don't have to interact with economically oppressed countries.
- oh_sigh 3y ago
  It can't be debased by a crackpot dictator but it can be debased by the crackpot market. If you "stored value" from 2021 in BTC, you'd only have about half of that value right now. Granted, if you "stored value" from 10 months ago, you'd have 50% more than you put in. But, I think those big swings make it a poor instrument for most people to view it as a real way to store value.
  - gosub100 3y ago
    It sucks because in theory all the "smart contacts" exist to create an instrument that holds its value. But that whole space has been saturated by wannabes, grifters and imitators. With all the day traders out there, I'm sure you could find a counterparty for a 5% X-year CD (dollar pegged, let's say). And I'm sure somewhere on the cryptosphere this exists, but good luck distinguishing it from a rugpull.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      >But that whole space has been saturated by wannabes, grifters and imitators. You are missing the extremely important point that crypto is saturated by these types exactly and explicitly because of design decisions that are inherent in crypto! The lack of transaction reversal is an explicit choice and explicitly empowers fraudulent activity over legitimate. What business or individual wants to lock up any value/cash/work they have in a system with zero recourse for fucking up?
      - gosub100 3y ago
        I don't disagree with you. I think it's a strange case where the tech-smart "code is law" proponents really think, in their minds, that it's invincible "because encryption!", and every time a new heist/scam occurs they dig their heels in deeper and say "that's different, it wasn't the _crypto_ that failed..." Even if it wasn't for elaborate rug-pulls, you could still lose everything to an evil-maid with a $5 key logger. That is just untenable.
gloosx 3y ago
The utility is distributing the money – if you don't see it, then you are alright with the bank system, having a credit card and a bank account. You are probably lucky enough to be born in a country which is not hated by the whole world, so it is integrated in the global economics. So as national of such well-regulated and established country, for you letting money to flow free always sounds like fraud and grift, but to some it is a matter of buying food and clothes, and it is an only mean of international money transfer left because well they are in a different situation and the current world can not provide you with even basic economic rights without discriminating
sickofparadox 3y ago
The utility is on the name: cryptoCURRENCY. Before it became a speculative asset, crypto faced the issue of adoption, now that it is one, it faces the issue of not being useful as a way to facilitate transactions.
- deleted 3y ago
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- stouset 3y ago
  Do you think it is possible that—despite the name having the word “currency” in it—the technology might just be poorly matched to what most people expect and need from a currency? That might explain its almost complete lack of real world use as a currency outside of a few scenarios of economic collapse.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  It doesn't help that the most popular cryptocurrency is intentionally deflationary. Deflationary currencies are terrible units of exchange.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    Gresham's Law: Bad money drives out good. If cryptocurrency is deflating, it's becoming more valuable with time. The dollar is inflating - it's becoming less valuable with time. So given the choice, I would pay with dollars and hold crypto. That's just normal human behavior. But while that may make crypto a good investment, it makes it a terrible unit of exchange, as you say (or at least a unit of exchange that will only be used as a last resort).
- giantrobot 3y ago
  But cryptocurrencies were designed to be deflationary which makes them shitty currencies. There's no point in spending a cryptocoin today when its value will be higher tomorrow.
  - jonkho 3y ago
rco8786 3y ago
Yea same. Really still unclear what utility it provides that fiat currencies do not. Not theoretical utility, like real world utility. I think crypto will go down in history as an amazing example of the importance of institutional knowledge and regulation. Like how did nobody see fraud coming in an unregulated financial instrument? Did folks genuinely think that "decentralization" was going to sidestep all of the typical problems that we've been using regulation to solve for the past several hundred years?
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  It is perfect for laundering large amounts of value, transacting in business that might not be legal but is between consenting adults (sex work and all the shades of that, pharma/recreational drugs), or for storing your value somewhere that can't be confiscated or inflated away by your local government. You might be willing to tolerate some loss if these are your threat models or use cases (versus being wholly unable to transact). Everyone else is better served by instant payments with utility pricing provided by a neutral party, such as a central bank or their delegate responsible for implementation and ongoing operations of the system.
  - anon1199022 3y ago
    You have no idea what you're talking about, right? https://www.axios.com/2023/05/11/stripes-crypto-strategy https://www.axios.com/2023/05/11/stripes-crypto-strategy "Accepting money is one thing, but paying out money to the rest of the world — especially long-tail countries with poor banking rails is another thing," he said. "It works better than fiat payments in a lot of cases," he added."
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      Okay ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If you want to bet $10k on the success of this, outline the success criteria and deadline for evaluation of the bet and we'll spin up a Long Bet [1]. Stripe talks a lot, while TranferWise (among others) gets shit done wrt cross border payments on real rails. Crypto is slowly dying while central banks raise rates globally, making the casino attempt at yield unpalatable (most crypto trading was gambling). Africa, for example, is going digital payments faster than some developed countries [2] [3]. Stripe's problem (along with Visa and Mastercard for that matter) is that developing countries are leapfrogging developed world financial infra, and owning it themselves to prevent "light colonization" of this critical financial infra. This compresses the global TAM for the for profit folks who are skimming off rails volume. [1] https://longbets.org/ https://longbets.org/ [2] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/the-future-of-payments-in-africa https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-i... [3] https://papss.com/ https://papss.com/
charcircuit 3y ago
NFTs. It's like Steam's marketplace, but without having to have one company have control to ban anyone. It lets you safely make trades without having to pass your items to sites for them to hold on to your items for you.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  > It's like Steam's marketplace, but without having to have one company have control ...and without payment processing, fraud detection, customer service, moderation tools, user reviews or a refund policy.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    The network does the payment processing. The rest can be implemented at a higher level. It is like offering customer support for open source software. Technically anyone can build a company on top of the software and start providing support.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      > The rest can be implemented at a higher level Eg. the rest is optional and doesn't come with the same guarantees as the base network. I don't hate cryptocurrency personally, but it's not hard to see how 99% of users would prefer "the rest" implemented well over a properly transparent blockchain.
- alasdair_ 3y ago
  Why can't the host of the image just delete the image? At that point, the NFT is effectively banned. Also, something like OpenSea can block you and you're effectively banned for all practical purposes.
  - Matticus_Rex 3y ago
    > Why can't the host of the image just delete the image? If it's a blockchain, there's no single host who can do that.
burnte 3y ago
Blockchain tech isn't 14 years old, it's 30 years old, or even 40 if you want to go back to the '82 paper. Still no world-changing tech has come from it, aside from monopoly money.
- palmfacehn 3y ago
  Sounds like the wrong monopoly's Monopoly money. I find it ironic that challenges to the state's monopoly on currency issuance are described as "Monopoly money". Also funny to observe that Binance is reacting to the regulatory moats created to preserve the state's monopoly. Say what you will about the grift and VC backed pump 'n dump schemes. There's no disputing that. The controversy will be around central banks, the legitimacy thereof and Cantillon effects which result in much of the same via similar means.
- Aunche 3y ago
  The blockchain as described in 1982 is a perfectly good niche data structure. Maybe it's not "world-changing," but it's useful enough for our team to use it at work.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Private blockchain implementations exist--including fairly large ones. But it's fair to say that it hasn't had the impact a lot of people thought it would.
- garba_dlm 3y ago
  > Blockchain tech isn't 14 years old, it's 30 years old, or even 40 if you want to go back to the '82 paper. Still no world-changing tech has come from it, aside from monopoly money. that's like saying that submarines were invented when Jules Verne wrote about them (i.e. you're wrong) blockchain technology requires the internet, hence it cannot be older than the internet
  - burnte 3y ago
    The internet started in the 60s. Even if blockchain needed the internet (it doesn't) the internet was absolutely around in 1982. Even TCP/IP was being used in 1982, becoming the standard across the entire net Jan 1, 1983.
anon1199022 3y ago
Arpanet started at 1969 and it was not immediately labed with certain groups as a scam, like here for years. That literally blocks the perception. So 2007-1969 is 38 years and not 14.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  Are you claiming that in 1983 - it was mainstream even in the investment world that the only usage of the Internet was fraud and crime?
  - ForkMeOnTinder 3y ago
    Are you claiming the investment world believes that about bitcoin today? Maybe dig a little deeper. Not everyone gets their info from mad money. https://www.fidelitydigitalassets.com/sites/default/files/documents/1012662.3.0%20Bitcoin%20First%20Revisited_Final.pdf https://www.fidelitydigitalassets.com/sites/default/files/do...
- buildbuildbuild 3y ago
  People were very hesitant to enter their credit card numbers into any website. This is a financial technology, it will bring more risks and justified hesitancy until the right projects iterate past the tests of time. We’re in the MVP stage as an industry with plenty of problems. Unfortunately those problems can impact lives in much more negative ways than a communication tech like the internet could during its “MVP era”.
  - pasc1878 3y ago
    And people started putting credit cards into websites where there were standards and government approval for it. So that fraudulent websites can be procescuted and the credit card companies will refund your money. ie the user is not at risk., When will there be this backing for bitcoin?
pphysch 3y ago
Or look at much newer LLMs, or even Gaussian Splatting. Clear use cases, rapid innovation, certain impact. Cryptocurrency has two main applications: illegal transactions, and speculation. It's high time to stop pretending it got popular for any other reason.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  The people still into crypto are the epitome of sunk cost fallacy
- vitehozonage 3y ago
  >Cryptocurrency has two main applications: illegal transactions, and speculation. So, two of the most valuable applications possible?
bko 3y ago
Sending money to other countries? You don't need to hold the coins long. Just buy some stable coins, send it, and other person sells them through a broker. From what I understand sending money across counties is very expensive. Not to mention "bad countries" Do people use it for this in real life?
- throwawayrupl 3y ago
  Yes, I do. I'm originally from a bad country (Russia) but right now live in a good country (Poland). I still do some work in the bad country and USDT is basically the only inexpensive, easy, and fast way to transfer money from the bad country to the good country.
  - Arainach 3y ago
    So the big use case of crypto is evading and violating international sanctions?
    - throwawayrupl 3y ago
      I don't violate any sanctions by sending my personal income from Russia to Poland. And it's still possible to send Swift from Russian bank to Polish bank. But it takes a lot of time to arrive and commissions are ridiculous.
    - lesuorac 3y ago
      Well they use it to avoid international sanctions but International Remittance is extremely common. The fees of which are estimated to be over 5% [1]; I mean imagine losing 5% of your paycheck just because of currency problems! The current Etherum TX fee is 0.0004 which at 1 ETH / 1,573.09 USD comes out to 62 cents. Would your rather pay 5% of your transfer to send money home to your family or 62 cents? [1]: https://fbf.eui.eu/what-explains-international-remittance-fees https://fbf.eui.eu/what-explains-international-remittance-fe...
      - Arainach 3y ago
jy1 3y ago
There's a lot of utility outside of the US, in countries without stable currencies. It's no web, but its a lot more impactful than say self driving cars (thus far), 3D-printing, or vegan meat. Edit: This is not to discount those technologies, rather to emphasize that crypto is used by millions worldwide for real transactions.
- malfist 3y ago
  Crypto is not more impactful than 3D printing. 3D printing has built real things, real products and has immense significance to fast prototyping. Crypto hasn't built a single tangible item.
  - jy1 3y ago
    Crypto is used everyday by millions in many countries including turkey, argentina, africa. You may be lucky to have a great financial system in the US but thats a very narrow POV.
- adamc 3y ago
  Is that utility somehow better than just moving assets into dollars or Euros?
  - Zuiii 3y ago
    And just how exactly do you propose moving those assets into dollars? Dollars are the first thing that becomes scarce.
  - jy1 3y ago
    Dollars and euros are in areas with the strongest economic regions in the world. What about the billions of people in emerging markets such as turkey, argentina, africa etc that dont have a stable currency to transact?
vaxintar 3y ago
Thanks to Ethereum (and specially now that there are L2s which have cheaper tx costs) I can distribute revenue from my business between different types of collaborators, without incurring in paying 120% in taxes for having "employees". In Argentina if someone works for you more than 15/20 hours in a given month you are legally obliged to hire them for, at least, 3 months. The legislation doesn't fit in tons of cases, and led the country to over 35% of working people outside the legal framework. Crypto gives people living in dysfunctional democracies a chance to participate in the global economy, something that people living in Europe or North America cannot comprehend. And don't even get me started on why ownership of your money is important but if you are willing to read take a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corralito https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corralito
- m_0x 3y ago
  Are you admitting a crime (tax evasion)?
- alexgartrell 3y ago
  Even if the laws are stupid, the killer feature you are describing is called crime.
  - salamanderss 3y ago
    [dead]
  - jonkho 3y ago
    Yes and we need tools to route around stupidity to keep checks and balances on stupidity. Otherwise locked-in stupidity can get even more stupid and that’s how suffering occur at scale.
    - Arainach 3y ago
      If you don't like the law, lobby politicians to change it. You don't get to decide that speed limits are stupid and go 100. You don't get to decide that taxes are stupid and not pay them. You don't get to decide that rules against murder are stupid and ignore them.
thomasahle 3y ago
It was pretty useful for sending money to people. If you regularly need to send money to friends in other countries, the current apps and bank account transfers are a pain.
- sam_goody 3y ago
  It may be useful for transferring money, but not because the technology is inherently better for that. In technical terms, it costs more for a bank to send an email in between branches than to transfer money in between branches. If, using current tech, some U.S. bank would offer transfers anywhere in the world for $0.20 a transfer, they would still make money, and you would feel much more confident that the money will be available for withdrawal. Now, I realize that due to various factors, it is not legal to transfer money to all nations, and there are some nations that dont have the infrastructure to reliably get you cash - but those are not advantages of the tech, they are advantages of the lack of laws. You could build a equivalent, illegal, "bank" with headquarters in, I dunno, Russia? Transfer money worldwide for $5/transfer, and figure out how to avoid the feds. No blockchain, and you have acheived the same.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  Strongly depends on where you are and where your friends are.
- rprospero 3y ago
  As someone who has been regularly transferring money between the US and UK for nearly a decade, using standard banking means has always been faster and cheaper for me than any of the crypto solutions that I've been presented.
  - csomar 3y ago
    It's only cheaper if you and your friend are inside the system. The two eco-system are separated and this makes friction and cost high (if you are onboarding/offboarding liquidity).
  - ForkMeOnTinder 3y ago
s_dev 3y ago
>Nearly 14 years in, where exactly is this “ton of real world utility”? People usually qualify this with "moral" or "legal" uses -- crypto currencies are absolutely useful for tax evasion and moving money across borders illegally -- it's why many people use them. It's these exact qualities that draw in the 'scammers' and 'get rich guys' as well. So it absolutely has real world uses just ones you don't like. The next question naturally then is why don't we shut them down? Now you can see how powerful they actually are because they're aren't fragile either and very persistent.
- sjsdaiuasgdia 3y ago
  >The next question naturally then is why don't we shut them down? TBH I think one of the larger reasons why authorities haven't taken more aggressive action against cryptocurrency blockchains is the "prosecution futures" aspect. The capabilities of the system attract illegal use, and truly staying unidentified requires really tight opsec. This gets even harder if you want to be able to pull some value back into traditional currency anywhere in the process. It is effectively a distributed honeypot the authorities don't even have to run themselves.
Pet_Ant 3y ago
> Nearly 14 years in, where exactly is this “ton of real world utility”? I don't think cryptocurrency has much value, but I think block chain has lots of potential for trading things that have unique ids and are owned by many people. I paid $1500 for research on a title claim and my lawyer came back with "It's looks solid, but I'd get the title insurance just in case". If property deeds were on the block chain then it'd be trivial. Car deeds, property deeds, stocks, concert tickets, air line tickets, hotel reservations, all these would benefit from being frictionlessly traded on a block chain. That said, to be useful the entities have to be tangible and the owners don't really benefit (though hotels would benefit from the speculation since it'd even out their cash flow) or the owner is the government.
- xnorswap 3y ago
  Like too many people, you have confused "blockchain" with "digital signature", which doesn't require a blockchain, and typically already is used to verify things. If you need to trust a central authority to hold up their end of the bargain, for example trusting a Hotel to actually provide the room, then a decentralised system adds absolutely no benefit over the hotel simply digitally signing a ticket themselves. The hotel must be trusted to actually provide the room, so why not trust the hotel to also store the booking information?
  - kemotep 3y ago
    That’s the thing. Cryptocurrency and blockchains (at least thr way the Bitcoin protocol works) provides for an “easy” way to verify transactions in a low trust or even no trust environment. However most if not all transactions you engage in need some level of trust. You want to trust that the hotel has a room, the car is not a lemon, a house is not condemned. Putting these transactions onto the blockchain adds nothing to the trustworthiness of these situations and whether you get what they say you are buying and since a lot of advocates push “code is law” the finality of the blockchain will mean you have no recourse. You bought the nft of a house. The house being in ruins is not their problem. The blockchain is the sole source of truth, not reality. Society should probably be a high trust environment and if it isn’t we should work to fix that.
  - 3y ago
tshaddox 3y ago
It strikes me as a bit silly to set the bar at the World Wide Web, which is easily one of the most transformative fast-moving technologies in human history.
LoganDark 3y ago
> Surely someone somewhere would have a product providing this utility like tor escrow markets? monero is a great way for us to obtain things that haven't been legalized yet. cryptocurrency has already found quite the niche for transactions that don't want or need government meddling -vicuna
DesiLurker 3y ago
if presence of crypto accelerated various central banks towards faster digitization like India's UPI or very recent US FedNow then I'd consider that a success of crypto. you cannot claim otherwise just like you have to acknowledge role of Linux in us not be completely beholden and nickle & dimed to death by the likes of MS/Apple. to be clear I still think crypto is completely take over by grifters & charlatans & the environmental footprint of proof-of-work is abysmal but still its good to have a decentralized alternative to central bank fractional reserve paper money. its as close to gold as we are ever gonna get now. if it were not so they (not just US but all around world) would not be trying to kill it that hard. PS: dont own crypto
philwelch 3y ago
> Nearly 14 years in, where exactly is this “ton of real world utility”? You can exchange cryptocurrency for goods and services, even the ones governments and banks don't want you to buy.
autokad 3y ago
> Nearly 14 years in, where exactly is this “ton of real world utility”? That's not a helpful comment, and you aren't even correct. the web was around in the 80s, 70s ... no wait the 1960s. The number of years its been around is irrelevant to its current or future usefulness.
- orwin 3y ago
  No. The web is NOT arpanet. This is an American-centric lie, like saying apple/Steve Jobs invented the mouse. The web was invented in Zurich by an English man in 89. Saying arpanet is the web is like saying Minitel clients are personal computers. Yes, the underlying tech is basically the same, but the design and philosophy is different.
  - autokad 3y ago
    you are being dishonest in your arguments. the point is the technology was around for decades before the said creation date. their argument is the tech for crypto has been around for 14 years so if it didnt take off by now, it never well. you are trying to get around my argument by nit picking over details 'what is the web and what isn't', which is a dishonest approach do discussion. Technology is usually around for a very long time before adoption.
kadabra9 3y ago
Hey, someone bought a pizza with Bitcoin one time ! /s
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jrm4 3y ago
There is literally only one kind of "utility" that matters in money and money-like instruments. ONLY ONE. "Do people believe it will retain or increase in value?" That's IT. This goes for the things you think are scammy, and it also goes for the things that you perhaps expect to retire on. There is nothing there besides "what people choose to believe." So there it is, even for crypto. If enough people believe in crypto/the stock market/social security, then it will work and do the thing. If they don't, it won't.
drak0n1c 3y ago
Decentralized ledger tech is just starting to get there - blockchains are the first inefficient implementation, and newer technologies like Hedera Hashgraph can do it far more cheaply and efficiently. Services are dependent on network effects and independent contributors. As long as people are discouraged from using it we won't get solid examples of usage. Wouldn't it be ideal if open source apps and platforms could go beyond the slow and risky traditional donation model, and not have to be entirely user-hosted or hosted by a paid company? Imagine social media platforms not susceptible to the pettiness of absolutist employees and owners, MMORPGs not debilitated by IP holders, cryptographically secured cloud software that follows the needs of its users. Perhaps like communes such projects are forever limited by the requirement of a modicum of participant interest and cost-sharing.
bdcravens 3y ago
I've conducted a handful of actual real transactions using it (over 10+ years) and I'm hardly a crypto advocate. I suspect that I'm the exception, and that even those who had the glowing eyes in their avatar and changed their username to "something.eth" rarely ever use it as an actual currency.
tim333 3y ago
Cryptocurrencies have a sort of value as a kind of collectable like art. Similarly to how people may like to buy paintings, have them appreciate in value and maybe trade them to other art collectors, other people may like to collect bitcoins or similar to likewise have them appreciate and maybe trade to other bitcoiners. You could say it's illusory but if it makes people happy does it matter? There's a lot of theoretical value there. I mean we'll all be gone in the end so if it helps you enjoy the journey.

ru552 3y ago

While it may be hard to see in first world countries, imagine being in a third world country and having a place you can store value that can't be debased by your crackpot dictator. That's huge.

ProjectArcturis 3y ago
Why hasn't it been adopted in those places then?
igsomething 3y ago
It is always the same debate in any cryptocurrency thread. People from economically free countries cannot understand cryptocurrencies because they are not meant for them and label them as scam. They cannot understand what 85% income tax is, authoritarian governments freezing (or emptying!) bank accounts for no reason, etc.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I disagree. I think people in economically free countries can and do understand this. But, as you point out, cryptocurrencies don't have a great deal of utility to people who don't have to interact with economically oppressed countries.
oh_sigh 3y ago
It can't be debased by a crackpot dictator but it can be debased by the crackpot market. If you "stored value" from 2021 in BTC, you'd only have about half of that value right now. Granted, if you "stored value" from 10 months ago, you'd have 50% more than you put in. But, I think those big swings make it a poor instrument for most people to view it as a real way to store value.
- gosub100 3y ago
  It sucks because in theory all the "smart contacts" exist to create an instrument that holds its value. But that whole space has been saturated by wannabes, grifters and imitators. With all the day traders out there, I'm sure you could find a counterparty for a 5% X-year CD (dollar pegged, let's say). And I'm sure somewhere on the cryptosphere this exists, but good luck distinguishing it from a rugpull.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    >But that whole space has been saturated by wannabes, grifters and imitators. You are missing the extremely important point that crypto is saturated by these types exactly and explicitly because of design decisions that are inherent in crypto! The lack of transaction reversal is an explicit choice and explicitly empowers fraudulent activity over legitimate. What business or individual wants to lock up any value/cash/work they have in a system with zero recourse for fucking up?
    - gosub100 3y ago
      I don't disagree with you. I think it's a strange case where the tech-smart "code is law" proponents really think, in their minds, that it's invincible "because encryption!", and every time a new heist/scam occurs they dig their heels in deeper and say "that's different, it wasn't the _crypto_ that failed..." Even if it wasn't for elaborate rug-pulls, you could still lose everything to an evil-maid with a $5 key logger. That is just untenable.

gloosx 3y ago

The utility is distributing the money – if you don't see it, then you are alright with the bank system, having a credit card and a bank account. You are probably lucky enough to be born in a country which is not hated by the whole world, so it is integrated in the global economics. So as national of such well-regulated and established country, for you letting money to flow free always sounds like fraud and grift, but to some it is a matter of buying food and clothes, and it is an only mean of international money transfer left because well they are in a different situation and the current world can not provide you with even basic economic rights without discriminating

sickofparadox 3y ago

The utility is on the name: cryptoCURRENCY. Before it became a speculative asset, crypto faced the issue of adoption, now that it is one, it faces the issue of not being useful as a way to facilitate transactions.

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stouset 3y ago
Do you think it is possible that—despite the name having the word “currency” in it—the technology might just be poorly matched to what most people expect and need from a currency? That might explain its almost complete lack of real world use as a currency outside of a few scenarios of economic collapse.
aidenn0 3y ago
It doesn't help that the most popular cryptocurrency is intentionally deflationary. Deflationary currencies are terrible units of exchange.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  Gresham's Law: Bad money drives out good. If cryptocurrency is deflating, it's becoming more valuable with time. The dollar is inflating - it's becoming less valuable with time. So given the choice, I would pay with dollars and hold crypto. That's just normal human behavior. But while that may make crypto a good investment, it makes it a terrible unit of exchange, as you say (or at least a unit of exchange that will only be used as a last resort).
giantrobot 3y ago
But cryptocurrencies were designed to be deflationary which makes them shitty currencies. There's no point in spending a cryptocoin today when its value will be higher tomorrow.
- jonkho 3y ago

rco8786 3y ago

Yea same. Really still unclear what utility it provides that fiat currencies do not. Not theoretical utility, like real world utility. I think crypto will go down in history as an amazing example of the importance of institutional knowledge and regulation. Like how did nobody see fraud coming in an unregulated financial instrument? Did folks genuinely think that "decentralization" was going to sidestep all of the typical problems that we've been using regulation to solve for the past several hundred years?

toomuchtodo 3y ago
It is perfect for laundering large amounts of value, transacting in business that might not be legal but is between consenting adults (sex work and all the shades of that, pharma/recreational drugs), or for storing your value somewhere that can't be confiscated or inflated away by your local government. You might be willing to tolerate some loss if these are your threat models or use cases (versus being wholly unable to transact). Everyone else is better served by instant payments with utility pricing provided by a neutral party, such as a central bank or their delegate responsible for implementation and ongoing operations of the system.
- anon1199022 3y ago
  You have no idea what you're talking about, right? https://www.axios.com/2023/05/11/stripes-crypto-strategy https://www.axios.com/2023/05/11/stripes-crypto-strategy "Accepting money is one thing, but paying out money to the rest of the world — especially long-tail countries with poor banking rails is another thing," he said. "It works better than fiat payments in a lot of cases," he added."
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Okay ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If you want to bet $10k on the success of this, outline the success criteria and deadline for evaluation of the bet and we'll spin up a Long Bet [1]. Stripe talks a lot, while TranferWise (among others) gets shit done wrt cross border payments on real rails. Crypto is slowly dying while central banks raise rates globally, making the casino attempt at yield unpalatable (most crypto trading was gambling). Africa, for example, is going digital payments faster than some developed countries [2] [3]. Stripe's problem (along with Visa and Mastercard for that matter) is that developing countries are leapfrogging developed world financial infra, and owning it themselves to prevent "light colonization" of this critical financial infra. This compresses the global TAM for the for profit folks who are skimming off rails volume. [1] https://longbets.org/ https://longbets.org/ [2] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/the-future-of-payments-in-africa https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-i... [3] https://papss.com/ https://papss.com/

charcircuit 3y ago

NFTs. It's like Steam's marketplace, but without having to have one company have control to ban anyone. It lets you safely make trades without having to pass your items to sites for them to hold on to your items for you.

smoldesu 3y ago
> It's like Steam's marketplace, but without having to have one company have control ...and without payment processing, fraud detection, customer service, moderation tools, user reviews or a refund policy.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  The network does the payment processing. The rest can be implemented at a higher level. It is like offering customer support for open source software. Technically anyone can build a company on top of the software and start providing support.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    > The rest can be implemented at a higher level Eg. the rest is optional and doesn't come with the same guarantees as the base network. I don't hate cryptocurrency personally, but it's not hard to see how 99% of users would prefer "the rest" implemented well over a properly transparent blockchain.
alasdair_ 3y ago
Why can't the host of the image just delete the image? At that point, the NFT is effectively banned. Also, something like OpenSea can block you and you're effectively banned for all practical purposes.
- Matticus_Rex 3y ago
  > Why can't the host of the image just delete the image? If it's a blockchain, there's no single host who can do that.

burnte 3y ago

Blockchain tech isn't 14 years old, it's 30 years old, or even 40 if you want to go back to the '82 paper. Still no world-changing tech has come from it, aside from monopoly money.

palmfacehn 3y ago
Sounds like the wrong monopoly's Monopoly money. I find it ironic that challenges to the state's monopoly on currency issuance are described as "Monopoly money". Also funny to observe that Binance is reacting to the regulatory moats created to preserve the state's monopoly. Say what you will about the grift and VC backed pump 'n dump schemes. There's no disputing that. The controversy will be around central banks, the legitimacy thereof and Cantillon effects which result in much of the same via similar means.
Aunche 3y ago
The blockchain as described in 1982 is a perfectly good niche data structure. Maybe it's not "world-changing," but it's useful enough for our team to use it at work.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Private blockchain implementations exist--including fairly large ones. But it's fair to say that it hasn't had the impact a lot of people thought it would.
garba_dlm 3y ago
> Blockchain tech isn't 14 years old, it's 30 years old, or even 40 if you want to go back to the '82 paper. Still no world-changing tech has come from it, aside from monopoly money. that's like saying that submarines were invented when Jules Verne wrote about them (i.e. you're wrong) blockchain technology requires the internet, hence it cannot be older than the internet
- burnte 3y ago
  The internet started in the 60s. Even if blockchain needed the internet (it doesn't) the internet was absolutely around in 1982. Even TCP/IP was being used in 1982, becoming the standard across the entire net Jan 1, 1983.

anon1199022 3y ago

Arpanet started at 1969 and it was not immediately labed with certain groups as a scam, like here for years. That literally blocks the perception. So 2007-1969 is 38 years and not 14.

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
Are you claiming that in 1983 - it was mainstream even in the investment world that the only usage of the Internet was fraud and crime?
- ForkMeOnTinder 3y ago
  Are you claiming the investment world believes that about bitcoin today? Maybe dig a little deeper. Not everyone gets their info from mad money. https://www.fidelitydigitalassets.com/sites/default/files/documents/1012662.3.0%20Bitcoin%20First%20Revisited_Final.pdf https://www.fidelitydigitalassets.com/sites/default/files/do...
buildbuildbuild 3y ago
People were very hesitant to enter their credit card numbers into any website. This is a financial technology, it will bring more risks and justified hesitancy until the right projects iterate past the tests of time. We’re in the MVP stage as an industry with plenty of problems. Unfortunately those problems can impact lives in much more negative ways than a communication tech like the internet could during its “MVP era”.
- pasc1878 3y ago
  And people started putting credit cards into websites where there were standards and government approval for it. So that fraudulent websites can be procescuted and the credit card companies will refund your money. ie the user is not at risk., When will there be this backing for bitcoin?

pphysch 3y ago

Or look at much newer LLMs, or even Gaussian Splatting. Clear use cases, rapid innovation, certain impact. Cryptocurrency has two main applications: illegal transactions, and speculation. It's high time to stop pretending it got popular for any other reason.

coffeebeqn 3y ago
The people still into crypto are the epitome of sunk cost fallacy
vitehozonage 3y ago
>Cryptocurrency has two main applications: illegal transactions, and speculation. So, two of the most valuable applications possible?

bko 3y ago

Sending money to other countries? You don't need to hold the coins long. Just buy some stable coins, send it, and other person sells them through a broker. From what I understand sending money across counties is very expensive. Not to mention "bad countries" Do people use it for this in real life?

throwawayrupl 3y ago
Yes, I do. I'm originally from a bad country (Russia) but right now live in a good country (Poland). I still do some work in the bad country and USDT is basically the only inexpensive, easy, and fast way to transfer money from the bad country to the good country.
- Arainach 3y ago
  So the big use case of crypto is evading and violating international sanctions?
  - throwawayrupl 3y ago
    I don't violate any sanctions by sending my personal income from Russia to Poland. And it's still possible to send Swift from Russian bank to Polish bank. But it takes a lot of time to arrive and commissions are ridiculous.
  - lesuorac 3y ago
    Well they use it to avoid international sanctions but International Remittance is extremely common. The fees of which are estimated to be over 5% [1]; I mean imagine losing 5% of your paycheck just because of currency problems! The current Etherum TX fee is 0.0004 which at 1 ETH / 1,573.09 USD comes out to 62 cents. Would your rather pay 5% of your transfer to send money home to your family or 62 cents? [1]: https://fbf.eui.eu/what-explains-international-remittance-fees https://fbf.eui.eu/what-explains-international-remittance-fe...
    - Arainach 3y ago

jy1 3y ago

There's a lot of utility outside of the US, in countries without stable currencies. It's no web, but its a lot more impactful than say self driving cars (thus far), 3D-printing, or vegan meat. Edit: This is not to discount those technologies, rather to emphasize that crypto is used by millions worldwide for real transactions.

malfist 3y ago
Crypto is not more impactful than 3D printing. 3D printing has built real things, real products and has immense significance to fast prototyping. Crypto hasn't built a single tangible item.
- jy1 3y ago
  Crypto is used everyday by millions in many countries including turkey, argentina, africa. You may be lucky to have a great financial system in the US but thats a very narrow POV.
adamc 3y ago
Is that utility somehow better than just moving assets into dollars or Euros?
- Zuiii 3y ago
  And just how exactly do you propose moving those assets into dollars? Dollars are the first thing that becomes scarce.
- jy1 3y ago
  Dollars and euros are in areas with the strongest economic regions in the world. What about the billions of people in emerging markets such as turkey, argentina, africa etc that dont have a stable currency to transact?

vaxintar 3y ago

Thanks to Ethereum (and specially now that there are L2s which have cheaper tx costs) I can distribute revenue from my business between different types of collaborators, without incurring in paying 120% in taxes for having "employees". In Argentina if someone works for you more than 15/20 hours in a given month you are legally obliged to hire them for, at least, 3 months. The legislation doesn't fit in tons of cases, and led the country to over 35% of working people outside the legal framework. Crypto gives people living in dysfunctional democracies a chance to participate in the global economy, something that people living in Europe or North America cannot comprehend. And don't even get me started on why ownership of your money is important but if you are willing to read take a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corralito https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corralito

m_0x 3y ago
Are you admitting a crime (tax evasion)?
alexgartrell 3y ago
Even if the laws are stupid, the killer feature you are describing is called crime.
- salamanderss 3y ago
  [dead]
- jonkho 3y ago
  Yes and we need tools to route around stupidity to keep checks and balances on stupidity. Otherwise locked-in stupidity can get even more stupid and that’s how suffering occur at scale.
  - Arainach 3y ago
    If you don't like the law, lobby politicians to change it. You don't get to decide that speed limits are stupid and go 100. You don't get to decide that taxes are stupid and not pay them. You don't get to decide that rules against murder are stupid and ignore them.

thomasahle 3y ago

It was pretty useful for sending money to people. If you regularly need to send money to friends in other countries, the current apps and bank account transfers are a pain.

sam_goody 3y ago
It may be useful for transferring money, but not because the technology is inherently better for that. In technical terms, it costs more for a bank to send an email in between branches than to transfer money in between branches. If, using current tech, some U.S. bank would offer transfers anywhere in the world for $0.20 a transfer, they would still make money, and you would feel much more confident that the money will be available for withdrawal. Now, I realize that due to various factors, it is not legal to transfer money to all nations, and there are some nations that dont have the infrastructure to reliably get you cash - but those are not advantages of the tech, they are advantages of the lack of laws. You could build a equivalent, illegal, "bank" with headquarters in, I dunno, Russia? Transfer money worldwide for $5/transfer, and figure out how to avoid the feds. No blockchain, and you have acheived the same.
RandomLensman 3y ago
Strongly depends on where you are and where your friends are.
rprospero 3y ago
As someone who has been regularly transferring money between the US and UK for nearly a decade, using standard banking means has always been faster and cheaper for me than any of the crypto solutions that I've been presented.
- csomar 3y ago
  It's only cheaper if you and your friend are inside the system. The two eco-system are separated and this makes friction and cost high (if you are onboarding/offboarding liquidity).
- ForkMeOnTinder 3y ago

s_dev 3y ago

>Nearly 14 years in, where exactly is this “ton of real world utility”? People usually qualify this with "moral" or "legal" uses -- crypto currencies are absolutely useful for tax evasion and moving money across borders illegally -- it's why many people use them. It's these exact qualities that draw in the 'scammers' and 'get rich guys' as well. So it absolutely has real world uses just ones you don't like. The next question naturally then is why don't we shut them down? Now you can see how powerful they actually are because they're aren't fragile either and very persistent.

sjsdaiuasgdia 3y ago
>The next question naturally then is why don't we shut them down? TBH I think one of the larger reasons why authorities haven't taken more aggressive action against cryptocurrency blockchains is the "prosecution futures" aspect. The capabilities of the system attract illegal use, and truly staying unidentified requires really tight opsec. This gets even harder if you want to be able to pull some value back into traditional currency anywhere in the process. It is effectively a distributed honeypot the authorities don't even have to run themselves.

Pet_Ant 3y ago

> Nearly 14 years in, where exactly is this “ton of real world utility”? I don't think cryptocurrency has much value, but I think block chain has lots of potential for trading things that have unique ids and are owned by many people. I paid $1500 for research on a title claim and my lawyer came back with "It's looks solid, but I'd get the title insurance just in case". If property deeds were on the block chain then it'd be trivial. Car deeds, property deeds, stocks, concert tickets, air line tickets, hotel reservations, all these would benefit from being frictionlessly traded on a block chain. That said, to be useful the entities have to be tangible and the owners don't really benefit (though hotels would benefit from the speculation since it'd even out their cash flow) or the owner is the government.

xnorswap 3y ago
Like too many people, you have confused "blockchain" with "digital signature", which doesn't require a blockchain, and typically already is used to verify things. If you need to trust a central authority to hold up their end of the bargain, for example trusting a Hotel to actually provide the room, then a decentralised system adds absolutely no benefit over the hotel simply digitally signing a ticket themselves. The hotel must be trusted to actually provide the room, so why not trust the hotel to also store the booking information?
- kemotep 3y ago
  That’s the thing. Cryptocurrency and blockchains (at least thr way the Bitcoin protocol works) provides for an “easy” way to verify transactions in a low trust or even no trust environment. However most if not all transactions you engage in need some level of trust. You want to trust that the hotel has a room, the car is not a lemon, a house is not condemned. Putting these transactions onto the blockchain adds nothing to the trustworthiness of these situations and whether you get what they say you are buying and since a lot of advocates push “code is law” the finality of the blockchain will mean you have no recourse. You bought the nft of a house. The house being in ruins is not their problem. The blockchain is the sole source of truth, not reality. Society should probably be a high trust environment and if it isn’t we should work to fix that.
- 3y ago

tshaddox 3y ago

It strikes me as a bit silly to set the bar at the World Wide Web, which is easily one of the most transformative fast-moving technologies in human history.

LoganDark 3y ago

> Surely someone somewhere would have a product providing this utility like tor escrow markets? monero is a great way for us to obtain things that haven't been legalized yet. cryptocurrency has already found quite the niche for transactions that don't want or need government meddling -vicuna

DesiLurker 3y ago

if presence of crypto accelerated various central banks towards faster digitization like India's UPI or very recent US FedNow then I'd consider that a success of crypto. you cannot claim otherwise just like you have to acknowledge role of Linux in us not be completely beholden and nickle & dimed to death by the likes of MS/Apple. to be clear I still think crypto is completely take over by grifters & charlatans & the environmental footprint of proof-of-work is abysmal but still its good to have a decentralized alternative to central bank fractional reserve paper money. its as close to gold as we are ever gonna get now. if it were not so they (not just US but all around world) would not be trying to kill it that hard. PS: dont own crypto

philwelch 3y ago

> Nearly 14 years in, where exactly is this “ton of real world utility”? You can exchange cryptocurrency for goods and services, even the ones governments and banks don't want you to buy.

autokad 3y ago

> Nearly 14 years in, where exactly is this “ton of real world utility”? That's not a helpful comment, and you aren't even correct. the web was around in the 80s, 70s ... no wait the 1960s. The number of years its been around is irrelevant to its current or future usefulness.

orwin 3y ago
No. The web is NOT arpanet. This is an American-centric lie, like saying apple/Steve Jobs invented the mouse. The web was invented in Zurich by an English man in 89. Saying arpanet is the web is like saying Minitel clients are personal computers. Yes, the underlying tech is basically the same, but the design and philosophy is different.
- autokad 3y ago
  you are being dishonest in your arguments. the point is the technology was around for decades before the said creation date. their argument is the tech for crypto has been around for 14 years so if it didnt take off by now, it never well. you are trying to get around my argument by nit picking over details 'what is the web and what isn't', which is a dishonest approach do discussion. Technology is usually around for a very long time before adoption.

kadabra9 3y ago

Hey, someone bought a pizza with Bitcoin one time ! /s

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jrm4 3y ago

There is literally only one kind of "utility" that matters in money and money-like instruments. ONLY ONE. "Do people believe it will retain or increase in value?" That's IT. This goes for the things you think are scammy, and it also goes for the things that you perhaps expect to retire on. There is nothing there besides "what people choose to believe." So there it is, even for crypto. If enough people believe in crypto/the stock market/social security, then it will work and do the thing. If they don't, it won't.

drak0n1c 3y ago

Decentralized ledger tech is just starting to get there - blockchains are the first inefficient implementation, and newer technologies like Hedera Hashgraph can do it far more cheaply and efficiently. Services are dependent on network effects and independent contributors. As long as people are discouraged from using it we won't get solid examples of usage. Wouldn't it be ideal if open source apps and platforms could go beyond the slow and risky traditional donation model, and not have to be entirely user-hosted or hosted by a paid company? Imagine social media platforms not susceptible to the pettiness of absolutist employees and owners, MMORPGs not debilitated by IP holders, cryptographically secured cloud software that follows the needs of its users. Perhaps like communes such projects are forever limited by the requirement of a modicum of participant interest and cost-sharing.

bdcravens 3y ago

I've conducted a handful of actual real transactions using it (over 10+ years) and I'm hardly a crypto advocate. I suspect that I'm the exception, and that even those who had the glowing eyes in their avatar and changed their username to "something.eth" rarely ever use it as an actual currency.

tim333 3y ago

Cryptocurrencies have a sort of value as a kind of collectable like art. Similarly to how people may like to buy paintings, have them appreciate in value and maybe trade them to other art collectors, other people may like to collect bitcoins or similar to likewise have them appreciate and maybe trade to other bitcoiners. You could say it's illusory but if it makes people happy does it matter? There's a lot of theoretical value there. I mean we'll all be gone in the end so if it helps you enjoy the journey.