financial apps on ethereum - https://defipulse.com/ - https://uniswap.info/home - https://compound.finance/ - https://nexusmutual.io/ - https://bloom.co/ - https://baseline-protocol.org - https://augur2.eth.link/
non-financial apps on ethereum - https://audius.org/ - https://ens.domains/ - https://decentraland.org/
popular newsletter - https://weekinethereumnews.com/
Uniswap - a scheme for assisting with speculating in cross rates between various cryptocurrencies.
Compound - it pays interest. But who's paying the interest? It doesn't seem to make loans. Possible Ponzi.
Nexus Mutual - insurance against failure of smart contracts, based on smart contracts.
Bloom - "validate anything about anyone." A signing service for identity document / email / etc tuples.
Baseline - Main use seem to be sealed-bid RFPs.
Augur - "Your global, no-limit betting platform".
All of these are either gambling schemes or solve a non-problem.
Uniswap solves many problems (trustless cross-asset exchange, liquid markets without market makers, decentralized orderbook problem, decentralized price feeds, etc)
>Compound - it pays interest. But who's paying the interest?
People who want loans in cryptocurrency.
a lot of people enjoy not playing by the rules.
https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-executes-blockchain-hard-f...
See UASF for the success in community governance. This is good proof that the users are always in control, not miners or Vitalik.
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/binance-may-consider-bitcoin-rollba...
enjoy your user uncontrolled anarchy
do you have any response to > 50% attacks?
In practice the actual cost and the uncertainty of an attack ensures that it is almost never attempted in practice for secure* blockchains:
1. You would need much greater hash rate share than 50% for good chances(forgoing the block rewards $$ incase of failure!), the social coordination is the bigger challenge, see mining pool distribution[1].
permissionless: seems to be code for "lets you do things that are illegal"
programmable: not exclusive to blockchain
trustless: also attracts those that are untrustworthy (scammers, etc)
unstoppable: seems to also be code for "lets you do things that are illegal", and im sure the various people who are in prison and/or under investigation for their various blockchain related crimes would disagree with how "unstoppable" it really is
Let's take the Nazi's for example, because they are always the generic personification of an evil government. Had digital currencies existed in that time, it would not have been immoral for the Jews to transitional all of their wealth into digital currencies ahead of trying to flee Germany, though it would have certainly been illegal by German laws against the jews.
Instant payments don’t need a blockchain [1]. Avoiding financial regulation sends you to jail [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_payment
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/9/18302053/bitcoin-dealer-pr...
If Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea can barely avoid sanctions what makes you think a blockchain network can avoid something similar?
Ethereum is becoming increasingly anonymous. While not as good as Monero, it's still trivial to go in and out anonymously.
https://decrypt.co/40284/us-homeland-security-can-now-track-... ("US Homeland Security Can Now Track Privacy Crypto Monero")
As I think you were getting at, there’s enormous systemic risk with hacks and bugs. Now the contract ecosystem is so intertwined that a bug in one can cause a cascading effect. E.g a price feed which powers a DeFi platform could be hacked/attacked. Even a bug in a simple erc20 could have massive consequences since a lot of the contracts are intertwined
But anyways, DeFi has tons of use cases including automated crop insurance based on weather events, decentralized money markets for car loans, tokenized rental real estate, synthetic derivatives, standard savings and loans utilizing stablecoins, etc etc. The notion that blockchain hasn't found product market fit in 2020 is laughably outdated.
Its a mixture of “I don't respect this market and thats the only actual distinction” along with “I have no idea these criticisms are present in actual currencies as well as the stock market and commodities spot markets and credit market and derivatives market and collectibles market”
Eventually they move the goal post so far that they are giving actual relevant criticisms of blockchain technology, like scalability concerns
And then they get flipped into realizing they can actually contribute to the solution and spread awareness
And then in a few short years they have enough clout to raise capital in the space
Most economic activity in Defi is unregulated gambling, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
There are relevant criticisms of the space, but the relevant ones are exclusively inside the space and are distinctly not irreconcilable as it is permissionless to build or advocate for consensus changes to implement something that was built.
The external criticisms lack nuance and masquerade their observations as absolute limitations.
You replied to my other comment, so this is exhibit A of a useless higher standard levied exclusively on the blockchain space, without acknowledging every other asset class.
Even with you not considering that a problem, and congratulations for that, the point in caring deflects away from what is happening and every asset class in existence.
In currencies, M0 is the small sliver of the supply use for goods and services, with the entire M1, M2, MB all used for speculation and is largely illiquid.
In stocks, credit, derivatives and commodities the same distribution is seen.
Its not odd for cryptoassets to have the same phenomenon occurring.
The interesting thing is just the overlapping feature set of all other asset classes at once, as well as the additional unique nature of cryptoassets.
The DeFi space in particular is converting non-interest bearing assets into interest bearing ones. That has market traction, and it is permissionless and of unlimited size, caveat emptor and that's a personal choice which has nothing to do with the viability of the space.
My point is that the nomenclature isn't useful because its not different than other asset classes, but absolutely is used as an indictment against this asset class and market. Whether you and I are personally pragmatic about it as a personal choice or not.
Its the interchangeably parts feature of smart contracts. Was missing before this year.
Analogous to how interchangeable parts heralded the industrial revolution.
The DeFi space would not be growing by orders of magnitude a quarter without that.
> premised on IANA handing over control of the DNS AND that hand over is to a premined cryptocurrency network so they can resell it?
Then not as far as I can tell.
If it's or, then yes. It looks like there is a 15% pre-mine: https://handshake.org/files/handshake.txt