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It's been 16 years since the original Satoshi whitepaper. You have to assume if there were tons of viable applications for blockchain, we'd have seen more of th

It's been 16 years since the original Satoshi whitepaper. You have to assume if there were tons of viable applications for blockchain, we'd have seen more of them by now.

m00dy 2y ago
Updating financial system is not the easiest one, also we would like to update it without a third world war.
beepbopboopp 2y ago
Id take it a step further. The immorality of cryptocurrency isn't complicated and defines why it never has become more. Fiat money exists within a social contract - governments that issue currency must also maintain the infrastructure that makes society work. They're accountable for everything from roads to retirement plans. When cryptocurrency advocates push to separate money from government, they're not just pursuing financial innovation. They're deliberately undermining the mechanism that funds our shared existence. They want the benefits of living in society without contributing to its maintenance. This isn't freedom - it's freeloading. Cryptocurrency, at its philosophical core, enables wealth hoarding while disconnecting the hoarders from any responsibility to the communities that made their wealth possible in the first place.
- friendzis 2y ago
  Libertarians are like house cats, they’re convinced of their fierce independence while dependent on a system they don’t appreciate or understand.
  - card_zero 2y ago
    It's true, am a cat. But tax is coercion. Make it voluntary, and people won't pay it. Despite this, a lot of people are fine with it because it gets them roads and state pensions and healthcare or whatever. Some people want it to be increased, thereby volunteering to pay more and volunteering others to do the same. Everything is based on force, and the social contract is a kind of Stockholm syndrome.
    - friendzis 2y ago
      > social contract is a kind of Stockholm syndrome One could always retreat to wildlands of Siberia and live their own happy life away from roads and reddit. One would not survive for long without the same society, which produced the survival knowledge, but one could at least try. > Everything is based on force How do you reconcile "what's stopping me from hitting you with 5 euro wrench" without the fantasyland non-aggression principle? Without that "social contract" and with absolute personal liberty, any rights/liberties/freedoms exist solely to the extent one themselves can enforce them against the mighty five euro wrench.
  - beeflet 2y ago
    Outside cats, at least, are independent. It's evidenced by the existence of so many stray cats. They have leverage that other pets don't. They don't need to understand the whole household. They only need to understand if they are being mistreated, in which case they can choose to leave and hunt vermon until the end of their (very few) days. So I think it is better to be a housecat than a lapdog at least.
- Acrobatic_Road 2y ago
  >Fiat money exists within a social contract - governments that issue currency must also maintain the infrastructure that makes society work. Imagine saying this to someone who lost their home in the LA wildfires despite paying high taxes all their life to live there. Some social contract.
  - roboror 2y ago
    Should I say it before after they get their government subsidized insurance money?
    - Acrobatic_Road 2y ago
      Government subsidized? >After saying it would run out of funds by March, California’s last-resort fire insurance provider will impose a special charge of $1 billion on insurance companies — which will in turn pass the costs along to homeowners — the first such move in more than three decades. https://calmatters.org/economy/2025/02/homeowners-insurance-costs-rising-in-california-fair-plan/ https://calmatters.org/economy/2025/02/homeowners-insurance-...
      - sanderjd 2y ago
        I'm a little confused... You're citing the existence of the government subsidy as a way to question its existence?
        Acrobatic_Road 2y ago
        The state (and city of LA): 1. Created dangerous conditions through inadequate fire management. 2. Prevented the private market from adequately communicating the risk through price increases. As a result, 7/12 of insurers stopped or restricted selling new policies. 3. Created a moral hazard by selling it's own policies to homeowners who were dropped by the private market. 4. Failed to respond to the fires. 5. Failed to cover claims through its insurance program. 6. Is trying to bail itself out by extracting $1 billion tax from the rest of the state. Yet we're supposed to be thankful for this? You could say the people whose homes burned are grateful they are being bailed out at everyone else's expense. But I bet they would be much happier if their homes had never burned down in the first place - a debacle that was entirely avoidable.
- jack_pp 2y ago
  > They're deliberately undermining the mechanism that funds our shared existence. They want the benefits of living in society without contributing to its maintenance. So I pay income tax, property tax, road tax, sales tax and even my savings I have to put in the hands of the govt which has been unreliable, corrupt and mostly serves the interests of the few over the interests of the many regardless of which political party has been elected.
  - bitcoin_anon 2y ago
    Indeed. Was Beepboop arguing that inflation is the mechanism that funds our shared existence? Why do you think cryptocurrency at its philosophical core enables wealth hoarding? If I don’t pay my property taxes, I lose my house, regardless of how much cryptocurrency I own. Why can’t we have a separation of money and state where the state receives its due through taxes and is unable to inflate the money supply?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - sanderjd 2y ago
      I'm having trouble making sense of anything in this comment.
      - beeflet 2y ago
        I think he's just advocating for the idea that money (and monetary policy) should be separated from taxation, like the gold standard. Or maybe an imaginary silver standard, where the citizens hold the precious metal directly (and pay taxes in it) instead of just having the currency backed by precious metal. Just because the government and banking institutions can't easily censor and restrict the money supply, doesn't mean they can't collect taxes on it. In a word where crypto is the dominant form of money they can just throw you in jail if you don't pay taxes. If you need to pay X amount of taxes, maybe the government should explicitly collect X amount of taxes transparently instead of collecting Y amount of taxes, selling a bunch of debt that needs to be financed at a later date, inflating the currency, etc. Because the more transparency in a democracy, the fewer ways for politicians to hijack taxation.
- beeflet 2y ago
  I think that taxes can and should be funded through the single tax on property proposed by Henry George as opposed to sales or income tax. Widespread adoption of private cryptocurrency may be sufficient to enable adoption of the single tax system.
  - cwmma 2y ago
    Georgism is orthogonal to cryptocurrency. Like how is cryptocurrency even related to consolidating all taxes into one on the unimproved value of land, this seems like such a nonsequitur.
    - beeflet 2y ago
      Cryptocurrency makes direct cash-like payments possible over the internet more easily. It makes collection of sales and income tax more difficult to collect.
      - beepbopboopp 2y ago
        More easy? Crypto is significantly more complicated than modern banking/credit cards. The second part is true though.
        cwmma 2y ago
        Is the 2nd part true though? In the US sales taxes are mostly applied at the state level where the governments don't have particularly privileged access to the banking system and is enforced by being able to physically go to the merchant in question. Bitcoin would probably make that easier for the government as you could now track merchants sales volumes directly on the blockchain. For the federal government being able to deputize the banks to flag suspicious transactions certainly helps find tax avoidance, we've had an income tax way longer then we've had credit cards.
      - red-iron-pine 2y ago
        more easy? requiring ever increasing computational requirements to move money? we figured out bank transfers decades ago, and there is no exponentially increasing challenges with a wire transfer.
Almondsetat 2y ago
Neural networks have existed for decades, and yet their utility has only become apparent after hardware got fast enough
- atrus 2y ago
  We've been using neural networks as classifiers for decades. They were useful immediately
- creata 2y ago
  So what might be blocking applications of cryptocurrency the way computational limitations blocked (many) applications of neural networks?
  - munksbeer 2y ago
    "You just don't understand bitcoin"
- taco_emoji 2y ago
  Neural networks were immediately useful, what are you talking about
- sanderjd 2y ago
  I think what we've been seeing with generative AI is much more of an argument against blockchains being a revolutionary technology than for it. This is what it looks like for a technology to go mainstream, relentless adoption that touches nearly everyone, and an innovation flywheel that keeps pushing the state of art forward every month. The past decade and a half of big promises and "is there actually anything to this?" debates on HN is just night and day in comparison. Your point might be that there just hasn't been another breakthrough on top of blockchains the way chatgpt was a breakthrough on top of neural networks. I think that's a reasonable point, but I still see a notable difference in that blockchains have been hyped as a product technology that has already arrived for nearly this whole time, rather than as an enabling technology still looking for its mainstream niche.
  - 2y ago
ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago
The internet that connects computers and all the awesome things we could do with it were demonstrated in 1968: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos Since 16 years later, in 1984 we still did not have Amazon, Google, Facebook, Instagram and Hacker News, the internet is obviously useless. Oh wait, it's 57 years later and we DO use the internet ...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  NLS, the system demoed in the Mother of All Demos, was a lot less well known in 1984 than it is now and I doubt anyone expected it to be delivered by packet-switched IP or HTTP (which didn't even exist yet). In 1984 the big hype was ISDN - digital telephony to the home - and all the wonky (and expensive) special services and gadgets you could layer on top of a whole two digital circuits. What killed that future was a combination of corporate ineptitude[0] and government action to kill AT&T's monopoly before AT&T got big enough to just buy out the US government. The thing about the Internet is that while it was invented very early on, it wasn't accessible until far later. The Internet was a DARPA project that had escaped into college campuses. You needed a hookup at a local college campus in order to even access it. In fact, USENET users refer to the time when normal people could just sign up to AOL and get Internet access as "the Eternal September" because it was an immediate and measurable cultural change. I think it's fair to say that the Internet before September 1993 was a fundamentally different concept than what was available afterwards, and for most people, that is when the Internet launched. September 1993 to 2009 takes us from "hey AOL has these funny new 'Internet' forums" to "tweeting on my iPhone in the bathroom". Other NLS ideas have similar trajectories. The mouse saw use in workstations but it took Apple and the Macintosh to try and actually make a mouse-driven computer for ordinary consumers. Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu was getting plenty of Autodesk money in 1984, but the hypertext protocol we actually use, HTTP, was invented at CERN in 1991. A lot of technologies are good ideas being held back by a world that isn't ready for them yet. Blockchain finance[1] is more akin to Xanadu or ISDN: something that exists because it's creators would be rich if it took off rather than because it has some obvious value to it. It runs off hype. As a regular Internet user, it actually provides negative value, because the people who actually gain value from having a financial system with nobody to tell you no[2] are literal scammers and thieves. [0] ISDN was notoriously poorly rolled out in the US, as BRI lines had been priced as a business service. Most people didn't need two lines over one wire and all the other usages of ISDN were purely speculative. Other countries whose local phone companies didn't have their heads up their asses actually did manage to sell it on the basis of clearer calls. [1] Being very specific here in case someone shouts "Git is a blockchain, your argument is invalid" [2] Well, unless what you want to do is raise the base block size of Bitcoin, then there's plenty of people who will tell you 'no'.
nailer 2y ago
Tradfi turned of retail access at the same time a few months ago. During this time distributed blockchains didn’t stop access to markets.
- sanderjd 2y ago
  I mean, there have been a number of examples of people losing access to cryptocurrency trading during times of chaos. The rebuttal is "sure, but not the ones that are actually decentralized!". Ok, but the cryptocurrency industry doesn't actually want "you can only use Bitcoin and Ethereum and only via direct interactions with them, not via intermediaries" to be the message, because then what are all these other projects even doing?
  - yieldcrv 2y ago
    that's not the rebuttal I would go for, the incentive model is to run your own node during times of chaos, centralized exchanges go down and RPC nodes go down. the incentive model is to run your own RPC node that has processing bandwidth so that your transactions can reach decentralized exchanges and continue doing whatever you wanted to do. times of chaos in this instance would be to swap to a stable value. the answer truly is "you're holding it wrong" I think there is plenty to criticize about what crypto proponents say, but there is a technical discussion worth having at the same level of parity we have about many other things on this forum
    - sanderjd 2y ago
      Right, if you hadn't said it yourself, I would have said that this is just another form of "you're holding it wrong ". But my point is that if this is actually the target market for these products - people who are gonna run their own nodes - then that market is like five orders of magnitude smaller than the crypto industry wants it to be.
      - yieldcrv 2y ago
        Ah ok, that’s fine to me Speculation drives innovation and crypto is the rawest form of that we have, in a global, nonstop market with extremes of selective evolution: permission to fail, instead of guardrails Practically none of the things that attract people to the space would have been developed without encountering frictions from speculation, and fixing them
yieldcrv 2y ago
the speed of capital formation and lowered barrier of doing so has been great, the obsolescence of capital controls has been great as well, from the strictest nation state level ones, to the most benign private sector ones. all overridden and circumvented. at this point I would just say if you're not the target audience that has nothing to do with anyone else that garners their own utility out of the ecosystem. I think people kind of want to be convinced about why they should adopt with examples of a use case they only make rebuttals about, and that's unproductive for everyone. tl;dr "you do you" but if you want to know why and how other people are using this ecosystem, there are plenty of user stories
- CPLX 2y ago
  This to me is the archetypal answer to question about what crypto is useful for. Like it has all these words in it and it seems like a statement of some kind but there’s literally nothing there.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
    You are saying is that you do not see a use of it for yourself. They are saying that others see a use for it for themselves. Hope that helps.
  - yieldcrv 2y ago
    You’re the archetype it’s about: you’re looking for something to convince you and challenge why it didn’t convince you When a lot of other people derive value and extract value from the space and thats all that matters. If you’re not those people, then dont worry about it. If you want to be those people, ask them what they’re doing and what problems they have. They’ll pay you to solve them. Just like every other sector. But then you too will be a part of the crypto economy.
    - CPLX 2y ago
      > If you’re not those people, then dont worry about it. Seems to me they're trying to get me to give them my tax money these days. Not sure "you do you" is really a great response to obvious grift and fraud. Nor is it an answer to the question of what crypto is actually useful for.
beeflet 2y ago
I think that a problem with generalized uses of "blockchain" to support some $USE_CASE is that you need a decentralized system to reward miners/stakers in order for it to be worthwhile, so you end up reinventing a cryptocurrency with whatever $FEATURE tacked on. The best case of this is something like filecoin or namecoin. Two very old projects as well. To a lot of groups, inventing another redundant cryptocurrency is a feature not a bug. A lot of these companies (big ones like Ripple Labs come to mind) essentially want to use the excuse of "cryptocurrency" to release an unregulated funding coin that essentially acts as a security. Even as a cryptocurrency supporter, it is easy to see how this is detrimental to "real" cryptocurrency because is diluting the purpose of decentralized money with centralized funding tokens and nonsense. It's obvious that blockchains have little use outside of decentralized money due to their obvious inefficiencies.
lambdaone 2y ago
Illegal commerce, money laundering, and speculation seem to have more than sufficed over that period

It's been 16 years since the original Satoshi whitepaper. You have to assume if there were tons of viable applications for blockchain, we'd have seen more of them by now.

m00dy 2y ago

Updating financial system is not the easiest one, also we would like to update it without a third world war.

beepbopboopp 2y ago

Id take it a step further. The immorality of cryptocurrency isn't complicated and defines why it never has become more. Fiat money exists within a social contract - governments that issue currency must also maintain the infrastructure that makes society work. They're accountable for everything from roads to retirement plans. When cryptocurrency advocates push to separate money from government, they're not just pursuing financial innovation. They're deliberately undermining the mechanism that funds our shared existence. They want the benefits of living in society without contributing to its maintenance. This isn't freedom - it's freeloading. Cryptocurrency, at its philosophical core, enables wealth hoarding while disconnecting the hoarders from any responsibility to the communities that made their wealth possible in the first place.

friendzis 2y ago
Libertarians are like house cats, they’re convinced of their fierce independence while dependent on a system they don’t appreciate or understand.
- card_zero 2y ago
  It's true, am a cat. But tax is coercion. Make it voluntary, and people won't pay it. Despite this, a lot of people are fine with it because it gets them roads and state pensions and healthcare or whatever. Some people want it to be increased, thereby volunteering to pay more and volunteering others to do the same. Everything is based on force, and the social contract is a kind of Stockholm syndrome.
  - friendzis 2y ago
    > social contract is a kind of Stockholm syndrome One could always retreat to wildlands of Siberia and live their own happy life away from roads and reddit. One would not survive for long without the same society, which produced the survival knowledge, but one could at least try. > Everything is based on force How do you reconcile "what's stopping me from hitting you with 5 euro wrench" without the fantasyland non-aggression principle? Without that "social contract" and with absolute personal liberty, any rights/liberties/freedoms exist solely to the extent one themselves can enforce them against the mighty five euro wrench.
- beeflet 2y ago
  Outside cats, at least, are independent. It's evidenced by the existence of so many stray cats. They have leverage that other pets don't. They don't need to understand the whole household. They only need to understand if they are being mistreated, in which case they can choose to leave and hunt vermon until the end of their (very few) days. So I think it is better to be a housecat than a lapdog at least.
Acrobatic_Road 2y ago
>Fiat money exists within a social contract - governments that issue currency must also maintain the infrastructure that makes society work. Imagine saying this to someone who lost their home in the LA wildfires despite paying high taxes all their life to live there. Some social contract.
- roboror 2y ago
  Should I say it before after they get their government subsidized insurance money?
  - Acrobatic_Road 2y ago
    Government subsidized? >After saying it would run out of funds by March, California’s last-resort fire insurance provider will impose a special charge of $1 billion on insurance companies — which will in turn pass the costs along to homeowners — the first such move in more than three decades. https://calmatters.org/economy/2025/02/homeowners-insurance-costs-rising-in-california-fair-plan/ https://calmatters.org/economy/2025/02/homeowners-insurance-...
    - sanderjd 2y ago
      I'm a little confused... You're citing the existence of the government subsidy as a way to question its existence?
      - Acrobatic_Road 2y ago
        The state (and city of LA): 1. Created dangerous conditions through inadequate fire management. 2. Prevented the private market from adequately communicating the risk through price increases. As a result, 7/12 of insurers stopped or restricted selling new policies. 3. Created a moral hazard by selling it's own policies to homeowners who were dropped by the private market. 4. Failed to respond to the fires. 5. Failed to cover claims through its insurance program. 6. Is trying to bail itself out by extracting $1 billion tax from the rest of the state. Yet we're supposed to be thankful for this? You could say the people whose homes burned are grateful they are being bailed out at everyone else's expense. But I bet they would be much happier if their homes had never burned down in the first place - a debacle that was entirely avoidable.
jack_pp 2y ago
> They're deliberately undermining the mechanism that funds our shared existence. They want the benefits of living in society without contributing to its maintenance. So I pay income tax, property tax, road tax, sales tax and even my savings I have to put in the hands of the govt which has been unreliable, corrupt and mostly serves the interests of the few over the interests of the many regardless of which political party has been elected.
- bitcoin_anon 2y ago
  Indeed. Was Beepboop arguing that inflation is the mechanism that funds our shared existence? Why do you think cryptocurrency at its philosophical core enables wealth hoarding? If I don’t pay my property taxes, I lose my house, regardless of how much cryptocurrency I own. Why can’t we have a separation of money and state where the state receives its due through taxes and is unable to inflate the money supply?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - sanderjd 2y ago
    I'm having trouble making sense of anything in this comment.
    - beeflet 2y ago
      I think he's just advocating for the idea that money (and monetary policy) should be separated from taxation, like the gold standard. Or maybe an imaginary silver standard, where the citizens hold the precious metal directly (and pay taxes in it) instead of just having the currency backed by precious metal. Just because the government and banking institutions can't easily censor and restrict the money supply, doesn't mean they can't collect taxes on it. In a word where crypto is the dominant form of money they can just throw you in jail if you don't pay taxes. If you need to pay X amount of taxes, maybe the government should explicitly collect X amount of taxes transparently instead of collecting Y amount of taxes, selling a bunch of debt that needs to be financed at a later date, inflating the currency, etc. Because the more transparency in a democracy, the fewer ways for politicians to hijack taxation.
beeflet 2y ago
I think that taxes can and should be funded through the single tax on property proposed by Henry George as opposed to sales or income tax. Widespread adoption of private cryptocurrency may be sufficient to enable adoption of the single tax system.
- cwmma 2y ago
  Georgism is orthogonal to cryptocurrency. Like how is cryptocurrency even related to consolidating all taxes into one on the unimproved value of land, this seems like such a nonsequitur.
  - beeflet 2y ago
    Cryptocurrency makes direct cash-like payments possible over the internet more easily. It makes collection of sales and income tax more difficult to collect.
    - beepbopboopp 2y ago
      More easy? Crypto is significantly more complicated than modern banking/credit cards. The second part is true though.
      - cwmma 2y ago
        Is the 2nd part true though? In the US sales taxes are mostly applied at the state level where the governments don't have particularly privileged access to the banking system and is enforced by being able to physically go to the merchant in question. Bitcoin would probably make that easier for the government as you could now track merchants sales volumes directly on the blockchain. For the federal government being able to deputize the banks to flag suspicious transactions certainly helps find tax avoidance, we've had an income tax way longer then we've had credit cards.
    - red-iron-pine 2y ago
      more easy? requiring ever increasing computational requirements to move money? we figured out bank transfers decades ago, and there is no exponentially increasing challenges with a wire transfer.

Almondsetat 2y ago

Neural networks have existed for decades, and yet their utility has only become apparent after hardware got fast enough

atrus 2y ago
We've been using neural networks as classifiers for decades. They were useful immediately
creata 2y ago
So what might be blocking applications of cryptocurrency the way computational limitations blocked (many) applications of neural networks?
- munksbeer 2y ago
  "You just don't understand bitcoin"
taco_emoji 2y ago
Neural networks were immediately useful, what are you talking about
sanderjd 2y ago
I think what we've been seeing with generative AI is much more of an argument against blockchains being a revolutionary technology than for it. This is what it looks like for a technology to go mainstream, relentless adoption that touches nearly everyone, and an innovation flywheel that keeps pushing the state of art forward every month. The past decade and a half of big promises and "is there actually anything to this?" debates on HN is just night and day in comparison. Your point might be that there just hasn't been another breakthrough on top of blockchains the way chatgpt was a breakthrough on top of neural networks. I think that's a reasonable point, but I still see a notable difference in that blockchains have been hyped as a product technology that has already arrived for nearly this whole time, rather than as an enabling technology still looking for its mainstream niche.
- 2y ago

ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago

The internet that connects computers and all the awesome things we could do with it were demonstrated in 1968: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos Since 16 years later, in 1984 we still did not have Amazon, Google, Facebook, Instagram and Hacker News, the internet is obviously useless. Oh wait, it's 57 years later and we DO use the internet ...

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
kmeisthax 2y ago
NLS, the system demoed in the Mother of All Demos, was a lot less well known in 1984 than it is now and I doubt anyone expected it to be delivered by packet-switched IP or HTTP (which didn't even exist yet). In 1984 the big hype was ISDN - digital telephony to the home - and all the wonky (and expensive) special services and gadgets you could layer on top of a whole two digital circuits. What killed that future was a combination of corporate ineptitude[0] and government action to kill AT&T's monopoly before AT&T got big enough to just buy out the US government. The thing about the Internet is that while it was invented very early on, it wasn't accessible until far later. The Internet was a DARPA project that had escaped into college campuses. You needed a hookup at a local college campus in order to even access it. In fact, USENET users refer to the time when normal people could just sign up to AOL and get Internet access as "the Eternal September" because it was an immediate and measurable cultural change. I think it's fair to say that the Internet before September 1993 was a fundamentally different concept than what was available afterwards, and for most people, that is when the Internet launched. September 1993 to 2009 takes us from "hey AOL has these funny new 'Internet' forums" to "tweeting on my iPhone in the bathroom". Other NLS ideas have similar trajectories. The mouse saw use in workstations but it took Apple and the Macintosh to try and actually make a mouse-driven computer for ordinary consumers. Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu was getting plenty of Autodesk money in 1984, but the hypertext protocol we actually use, HTTP, was invented at CERN in 1991. A lot of technologies are good ideas being held back by a world that isn't ready for them yet. Blockchain finance[1] is more akin to Xanadu or ISDN: something that exists because it's creators would be rich if it took off rather than because it has some obvious value to it. It runs off hype. As a regular Internet user, it actually provides negative value, because the people who actually gain value from having a financial system with nobody to tell you no[2] are literal scammers and thieves. [0] ISDN was notoriously poorly rolled out in the US, as BRI lines had been priced as a business service. Most people didn't need two lines over one wire and all the other usages of ISDN were purely speculative. Other countries whose local phone companies didn't have their heads up their asses actually did manage to sell it on the basis of clearer calls. [1] Being very specific here in case someone shouts "Git is a blockchain, your argument is invalid" [2] Well, unless what you want to do is raise the base block size of Bitcoin, then there's plenty of people who will tell you 'no'.

nailer 2y ago

Tradfi turned of retail access at the same time a few months ago. During this time distributed blockchains didn’t stop access to markets.

sanderjd 2y ago
I mean, there have been a number of examples of people losing access to cryptocurrency trading during times of chaos. The rebuttal is "sure, but not the ones that are actually decentralized!". Ok, but the cryptocurrency industry doesn't actually want "you can only use Bitcoin and Ethereum and only via direct interactions with them, not via intermediaries" to be the message, because then what are all these other projects even doing?
- yieldcrv 2y ago
  that's not the rebuttal I would go for, the incentive model is to run your own node during times of chaos, centralized exchanges go down and RPC nodes go down. the incentive model is to run your own RPC node that has processing bandwidth so that your transactions can reach decentralized exchanges and continue doing whatever you wanted to do. times of chaos in this instance would be to swap to a stable value. the answer truly is "you're holding it wrong" I think there is plenty to criticize about what crypto proponents say, but there is a technical discussion worth having at the same level of parity we have about many other things on this forum
  - sanderjd 2y ago
    Right, if you hadn't said it yourself, I would have said that this is just another form of "you're holding it wrong ". But my point is that if this is actually the target market for these products - people who are gonna run their own nodes - then that market is like five orders of magnitude smaller than the crypto industry wants it to be.
    - yieldcrv 2y ago
      Ah ok, that’s fine to me Speculation drives innovation and crypto is the rawest form of that we have, in a global, nonstop market with extremes of selective evolution: permission to fail, instead of guardrails Practically none of the things that attract people to the space would have been developed without encountering frictions from speculation, and fixing them

yieldcrv 2y ago

the speed of capital formation and lowered barrier of doing so has been great, the obsolescence of capital controls has been great as well, from the strictest nation state level ones, to the most benign private sector ones. all overridden and circumvented. at this point I would just say if you're not the target audience that has nothing to do with anyone else that garners their own utility out of the ecosystem. I think people kind of want to be convinced about why they should adopt with examples of a use case they only make rebuttals about, and that's unproductive for everyone. tl;dr "you do you" but if you want to know why and how other people are using this ecosystem, there are plenty of user stories

CPLX 2y ago
This to me is the archetypal answer to question about what crypto is useful for. Like it has all these words in it and it seems like a statement of some kind but there’s literally nothing there.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
  You are saying is that you do not see a use of it for yourself. They are saying that others see a use for it for themselves. Hope that helps.
- yieldcrv 2y ago
  You’re the archetype it’s about: you’re looking for something to convince you and challenge why it didn’t convince you When a lot of other people derive value and extract value from the space and thats all that matters. If you’re not those people, then dont worry about it. If you want to be those people, ask them what they’re doing and what problems they have. They’ll pay you to solve them. Just like every other sector. But then you too will be a part of the crypto economy.
  - CPLX 2y ago
    > If you’re not those people, then dont worry about it. Seems to me they're trying to get me to give them my tax money these days. Not sure "you do you" is really a great response to obvious grift and fraud. Nor is it an answer to the question of what crypto is actually useful for.

beeflet 2y ago

I think that a problem with generalized uses of "blockchain" to support some $USE_CASE is that you need a decentralized system to reward miners/stakers in order for it to be worthwhile, so you end up reinventing a cryptocurrency with whatever $FEATURE tacked on. The best case of this is something like filecoin or namecoin. Two very old projects as well. To a lot of groups, inventing another redundant cryptocurrency is a feature not a bug. A lot of these companies (big ones like Ripple Labs come to mind) essentially want to use the excuse of "cryptocurrency" to release an unregulated funding coin that essentially acts as a security. Even as a cryptocurrency supporter, it is easy to see how this is detrimental to "real" cryptocurrency because is diluting the purpose of decentralized money with centralized funding tokens and nonsense. It's obvious that blockchains have little use outside of decentralized money due to their obvious inefficiencies.

lambdaone 2y ago

Illegal commerce, money laundering, and speculation seem to have more than sufficed over that period