Comment by casi18 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by casi18 | Hacker News Reader

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I now barely use my bank account, i get paid in dai, i pay others in dai. occasionally i have to move dai into fiat for bills. hopefully these central bank digital currencies help bridge that last step.

i love it because i can write programs to move my money around. I can stream payments with https://sablier.finance i can lend and borrow with https://aave.com I get paid universal basic income each hour from https://www.proofofhumanity.id I use https://yearn.finance/ and https://app.pooltogether.com/ as my savings accounts.

I can take a loan against my collateral with https://alchemix.fi/ to buy things irl. I have a https://monolith.xyz/ visa card to pay for things with my crypto (until bridges arrive).

I can organise with others in https://app.daohaus.club/ and vote in https://snapshot.org/

At what point have we satisfied your criteria for making something useful and successful? I use it everyday, it works great for me.

(all of the above is just a small set of projects on ethereum)

I should clarify, Ethereum isn't merely "Blockchain technology", it's a more programmable Bitcoin (with other trade offs of course). In that sense, it's useful for the reasons you mentioned. The point applies more to projects that think they can replicate some form of this success by just hashing a block and stringing them together.

A lot of jurisdictions if everything goes wrong:

https://www.proofofhumanity.id/ - exists since 2021-01-20 | whois unavailable | 1 Guy from Brazil on Github

https://yearn.finance/ - exists since 2020 | Iceland

https://sablier.finance - iceland

https://app.pooltogether.com | canada

https://alchemix.fi/ Charlestown? - France

monolith.xyz | US

No thanks. I'll keep everything through the bank in my country, which I can call everytime if something would be wrong.

Those are mostly just front ends (expect monolith which is just for visa, not a long term thing), I can make/host my own front ends for the protocols if i want.

e.g. the yearn dai vault address is 0x19D3364A399d251E894aC732651be8B0E4e85001 i can call the functions at that address via my own node with my own code if i want to.

It isn't in a jurisdiction, no-one else is responsible for my money but me. That comes with risk sure, but it also comes with liberty. They are decentralized applications and I can always opt out and move somewhere else. I can take their code for their financial application, fork it and re-deploy my own version under my central control if i wanted too. Imagine forking a HSBC savings account. It is wild and crazy. Some people don't like that. I love it.

You can feel free to do as you like. A lot of the interest in crypto is that if these tools allow people to coordinate and communicate more effectively than the old tools, then they will come to replace them. If it works as we imagine then you may end up using it and not even knowing.

But you're using all sort of things which i already have access to.

I wouldn't want all my money on a platform with "risks", for something i already have.

Could be fun, doesn't make it useful though.

This stuff doesn't scale.

The 99% is represented by the regular normie citizen who likes intermediaries because they don't want the responsibility.

The legacy financial system with intermediaries didn't emerge from some evil dictators pushing it onto the world.

It spurred from the market desires, and the market is made up of the regular normie citizens AKA the 99%

Despite what the headlines say, the 99% as a whole controls 99% of the total wealth and they dictate the rules

Maybe it doesnt scale? lets try it. Maybe 99% of people dont want to use it? Cool, lets try it.

We don't have to be 100% better, we have to be 0.1% better. I think that is absolutely in reach. I think that will be transformational for many. It will not bring us utopia, it might have bad side effects, hopefully the good outweighs the bad.

And is this not spurred from market desires too? How do we know the difference between genuine forces of innovation and a temporary trend?

I remember using the internet for the first time in the late 90s, it was slow and clunky and magical. We had twenty years of silicon valley startup culture, there was some fun there, but it is so tired. Crypto-communities are the most fun i've had on the internet in a long long time. And the DeFi/DAO/Ethereum stacks feel magical.

Maybe i'm wrong and it is nothing in the long term, but maybe we dont have to assume the authority of the legacy system is legitimate. Maybe the feeling of liberation it brings with it, and the love in the community, will drive the space to continue to out-perform the markets, out-innovate the fintech startups, and out-last the legacy systems.

I get what you say.

But I think you are projecting yourself onto the regular citizen.

The thing which up to now the crypto world has managed to capture about the regular citizen is its fear of inflation and strong preference for deflation which allows him to increase his net worth without doing any work, just by sheer deflationary force baked in the protocol.

From a purely financial return standpoint: If DeFi/DAO/Eth is what the internet was back in the days, then it's IRC.

IRC didn't make any money. Facebook which is the dictionary definition of tired and not fun...well it will smash the record as the fastest Company from 0 to 1T.

So the equivalent to that would be betting on the Bank which decides to make Buterin the CEO or the maybe a new properly regulated fintech startup which wears the mantle of DeFi and the PR of Eth, but it's really an old school intermediary.

I get what you are saying about fun, but fun and finances shouldn't be mixed, in my opinion. Because you'll never know what other people who are not yourself would consider fun and if they'd jump on board to legitimize the community and have the token/stock you invested in appreciate

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