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Comment by drcode | Hacker News Reader

What metric interests you? Number of stories in mainstream publications? Number of projects based on the tech in corporations? Amount of developer interest? Market cap?

I agree that it is still in need of mainstream use cases, if that is your metric then you can justifiably argue no cryptocurrency is "successful".

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Yes, real mainstream use cases are a good measure of tech success. At least, I'd want to see some plausible early mainstream use and a path for it to broaden.

It's very typical that spruikers of tech hype cycles focus on the amount of press coverage, the number of projects rushing into the space, the amount of developer interest, or highly extrapolated market numbers. It doesn't prove anything about whether the thing has any real value or will be around in 10 years.

Given the allegedgedly vast scale of cryptocurrency deployments, there ought to now be some real uses and I don't see any, other than black markets, money laundering, speculation, and ransomware. Those are always going to exist and may be a stable base but probably aren't enough to justify the hype.

Yeah, I agree that to a casual follower of the space, the lack of mainstream use cases should arguably raise some red flags.

However, as someone now deeply involved in the tech, I'm pretty confident that the use cases are coming and are delayed solely because of peculiar obstacles that will likely get resolved in the near future.

I'd love to hear what those use cases are, and what the fixable obstacles are.

So to be clear you're confirming that nothing works now and that not only use cases but also working tech is still entirely speculative?

My two cents: We've been waiting for a non-speculative use for ethereum since 2013. After how many years might it be time to suggest that there is no non-speculative use?

It will naturally die if/when all ideas have been extinguished, and we all should hope no sooner. This is literally the process all invention goes through, some tech just more publically visible than others. What do you think?

Resources and creativity are being drawn into crypto, that could be spent elsewhere, perhaps more usefully. Not to mention vast amount of electricity.

A brute force exhaustive search of all possible technologies is not smart engineering.

I have been getting a number of people trying to get me to apply for crypto jobs recently. They list a load of buzzwords expecting me to be enthusiastic about the hot new tech. I explain that I am not (but that I will work for them if they are interested in a solid software engineer and they pay me enough).

As someone who started a project to FIX the scaling problems of Ethereum, I have one metric I’d like to ask about:

NUMBER OF TOKENS USED FOR ACTUAL EVERYDAY PAYMENT IN AN ECOSYSTEM ON THE MAIN NET and not just pre-buying for speculative purposes.

Has there been a single one? Cryptokitties is the only one I can think of and that has nearly brought the whole “world computer” to a halt.

Projects like Kik Messenger which raised hundreds of millions even say in their whitepaper that they will get off ETH as soon as they can, because it can’t handle the volume of transactions they have.

the single promise of the project maybe? to enable transactions or way to fund distributed projects from direct sales to things as IPFS.

it's at most a hacker toy platform.

MakerDAO is platform agnostic but currently exists on the Ethereum blockchain.

MakerDAO is awesome, and would encourage you all to take a look.

https://cdp.makerdao.com/

intro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3YL_D66TjA&feature=youtu.be

It's enabled a lot of transactions, several by myself. Indeed yesterday I did a couple of ERC20 token transfers which took less than a minute and cost two cents each.

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