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> Basically, Ethereum is no longer just a financial ecosystem. It's a full-stack replacement for large parts of "centralized tech", and even provides some thing

> Basically, Ethereum is no longer just a financial ecosystem. It's a full-stack replacement for large parts of "centralized tech", and even provides some things that centralized tech does not (eg. governance-related applications). And we need to build with this broader ecosystem in mind. I have respect for ethereum. It seems like one of the few cryptocurrency projects actually trying to push those ideas as far as they'll go, instead of just being endless scams. But still, at the end of the day, this feels like endless complexity and in the end we are just back we started: applications we could already do much better using traditional technologies. What even is the elevator pitch use case of all this?

kinakomochidayo 3y ago
> What even is the elevator pitch use case of all this? > It's a full-stack replacement for large parts of "centralized tech" Anti-censorship, permissionless data that lasts longer than centralized companies..?
smoovb 3y ago
My (non-crypto) company uses USDC daily on L2 Arbitrum for international settlement, and have seen the fees drop to a few cents per transaction with the release of blobs. We have replaced the need for wires/TransferWise/Revolut on several of our routes.
- anonymousDan 3y ago
  Awesome. Can I ask the name of your company?
- defiamazing 3y ago
  There is absolutely no reason for USDC to be on a blockchain other than to interact with DeFi. Once DeFi hype dies USDC will be outcompeted by a centralized solution. It's multisig controlled anyway so it's the same thing.
  - arandomusername 3y ago
    Sending USD across countries, e.g from EU to US, is a LOT easier and faster with USDC than any other solution out there.
    - defiamazing 3y ago
      That's because it has regulatory approval (for now). It's not because of a blockchain. You can start the thought experiment by asking why USDC is on Ethereum and other popular chains rather than own private blockchain. People could make payments faster. Fees would be lower or more likely zero.
      - arandomusername 3y ago
        If it's not because of a blockchain, how come there is no other good way? It's not on it's own private blockchain because then no one would use it.
        defiamazing 3y ago
        No one would use it because people don't actually want to send money internationally badly enough to create a profit opportunity. They want to interact with DeFi protocols, that's why USDC exists on eth, once the DeFi protocols die then so will USDC. There's no good other way because people don't actually want to send money internationally badly enough to create a profit opportunity.
        arandomusername 3y ago
        Huh? International payments are a HUGE industry. What are you talking about? Western Union and Transferwise are both huge companies that specialize in international payments. DeFi protocols are a benefit, but even without it USDC would still persist. There's no good other way because of extreme regulations that harm law abiding citizens under the guise of AML and other junk.
Destiner 3y ago
Here's an elevator pitch. Your twitter/facebook/github account gets banned, what do you do? With farcaster/lens/radicle, it's impossible.
- thisgoesnowhere 3y ago
  Direct RSS from the source does this as well. What's the difference?
  - mattdesl 3y ago
    RSS isn’t a social media protocol with follows, comments, usernames, etc.
- bawolff 3y ago
  Join mastadon?
- defiamazing 3y ago
  The blockchain's security depends on native token value and the native token is a memecoin with no backing and if there's a speculative dump then the network has no security, so no not quite impossible.
  - DennisP 3y ago
    ETH is not a memecoin and it has a real economic model. It's used to pay transaction fees, which are mostly burned. There's a small amount of issuance but most of the time that's less than the burn, so the supply shrinks. You can model it as a company, where fee burn is revenue, issuance is cost, the net is earnings, and earnings are distributed to ETH holders like a company doing stock buybacks. You can calculate a PE ratio; when I checked sometime last year the PE was around 100.
    - defiamazing 3y ago
      Having an economic model doesn't make it not a memecoin. LINK has an economic model and most would agree that there's no reason for it to exist other than to dump on retail. The burn is there in large part to enshrine ETH so that investors can dump on retail, otherwise fees could be paid in other ways. It provides no liquidation or dividend rights. The closest thing to that is rights to MEV, which the base fee controller actively prevents. Value is speculative and if it went to zero then the network would completely die unless it forked to disable the burn.
xotesos 3y ago
To me, the pitch is take whatever you wanted to do with traditional technology and run a distributed lottery game for cash and prizes on top of it. A database with a game show component for cash and prizes. People want exactly this coupled with a bunch of hand waiving to obfuscate this reality so it has more emotional impact when you win the lottery. The traditional lottery is too obviously random with such poor odds. People want a more distributed lottery payout and crypto has delivered. There is nothing wrong with this. No one pretends though that the state lottery is some mathematical investigation into the dynamics of a stochastic process. Playing the state lottery is not doing research in stochastic calculus. I suspect if the state lottery had started for the first time today though that is exactly how it would be marketed.
DennisP 3y ago
For businesses, doing the same thing for transactions between businesses that ERP systems did for internal transactions. Right now there's a lot of cumbersome and expensive mutual auditing, and nobody wants to put it all on a centralized third-party database because inevitably the third party will charge a lot of money once they're hard to replace. Paul Brody is head of the Ethereum effort at EY, and wrote a book about this called Ethereum for Business. He includes a lot of specific examples. As Vitalik mentioned in the article, most of it is waiting for scaling.

kinakomochidayo 3y ago

> What even is the elevator pitch use case of all this? > It's a full-stack replacement for large parts of "centralized tech" Anti-censorship, permissionless data that lasts longer than centralized companies..?

smoovb 3y ago

My (non-crypto) company uses USDC daily on L2 Arbitrum for international settlement, and have seen the fees drop to a few cents per transaction with the release of blobs. We have replaced the need for wires/TransferWise/Revolut on several of our routes.

anonymousDan 3y ago
Awesome. Can I ask the name of your company?
defiamazing 3y ago
There is absolutely no reason for USDC to be on a blockchain other than to interact with DeFi. Once DeFi hype dies USDC will be outcompeted by a centralized solution. It's multisig controlled anyway so it's the same thing.
- arandomusername 3y ago
  Sending USD across countries, e.g from EU to US, is a LOT easier and faster with USDC than any other solution out there.
  - defiamazing 3y ago
    That's because it has regulatory approval (for now). It's not because of a blockchain. You can start the thought experiment by asking why USDC is on Ethereum and other popular chains rather than own private blockchain. People could make payments faster. Fees would be lower or more likely zero.
    - arandomusername 3y ago
      If it's not because of a blockchain, how come there is no other good way? It's not on it's own private blockchain because then no one would use it.
      - defiamazing 3y ago
        No one would use it because people don't actually want to send money internationally badly enough to create a profit opportunity. They want to interact with DeFi protocols, that's why USDC exists on eth, once the DeFi protocols die then so will USDC. There's no good other way because people don't actually want to send money internationally badly enough to create a profit opportunity.
        arandomusername 3y ago
        Huh? International payments are a HUGE industry. What are you talking about? Western Union and Transferwise are both huge companies that specialize in international payments. DeFi protocols are a benefit, but even without it USDC would still persist. There's no good other way because of extreme regulations that harm law abiding citizens under the guise of AML and other junk.

Destiner 3y ago

Here's an elevator pitch. Your twitter/facebook/github account gets banned, what do you do? With farcaster/lens/radicle, it's impossible.

thisgoesnowhere 3y ago
Direct RSS from the source does this as well. What's the difference?
- mattdesl 3y ago
  RSS isn’t a social media protocol with follows, comments, usernames, etc.
bawolff 3y ago
Join mastadon?
defiamazing 3y ago
The blockchain's security depends on native token value and the native token is a memecoin with no backing and if there's a speculative dump then the network has no security, so no not quite impossible.
- DennisP 3y ago
  ETH is not a memecoin and it has a real economic model. It's used to pay transaction fees, which are mostly burned. There's a small amount of issuance but most of the time that's less than the burn, so the supply shrinks. You can model it as a company, where fee burn is revenue, issuance is cost, the net is earnings, and earnings are distributed to ETH holders like a company doing stock buybacks. You can calculate a PE ratio; when I checked sometime last year the PE was around 100.
  - defiamazing 3y ago
    Having an economic model doesn't make it not a memecoin. LINK has an economic model and most would agree that there's no reason for it to exist other than to dump on retail. The burn is there in large part to enshrine ETH so that investors can dump on retail, otherwise fees could be paid in other ways. It provides no liquidation or dividend rights. The closest thing to that is rights to MEV, which the base fee controller actively prevents. Value is speculative and if it went to zero then the network would completely die unless it forked to disable the burn.

xotesos 3y ago

To me, the pitch is take whatever you wanted to do with traditional technology and run a distributed lottery game for cash and prizes on top of it. A database with a game show component for cash and prizes. People want exactly this coupled with a bunch of hand waiving to obfuscate this reality so it has more emotional impact when you win the lottery. The traditional lottery is too obviously random with such poor odds. People want a more distributed lottery payout and crypto has delivered. There is nothing wrong with this. No one pretends though that the state lottery is some mathematical investigation into the dynamics of a stochastic process. Playing the state lottery is not doing research in stochastic calculus. I suspect if the state lottery had started for the first time today though that is exactly how it would be marketed.

DennisP 3y ago

For businesses, doing the same thing for transactions between businesses that ERP systems did for internal transactions. Right now there's a lot of cumbersome and expensive mutual auditing, and nobody wants to put it all on a centralized third-party database because inevitably the third party will charge a lot of money once they're hard to replace. Paul Brody is head of the Ethereum effort at EY, and wrote a book about this called Ethereum for Business. He includes a lot of specific examples. As Vitalik mentioned in the article, most of it is waiting for scaling.