Crypto is 'backed' by the sunk cost of the energy used to mine it.
I sold most of my crypto because it's too risky/sketchy for me now.
"Crypto is 'backed' by the value of the sunk cost of the energy used to mine it."
...which is to say: nothing.
But for as long as collective agreement persists, there is volatility. And where there's volatility, there are profitable trades.
The natural question becomes "Why does, and for how long will, the collective agreement persist?".
For that, I have no answer. :)
If the moment you stopped mining gold, it began to sink into the earth again, would the amount of mining you did in the past have value in the future?
Turns out, virtually nil, because it's been around for 8 years and nobody is using it, because there is no real-world use case for contracts written as software.
The only people using smart-contracts are enthusiasts and proof-of-concept startups that have no traction in the market because smart contracts don't offer any advantage over any other computing system.
That's laughably wrong, go look up how much revenue the Ethereum network is bringing in with smart contract fees.
- Speculators buying ETH to ride the bubble
- A revolving door of Proof-of-concept startups with backing from starry-eyed VCs and no viable business plans that pop up, use a bunch of compute, and then fail, every couple of months.
Ethereum mining conglomerates don't even use Smart Contracts, they just cite "a long history of successful payouts", trust, and old-fashioned promises written in vernacular English.
A few other use cases: DeFi (mainly crypto backed loans), NFTs (so far not too interesting to me), distributed ETH2 staking pools, distributed betting markets (the coolest one in my opinion).
DeFi is used almost exclusively as margin for speculation. Since smart contracts have no legal force, the only way lenders can be guaranteed their money back is by demanding collateral that is greater than the value of the loan. When is the last time you needed a loan of $10,000, for which you were happy to put up $15,000 of your own dollars in escrow as collateral, other than securities gambling?
NFTs are just cryptokitties by another name, ETH2 staking pools are just private equity firms but without security because millions of dollars are stolen out of them every year, and crypto distributed betting markets are patently illegal.
Which brings us right back to where these conversations always end: the only things blockchain has or will ever be useful for are speculation and obscuring criminal activity.
Those are two wildly different claims but I'll bite anyway:
Your argument against DeFi could be made about Schwab, or any brokerage providing margin so I don't find it very compelling. Is selling margin to gamblers not a "competitively successful commercial activity"? Your original claim was that there were no users.
> crypto distributed betting markets are patently illegal
That's like saying self driving cars are patently illegal. Of course they are (more illegal than grey market sports betting), but it's a nascent technology and it's not obvious that it will stay illegal.
> semantics
Every competent English speaker knows that the phrase "nobody uses X" is never meant to be taken literally. When I say "nobody uses PowerPC", I mean that its market share is miniscule and the industry has moved on, I am not claiming that there does not exist some nerd somewhere who maintains a 20 year old imac as a hobby, and finding that nerd is not a disproof.
> margin trading
Margin accounts are not commercial activity. When you buy or trade securities, whether on margin or otherwise, no new value is being created, no workers are being paid, no commodities are being traded, no products are being consumed.
The entire market could vanish overnight and nobody would notice, because it isn't doing anything, it's just making increasingly complicated guesses at what other people will do.
> betting is like self-driving cars
Self driving cars are new technology. Online betting is not, it has been around since the beginning of the internet. Blockchain is doing nothing but helping the illegal gamblers to hide from law enforcement.
Well that's bad analogy, because unlike PowerPC there are more users of Ethereum than ever before, and Ethereum is generating more revenue than ever before.
> Self driving cars are new technology. Online betting is not, it has been around since the beginning of the internet. Blockchain is doing nothing but helping the illegal gamblers to hide from law enforcement.
I think you're being obtuse. Ethereum is the new technology here, that enables a distributed betting platform that was previously not possible. Self driving cars are a new technology that enable a type of transportation (existing market, like betting) that previously wasn't possible.
Nobody is using the compute power, though. Can you point to what they are using it for, if you have an example?
Having trouble finding the total smart contract revenue, but this article has examples of the top few, and gives an idea of their usage patterns: https://medium.com/@vikati/ranking-ethereum-smart-contracts-...