Comment by pattusk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pattusk | Hacker News Reader

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I'll bite. Here are some things you can currently do with blockchains/crypto currencies that are neither fraud nor scamming people:

- Earn yield on stablecoins or cryptoassets by providing liquidity on an automated market maker. The yield comes from trading fees that are redistributed to liquidity providers (i.e. no one is getting defrauded).

- Earn more yield using a yield optimization service such as yEarn

- Use your cryptocurrency as a collateral to take out a loan for half its value with Alchemix. The collateral is invested in yEarn and the yield received slowly pays back the loan.

- Use an insurance protocol to take out a cover on the money you have put in either of the above mentioned protocol to protect them in case of a hack

- Manage an entire organization (DAO) and its payroll, where you currency serves as both voting rights for the strategic decision of the organization and as a way to reward contributors without having to deal with the headache of local currencies.

- Mobilize thousands people around the world to act as arbitrators to resolve an ongoing dispute (Kleros)

- Store files in cloud service built on top of a decentralized and censorship resistant way (Filecoin)

- Sell unused or underutilised cloud resources (iExec)

I know people here are skeptical of crypto, and it's fine. Maybe it won't change the world. Maybe the bubble will pop. But even then, I find it hard to not be at least a little bit intellectually excited by the new forms of organizations and new financial models that are emerging out of the space.

Also, as by disaster I assume you are referencing the ecological costs of Bitcoin, most of current blockchains have moved or are moving towards a proof of stake model that is much more environmentally friendly. With Avalanche, for instance, developed by Emin Gun Sirer at Cornell you can still run a node on a Raspberry Pi.

Your first 4 points are all self-referential. Therefore I don't think those are use cases.

The DAO is theoretically possible. But for whom is it a use case right now? Are there any running DAOs for non-self-referential purposes?

Klerios.io - I clicked around on the website but could not make sense of it. I have the feeling it is kind of a ghost town / abandoned project?

Is Filecoin really used by anyone? Same for iExec.

While I understand what you mean by self-referential and it is true that a lot of the economic activity in the crypto space is centered on crypto-assets, it's also becoming more and more connected to the real financial system. Stablecoins mirror real world currencies, synthetics mirror real world assets such as stocks. You have to keep in mind that decentralized finance currently only has 2 million wallets (so even less users) and has been around for less than 2 years. But the space is growing and tokenization of real world assets is increasingly common. [0]

Alchemix may be self-referential because it relies on crypto yields, but you could replicate its organizational model in the real world. It would be something like an overcollaterized hypothecation union with none of the overhead of the IT and employees. The way you can use the funds you get from your loan are also very much non-referential. Here [1], one user mentions several potential use cases from charity to crowdfunding.

I don't think there are DAOs outside of the crypto space, that does not make them less interesting as social experiments. Andre Cronje from iYearn recently introduced a decentralized payment system for the organization. [2] Even if its use is for a "self-referential" project, it's still fascinating to see how the relationship between wages, labor and consumers is being redefined in a model that is fundamentally different from that of the corporation.

Kleros is an arbitration layer, it has suffered from Ethereum gas prices recently (since it's meant to be a mean of primarily adjudicating small claims) but is very much active in development and user base. They've also developed a proof of humanity system as an extension to their arbitration offering. People have used the Kleros courts to contest payment of poorly done translation jobs and resolve ecommerce disputes. It may sound unimpressive, but at the size of ecommerce it's a potentially big market that would give any online retailer the opportunity to outsource their dispute resolution service.

Filecoin is used, although I'd say it still mainly serves crypto-savvy customers (I've used it for personal file storage as it's cheaper than s3). iExec has built projects with a number of corporate partners. I'll agree that the actual adoption is small compared to the valuation if you compare to real world companies, but that does not make the possibilities less interesting.

[0] https://duneanalytics.com/rchen8/defi-users-over-time

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/b05crypto/status/1380768156029841...

[2] https://medium.com/iearn/decentralized-payroll-management-fo...

[3] https://blog.kleros.io/proof-of-humanity-an-explainer

Thank you for these two posts. Very informative and unbiased. People here simply don’t want to know. They have become what they despise in other people that are ignorant of certain technologies. There’s absolutely nothing you can do to change their mind. They will simply be surprised one day to find that every single interaction they have with money and finance is intermediated by a Blockchain. They will then accept it. But they will have missed out on being part of the adventure to build up the infrastructure. And that’s fine.

None of this is true. People are interested, they want to learn new useful things. The problem with blockchain is that the environment is literally filled with fraudsters and you can't trust anyone. One ugly case after another and at the end of the day you just feel distrust whenever someone is advertising a "new revolutionary blockchain scheme" or whatever.

Tell me clearly what your project is, why it's useful in real life, who is actually using it - and if it makes sense for me, I'll be glad to use it.

> It may sound unimpressive, but at the size of ecommerce it's a potentially big market that would give any online retailer the opportunity to outsource their dispute resolution service.

Just like many other blockchain uses, it is very interesting and in theory has a great potential, but in practice the interest and popularity is limited. Personally I consider these 600 cases in the Kleros court a huge success already. And using it for ecommerce reviews sounds interesting in theory, but in practice, just like any other, can be gamed to the advantage of the more powerful party.

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