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Comment by jeremyjh | Hacker News Reader

Yes, perhaps this is correlated with the fact that the successive number of years that crypto has been hyped and failed to deliver anything of value only grows as time goes on.

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I would reply to you and describe the burgeoning ecosystem of economic activity and the speed at which the entire sector is growing, but I have a feeling that convo will not go anywhere. Crypto is eating finance. It's going to eat everything else too. The longer you fight that, the harder the 21st century is going to be for you.

Yeah but how does Crypto make stuff happen in the real world? Like a bank can repossess people's houses and stuff and have the law applied. Crypto only has power over what's on that specific blockchains contracts.

On blockchain, the code is the law, for better or worse. It brings a lot of powerful advantages but certainly comes with some tradeoffs. Loans on DeFi today, tend to be overcollateralized, so that a loan's collateral can be liquidated by a "watcher" if the loan goes into default or is at risk of becoming undercollateralized.

Arbitration, insurance, etc. can also be recreated on-chain and already exist to some extent although it is quite early days still.

What problem does crypto solve apart from being a digital alternative to gold? It's not anonymous (except Monero which is centralized), transaction fees and times tend to be high (depends on which currency and exchange you're using), there's zero recourse for stolen funds currently (which makes it ripe for fraud). And in addition to that, at least for Bitcoin, it's an environmental disaster.

What do you think makes crypto useful?

And also that people are starting to seriously worry for the energy consumption of something that provides no useful value.

At its bare bones crypto is a perimissionless payments system, you dont see any value here?

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