Ethereum is certainly more interesting than Bitcoin but the use cases so far seem to be more speculation.
Buying something without a credit card online.
* For one, Bitcoin can do this too (though not in many places)
* For two, you can’t do it in many places
* For three, you already can buy online with paypal, prepaid debit/credit, and other checkout solutions, for less fees. You can buy a prepaid credit card useable online in any convenience store for a low fee....
I don’t think this is what OP meant.
I think people can quickly get dissuaded by some negatives like lack of scaling or environmental issues. These are real but are being solved. We really need communities like HN to engage because if proponents are right then the change will be vast and we are unprepared.
My personal favorite outcome is playing out right now. When a tech company is successful they capture near 100% of the value, despite leeching content off users. Ethereum based projects generally share rewards with the community of users that make the protocol/network successful. Applications are forkable, not just the code but the community, too. The community is in control.
With the early internet it was easy enough to see there were use cases like “instantly send a letter to someone across the world” or “order a book not stocked at your local store” or “go directly to Nintendo’s website and read their info”. I remember doing this last one as a kid in the library and was instantly taken with the internet.
What are some similar ELI5 use cases of the Ethereum chain and those names you mention? Other than intra crypto loans, derivatives etc
Liquidity for things that don't normally have liquidity.
Example: like wrapped Bitcoin, you could create wrapped Wine. Say you've got $1 million in a wine cellar. Create a wrapped token which allows you to use it as collateral or provide it to a liquidity pool to generate revenue.
Now your wine is earning you interest. Something like this may already exist...
Same for Tesla stock above. Now that a TSLA token exists you could provide to a pool for interest since it doesn't pay a dividend.
https://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-accepted-fine-wine-a...
Explain further. Why would you be able to have the benefits of owning wine or TSLS and also earn interest on it. That’s your cake and eating it too.
There must be a risk element to the liquidity pool. What risk exposure are you taking by depositing TSLA stock there that you can’t get through normal finance?
Not a real problem. Any civilized country has solved identity already.
> DAOs
A solution in search of a problem
> NFTs
Speculative. Game items, land registries and deeds are a solved problem. If your jurisdiction/company hasn't solved them already with Postgres and hardcopy it's because it's not interested in solving it or it's not a real problem, just a minor annoyance.
Jesus Christ. So the only problems that matter are the ones in "civilized" countries? What does that even mean?
Perhaps I am simply suffering a tragic failure of imagination, but I fail to see how adding a blockchain changes things substantially.
It's not a known problem because each country has its own context. That's like saying US healthcare problem can be solved just by doing what nordic countries do.
I'm not arguing for blockchain.
Even if they might do things better (which I don't see that happening; solutions are objectively slower and more cumbersome than centralized databases with audit logging), they appear to solve "problems" that aren't really problems.
There's a lot of things that classify as annoyances and inconveniences in the world. That doesn't mean that I'm willing to dump a boatload of cash to solve them.
Identity isn't currently a technological issue. Microtransactions aren't a technological issue solved by blockchains. Ledgers of most things in general don't have a trust issue that's solved by blockchains.
Technies being techies think that technology solves a lot of issues just by existing while completely discounting the issues of trust and control in institutions themselves.
Most blockchain problems are actually governance issues.
The early internet immediately allowed people to do cool stuff that was explainable if someone had a moderately open mind. If wasn’t vaporware.
"Just imagine all those possibilities."
"It may not be there yet, but the smartest minds are working together on it."
"How can you not see what the importance of this new infrastructure?"
"DAOs, NFTs, [insert new useless crypto tech of the day]"
If, just once, they could just provide a single real use case that would actually improve my life... I get it, crypto is great for buying drugs on the internet, money laundering, riding the hype train, speculative investment, and so on. But I just have never seen any real legitimate use case that would benefit from crypto.
I hope that will never happen. We really don't need anyone to end up in a situation where a key is lost and they can neither prove they own something nor sell it legally. Also, "transfer your home by mistake" scams. And have fun trying to figure out how to deal with dead owners.
Husband and wife divorce and the courts rule that the husband gets the deed to the house and the wife gets the Ferrari. Husband refuses to transfer the Ferrari's deed. Now what?
Unless you mean that the land registry continues to exist but uses a public blockchain as their database? In which case... why? If they did decide they wanted it all public, auditable, and in the open, they could just publish it as a signed text file every day and anyone who cared could mirror it.
Don't get me wrong, I think there's some really cool possibilities in the space, but lots of the things that get proposed are fundamentally subject to court orders. Unless we change the law so that judges can't say "I don't give a shit what the 'blockchain' says, A belongs to X and B belongs to Y, and anyone who won't play ball can sit in jail for contempt until they get on board," there won't be much point in keeping track of those assets on a blockchain.
Court systems, even traditional ones, can interact with Ethereum. At the end of the day, Ethereum is just a ledger. We humans are the ones that enforce laws and social contracts, Ethereum just helps with the (automated) bookkeeping.
Also laws change. What you signed in an ETH contract today may be completely different than what's legal / possible to enforce tomorrow.
If a law changes and affects an on-chain asset, then that logic will need to be reflected on-chain, otherwise the involved parties won't come to agreement in the real world. There are ways to make contracts upgradeable on Ethereum while still preventing someone from stealing funds, like through a multi sig wallet, perhaps with lawyers holding some of those keys. It all depends on how it's structured, but the benefits of using Ethereum (or something like it) are clear.
How is an automated ethereum contract going to lend it out and ensure its return in good working order, or pursue damages if it is not?
Say my asset is actually just a lump sum of regular US dollars, which I would very much desire to be returned to me as US dollars plus interest so I can my US taxes with them at a later date. How is an ethereum contract going to actually ensure I get my US dollars back, or have resource to pursue them, seeing as how no mechanisms of US dollars are dependent on ethereum?
There are stablecoins backed by USD reserves, like USDC. Again, the ethereum contract is only a ledger. The people responsible for giving you USD is going to be Gemini who control the supply of USDC. You having proof that you own USDC allows you to withdraw USD.
There are of course stablecoins that are not backed by USD, but rather backed by ETH directly and the USD peg is maintained through arbitrage, oracles and control systems implemented in the contracts.
This still depends on trust. The blockchain doesn’t verify the backing. And USDC’s attestation is rather late.
How does the delivery and return of my USD work?
At every junction the answer is "well you trust another party and..." - so why is ethereum needed in the process at all? All of this is just companies providing an API for a service (which generally they don't, now, because it's complicated to orchestrate such a thing).
Ethereum is not contributing anything useful here, because everything important is "trust this person" - at which point I'm really just "hiring a lawyer".
The GP is describing a system kind of like Zipcar - you go online, you enter payment, and Zipcar allows your card to operate a car for a period of time. So, you might say, so what, we already have a Zipcar, why replace it with the blockchain?
Because if Zipcar goes out of business, all the cards and hardware on Zipcar cars are defunct. If all the hardware talks to contracts on Ethereum, there's no Zipcar to go out of business - you buy the hardware once, but the operation of the system happens on Ethereum, not in Zipcars' SQL database.
- Pseudonymous Transactions - Multiple Accounts - International Transfers - Customization (smart contracts) - Micro Payments / Internet money - Privacy - Low entry (Phone, internet) - Peer 2 Peer and decentralized - Free Software - Programmable
- Multiple Accounts
- International Transfers
- Customization (smart contracts)
- Micro Payments / Internet money
- Low entry (Phone, internet)
- Peer 2 Peer and decentralized
- Free Software
Not really tech problems; you're bound to the limits of the law
> International Transfers
Not a tech problem; international trx are dropping in price as competition increases; tech doesn't change anything here.
> Micro Payments / Internet money
There is no way to scale the tech to the volume where it makes sense for microtransactions.
I'm not really seeing these as problems fundamentally limited by technology.
Isn't eth terrible at this? i have $12 USDT stuck on an eth address because i need to spent $30 worth of eth to send it. That's not even including the fee I'll incur when i have to send eth to the address to fund it..
No, you don't. The eth contact can control ownership of and permissions to the Filecoin files.
> Eth network can be banned too
Banning the entire network is different than granular censorship of individual files
> And LE or govs see who to target too.
Anonymity is also different from censorship.
You are talking about a lot of adjacencies and "what-abouts"... There are at least half a dozen projects in this vein at the moment, so I'll kindly leave the rest as an exercise to the reader
Anonymity is different from censorship, but censorship is trivial in networks where you ask "who has this file" and everyone points at the actual nodes which store it, with public IP addresses.
I mean, we've had a decades of cryptocurrency and just one actual application has arisen - crime. Money laundering, tax evasion, purchasing illegal items, and that sort of thing.
When it comes down to it, cryptocurrencies say that people trust some obscure algorithm that almost none of them could evaluate over society and governments.
It's a bad sign.