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Comment by zaidf | Hacker News Reader

Key difference: dot-com bubble followed successes like Yahoo, Amazon, Hotmail. What are the crypto equivalent of the Yahoos that have a material product and user-base?

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Bitcoin and ethereum are such successes! On a smaller scale but growing, 0x is doing an amazing job.

What’s their end product to date besides speculation?

It is in heavy use in black markets and for illegal enterprise such as ransom. So the product is successful transactions outside many laws.

The same can be said of cash. Can we agree that this has been played to death by now?

Cash can be used at tens of thousands of locations for non-shady uses. Same can’t be said of crypto.

Same can be said for the Internet, cars, cell phones, hell a paper and pen.

I'm thrilled to participate in building something that won't be government controlled. It's the same excitement I had when the web wasn't Facebook and Google.

I really believe that Bitcoin has a material product and user-base but I suspect you will disagree with me. Just a hunch :)

Believing is good, proving is better. Every time I hear this kind of comment I've never once found a person that could give me concrete proof or simple explanations of how any of this is being "successful". I'm not trying to be a skeptic, it's just the easiest position given the situation.

I also think “will crypto ever be successful?” and “isn’t it just like the dot-com bubble?” are worth answering separately.

I’m pretty sure blockchain applications will emerge eventually and have wide usage.

But I also think crypto is more so where the Internet was in the late 70s than 90s. Except for the hype (the Internet wasn’t as hyped in 70s and 80s.)

Hotmail success, yes.

Amazon success, yes.

Yahoo, had alot of money and continuously pissed it away on poor choices (Mark Cuban, just to name one. 5MB limit on email).

Ripple and XRP have actual Banking software actually used by money transfer firms and banks

AFAIK Ripple-the-software has very little to do with crypto. It’s a centralized system to move fiat and only the super tiny fee it charges banks are paid using XRP — and that too is optional.

Chuckecheese tokens have more widespread usage than XRP.

What part of "Distributed Ledger" seems centralized to you?

Distributed doesn’t necessarily mean “decentralized”. I can have a distributed database stored across 5 servers. It wouldn’t mean my database is “decentralized.”

Fair enough. But why do you say Ripple is centralized?

Ripple (the protocol) has been tested and presumably is still tested by money transfer firms and banks for evaluation purposes but not used in production.

And Ripple the protocol != XRP which is kind of funny with the ridiculous valuation of XRP. XRP is a pregen (shit)coin which banks would be loathe to use.

I never said Ripple == XRP. In fact, I meant Ripple the company.

I am not going to make a comment about coin valuations - that is a different discussion.

You were looking for an example where something useful that creates real value for customers was created. I simply gave you an example of something that does.

Well you did write Ripple and XRP so you can see how one could be confused. :)

When/if financial institutions start using Ripple the protocol for real then I will agree that it creates a real value for customers.

If I order an eval kit for the latest RPi clone and I do not use it after a week of evaluation it is debatable whether the kit created a real value for me.

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