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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

> You dont need a token. No, really you dont. Your tokens only use case is likely to transfer value

Other way round: transferring value to yourself is the only use case.

If you take a second to look in the mirror and see the wreckage of previous startups in this space, you'll see that - as pointed out in the OP thread - 99% of the community is there for the pump and dump. For all the practical purposes, distributed solutions end up worse than centralised ones. Except possibly for censorship resistance, which means you have the problem of attracting people who want to use it because they've been banned from other services.

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That's exactly right. I've seen zero products where the blockchain is a compelling value ad, with the exception of:

- it makes it easier to raise capital by claiming that what you are doing involves crypto, because then you get crypto-type valuations

- you can get money from people who want to speculate

I, personally, think Handshake is an interesting value add. Decentralized ICANN on a blockchain, mainly because I can't think of a better method to decentralize TLD management.

The negative is a lot of the TLDs sold on Handshake were sold to early interested parties, many of which were speculators. Unfortunately, other than an ICANN run solution, I can't think of a way to solve this since you need critical mass to make it fair, but can't get critical mass without having everything running.

Maybe they should have restricted the character length of the TLDs that were available to be auctioned at any given time based on the number of mined coins so more valuable TLDs wouldn't come available until, ideally, more people were onboarded to the service. Not sure there's a great solution there.

I've never been able to get over Handshake basing their domain-claiming system on DNSSEC -- and when they launched they couldn't even claim their _own domain_ because .org was still signed with a RSASHA1-NSEC3-SHA1 key: https://github.com/handshake-org/hsd/issues/399

It, uh, didn't inspire a lot of confidence.

HN's hypocrisy: constantly complaining about centralisation but dismissing attempts of freeing people from said centralisation at the same time.

What do you expect from Big Tech engineers? Honestly most peoples livelihoods are generated by working on extremely centralised, monopolistic services.

In practice, crypto does not free people from centralization. That's one of the problems highlighted by this thread.

Centralization is a spectrum.

> > You dont need a token. No, really you dont. Your tokens only use case is likely to transfer value

> Other way round: transferring value to yourself is the only use case.

Everyone needs money. These tho claims are contradictory. If by creating tokens you can transfer value to yourself, it is clear use case and thats why people will keep creating tokens.

Sounds to me as if you dont have any "blockchain project" ideas. That's fine do something else. If whatever you every wished to crate does not profit form this tech, it probably really just does not profit form it. Nothing wrong with that. It would be a shame to slap blockchain on a cool project that doesn't need it.

No it's not that, there's not a single blockchain based solution that achieves better results than a classical solution. Not a single one. Never has been. Not in 14 years. I'm open to one showing up! But, well, it hasn't.

And that's because there's a huge fundamental cost to trustlessness, decentralization and permissionlessness that substantially no project actually benefits from.

The post above has a list of companies who build on top of such a decentral permission-less system that apparently has no benefits.

Start with coil.com what they do it not possible with the financial system. They enable users to stream money to content creator in real time with fractions of cents per second. A central system would not make any sense. It must be p2p and there must be a ledger to "settle the transactions"

Its not impossible to make it central it just not lucrative in any way. But if the middlemen is removed it doesn't have to be lucrative for that middlemen anymore and it turns out to be almost free because you just need to send p2p data packages to stream money.

Its called interledger protocol (ILP) its not a blockchain its a protocol but like I said above you need to settle somehow and which bank or financial system lets you settle fractions of cents? No one because there is no money to be made from this so a system that does not generate money for the owner (a decentral system) works best.

> The post above has a list of companies who build on top of such a decentral permission-less system that apparently has no benefits.

Correct.

> Start with coil.com what they do it not possible with the financial system. They enable users to stream money to content creator in real time with fractions of cents per second. A central system would not make any sense. It must be p2p and there must be a ledger to "settle the transactions"

Any wallet could offer the same thing. PayPal could offer it. But they don't because nobody wants micropayments. Nobody's ever actually wanted micropayments, it's something they think they do, but in reality, they do not. This comes up from time to time. One of the crypto folks actually wrote a really good paper on it, I'll dig it up.

You just build up the balance until it's over $1 and ACH/RTP it. Those transaction methods cost $0.0033 in bulk.

Further, this is just revisiting whether people are willing to pay for content online. They are not. They would rather be subjected to ads and not pay anything.

>Any wallet could offer the same thing.

No, its not a wallet at all its a protocol like TCP but for money. If you are interested go read about it first. There is no point in arguing about something you dont know what it is.

>PayPal could offer it

Yes, they could but its not lucrative and if it would be they would not be interested in using a public interoperable protocol where everyone can offer the same service and compete.

So you have some sites that use PayPal and other sites use 15 other payment companies. You just recreated subscription hell. Its completely missing the point. If its decentral and standardized all systems work together. If I have the wrong token or currency the decentral system finds a way to swap them so I can use any services no matter what "wallet" or currency I use. I cold stream Netflix and Amazon Prime and only pay what I watch and when I watch.

Also why would I want PayPal to know whom I stream money? If its central its impossible to hide such data. If its p2p no third party know what content I pay for. That's how it should be.

>Nobody's ever actually wanted micropayments

We already have it.... its called ads. Ever page load, every click, every interaction and every data collected about you is a form of inefficient micropayment. One that does not respect your privacy, tires to maximize the time you waste and tries to trick you into buying stuff you dont need. And the cost of that is slapped onto the product you may buy.

Don't you think there are tons of people out there who would rather not annoy their visitors with ads? They would rather have them pay a few fraction of a cent directly to them without the ad-mafia taking a huge junk out of the revenue. And dont you think there are people who would rather pay a few fraction of a cent than see ads or block ads knowing that the content creator does not get paid then?

>Further, this is just revisiting whether people are willing to pay for content online. They are not. They would rather be subjected to ads and not pay anything.

That's your personal opinion. The facts are not on your side. People already pay to not see ads its just cumbersome because every service needs a subscription or pro app or whatever. It does not scale to the number or services the average user wants to use. And it hardly adjust to the actual use. Its objectively just so much worse than if you could stream for what you use in real time.

You could go a long way without ads for a few bucks if you would replace them with the actual revenue they create. Only if your time is worthless you would rather watch a 15 second ad than pay 1/10 cent or whatever to not see it.

> People already pay to not see ads its just cumbersome because every service needs a subscription or pro app or whatever.

People will pay if it's a frictionless payment of a small amount reflective of the value gained. Netflix did this with movies, Spotify with music, `crypto with everything?` if the tech and business models are worked out.

Imagine how awesome it would be if you could search for a movie choose the service that current has the best cost/byte ratio for your location (they can make this variable to manage load). Then you start streaming. No registering needed. Not even a login.

After 10 min you notice the film sucks so you stop the stream. You only payed for the first 10 min.

Totally friction-less ofc. You could watch on a random TV anywhere and stream the money from your phone.

Sounds like sci-fi but we have all the key tech needed for this.

It sounds not very compelling. Id rather give Netflix $50/mth and not worry about any of that.

[edit] not to mention, content creators don't price their movies in dollars per byte haha, they price it based on what they think people will pay. This is part of the reason all you can eat is much more enjoyable.

I think you didn't get the bigger picture. Its not for streaming a movie is for everything on the web. Why would you pay 50 for Netflix if you can just consume content wherever you want for 50 bucks instead. They can still offer you a flat rate if they want. The option to pay what you use doesn't take the option to pay upfront or whatever away. There is no doubt they will lure you into using the same service somehow but that's kind irrelevant. The goal is to have the choice and that you can pay/support the small fishes too. The one you would never make a subscription for. Same with donation. You probably dont have Wikipedia or hacker news subscription. But leaving a few cents for free content ever month would probably be a good idea to keep it free.

Its not "all you can eat" is "you can eat where you want" you never missed that because it was always like that you never needed a subscription for certain food or restaurant chains. You just go and eat wherever you want and they all expect you to pay what you ordered or whatever deal they offer. This system makes it far more likely you go eat somewhere new and far more likely that you eat spaghetti where you like it the most and pizza somewhere ease. Web content should work the same.

This conversation is odd. Someone says there are no real world use cases. Someone else says yes there is and poses one. Former person points out that in fact that example just makes their point for them. The counter is well there has to be some use case because there are theoretically an infinite number of them. We just have to find one from that set.

This example right here. It presumes that content creators will happily just bypass distributors like Netflix. I find that unlikely because it ignores what Netflix actually provides for content creators.

1. Funding in some cases.

2. Discovery and a ready audience.

3. Availability of content to your audience.

Content creators have little motivation to not use Netflix or Disney+ or whatever other service. Those services have little motivation to use crypto streaming payments. And frankly most consumers don't care enough to create an incentive for the creators by voting with their wallet.

Sorry for the confusion what I meant was this is achievable today, but instead people opt to avoid micropayments and instead want to watch ads + get the content free, or pay for an all you can eat model. Everyone’s thought about micropayments. For decades. They’ve tried it many times. There’s no technological reason today that micropayments couldn’t be adopted overnight. They reason they aren’t is because people don’t want them.

There’s a mass grave of micropayments startups, and I bet you anything it’s not because they couldn’t figure out how to debit and credit fractions of a unit.

People don’t want to continuously make judgements about whether they’re getting good value for money in their content - especially their entertainment content.

>People don’t want to continuously make judgements about whether they’re getting good value for money in their content - especially their entertainment content.

Why dont you look into the things we talked about here? See coil.com its a flat-rate system you are never bothered to decided if what you see is "worth the money" you just see that it streams money and you know its roughly halve a cent per minute. If the content sucks you leave because obviously you want the money to go to something you like. But that's already the default behavior anyway.

I did look into it, I've seen these ideas before, and no, nobody wants to have an app or service than can just arbitrarily withdraw money from them haha.

This is the problem you've danced around a few times. Content producers do not price their content by the byte or by the minute. They charge premium prices for premium content. And they charge low rates for low-end content. The flat-rate per-unit-data billing model falls down as soon as content providers set their own rates (and they will demand to). Then not only is there a ton of perverse incentive (like content providers just setting the max rate all the time since they know you're not making a purchasing decision) but it also feels crap to know you have no (a) idea and (b) control over how much you're getting billed.

The only model that I can see working is a Netflix type model where you bill folks a fixed monthly fee, and you hand out the money to content producers based on agreements you negotiate. You aggregate the risk, you negotiate the pricing, you intermediate the customers and the content producers. You bill once a month, a fixed, predictable amount. No blockchain needed, just a Stripe account.

I'm uniquely qualified to answer this, I worked at a startup that considered building literally this 5 years ago. The payment mechanics were never the issue. The fundamental billing model and customer interaction dynamics were at issue. Nobody wanted it haha, according to our user research. Nothing has fundamentally changed by stapling the blockchain to it.

We actually got pretty far along building it - and had a bunch of high profile content producer relationships, you're welcome to reach out if you want to take the learnings. You seem involved in the project.

You also miss the whole point. The Netflix example isn't something anyone tires to do now and it may never happen its just to show what the tech COULD do. Today web monetization and micropayment ideas are targeted at replacing ads. Ads are already micropayments.

"Streaming money" doesn't sound like sci-fi at all. It just sounds like something I absolutely would try to avoid at all costs.

Well there can still be option to pay full at once. Not quite sure what you gain from this but if you can stream you can also stream all once.

IMO people don't want to pay piece by piece, and content producers are not going to produce media for a flat rate $/byte. That's not how it's metered.

this sound great. I'd cancel my Netflix sub and go for this in an instant.

Now go pitch it to the 50+ copyright owners that you'd need to convince to make this happen.

Strong hint: it's not going to happen. The people who own the content you want to stream like this have no incentive to make it work like this.

If they could go back in time and say "no" to Spotify, they would.

> Now go pitch it to the 50+ copyright owners that you'd need to convince to make this happen.

How about instead I pitch it to people that make content I _actually_ want to see. The Netflix/Spotify thing was just an analogy. Before youtube became big brother, the majority of content I watched was there.

I'm personally sick of the `50+ copyright owners` homogenizing our culture into bland idiotic sludge. My hope is the `50+ copyright owners` lose all power and wither away.

Spotify and Netflix do the exact opposite: fixed cost. People hate having a taxi meter running.

You can still have fixed cost/flat rates whatever. The key point is that you can use any service you want and they have to actually compete with the price and content. This is not the case now. You are locked-in or you overpay if you have multiple subscriptions.

> Don't you think there are tons of people out there who would rather not annoy their visitors with ads?

No, I don't. I mean I think they would if it didn't cost them anything but I firmly believe when given the decision between being vaguely annoyed by ads vs. ponying up the cash, they'll do the former substantially all the time.

Nick Szabo has a great paper on it. [1] Trust me when I say this is almost certainly the only thing Nick Szabo and I agree on.

[1] https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/micropayments-and-...

Cough...Patreon.

Patron kinda proves the point that no-one wants micropayments (and that small/threshold payments work fine in a centralized system)?

No it does not. It proves the point that people are willing to pay for content. But no one wants to be locked-in to patron. There is a high chance over the next years many patron competitors will emerge and its neither in the interest of creators nor the consumers to have to pick one an lose out on the others or to use all in parallel. These walled-garden solutions suck. It either fragments people or someone has a monopoly and screws people over.

Standardized web monetization with micropayments has obvious benefits, its like email you dont care what provider the other people use its just works.

That coil.com exists only proves one thing: they found a neat token idea to shill. We're in full-on speculative mania phase. Anything with blockchain stapled to it immediately garners a high "market cap" and a lot of attention. We're back in the new Long Blockchain Inc phase.

Exactly my point :) that’s not micropayments that’s full on payments and you subscribe monthly!

Exactly - a good use of a decentralized ledger doesn't leave so much room for speculative profit motives.

However, my own investment thesis is that the "crypto" market is ultimately destined to march towards that useful and unprofitable outcome, kicking and screaming the whole way, by dint of the long-term market survivors being the civically oriented perennials. But this is a long journey, maybe another decade or two in the making(a epochal shift in tech). It will continue to have ups and downs.

The goal was to remove the middlemen to make stuff cheaper/unbiased/fair/private. The token prices going up an down is indeed just a side effete of speculation. but will definitely go away over time its not solving any problem and it hides the tech because people just see the money.

I’m sorry, what? Genuinely curious about what the use case is here, I’ve never heard of this before. I pay based on the amount of time I consume?

Currently Coil costs you 5 bucks a month and its distributed to the content creators that you consume on the basis of how long you consume them. The Creator must have a web monetization enabled website [1] to participate. And you need either an add-on or a browser that has it integrated. The creator can show/hide content based on whether you stream money or not (kinda like a paywall)

Its obviously intentional very simplified ATM because its rather new. There is long way to go before we can actually pay for exactly what we consume.

[1] https://webmonetization.org/

Old (2018) but fun: A Raspberry Pi ILP power switch (Turns on a light if money is streamed) https://xrpcommunity.blog/raspberry-pi-interledger-xp-powers...

Isn’t this roughly similar to what Spotify does? You get paid based on how many listeners you have? Or YouTube paying the content hosts a split on ad revenue? I guess I’m not sure what crypto solves here that doesn’t actually already happen. Isn’t Coil just another centralized place you pay that then pays out to its network, like everyone else?

Re: coil.com, what they do is entirely possible on a centralized system. cam sites have been using token based internal payment systems based on minutes viewed, tips, etc at sub $0.01 levels for 20+ years now. and until the tubes came along, all sides profited handsomely.

source: i helped build some.

That not what coil does.

Coils is just payment provider for web monetization. You can use another (probably none exist so far) and more importantly you can use web monetization outside of coil owned platforms.

The cam site thing maybe look similar on the surface but its not. It only works in very limited full controlled closed system. It can not scale to the web. You would need 100+ subscriptions in the end that not the goal. Or you would need one overlord that has the monopoly on web monetization and everyone is forced to use g$$gle. Obviously bad for all kinds of reasons like privacy, competition, censorship etc etc.

Web monetization puts a payment pointer into the HTML meta tag The browser reads this and streams money there. See https://webmonetization.org/docs/getting-started

> you can use web monetization outside of coil owned platforms.

Like you can use PayPal to sell (access to) digital assets? Or patron?

I'm not sure which part of the core value proposition of coil has anything to do with blockchain?

And small wonder: crypto/chains allows us to transfer trust (eg, I trust i can buy milk for my dollar, I buy bitcoin for a dollar, I give you bitcoin, if you can sell bitcoin for a dollar, we trust that I have given you the opportunity to buy milk).

This could also go via bank transfer, or hybrid systems like PayPal,stripe or vipps[1].

I see some benefit to "magic crypto cash on the interwebz"- but untraceable tender is generally not what chains facilitate. Quite the opposite.

When you realize crypto currency can go two ways: perfect taxation (billionaires and corporations will fight it, to the death), or: perfect money laundring/tax evasion (government will fight it, to the death) - the crypto future looks quite distant.

[1] a Norwegian bank owned platform for instant digital settlement: https://vipps.no

The question you have could easy be answer by yourself if you just go to the official page and read for 5 minutes what they are doing and how.

Coil primary uses ILP its not a blockchain its a protocol it can use fiat or "magic crypto cash on the interwebz" its irrelevant.

>This could also go via bank transfer, or hybrid systems like PayPal,stripe or vipps[1].

As soon as they support ILP yes, it could use whatever that's the whole point. An open standard/protocol where everyone can join and offer competing service and 2 parties can transact with each other regardless of whos underlying service they use.

Like email. I dont care whos your email provider I just need your address and it works. The IPL equivalent is called Interledger Payment Pointer. Again has nothing to do with blockchain.

If you actually are interested its now up to you to read more about it. I wont go any further with this discussion.

>>> I'm not sure which part of the core value proposition of coil has anything to do with blockchain?

>> The question you have could easy be answer by yourself if you just go to the official page and read for 5 minutes what they are doing and how.

From coil.com:

> Get your Coil Membership for $5 per month.

> Install the Coil Extension or the Puma Browser app.

> Log in to Coil and enjoy web monetized content and features across the internet.

So the same model as patron?

The original question was about if the companies product could work without the blockchain. I would be happy to see an open standard for transactions - but no one will pay coil.com for that. They make money as middlemen. That's what they are selling.

So, again - how is blockchain essential to what coil are doing (as a business)? Is their business model not being a payment provider, collecting legal tender ("real money") from consumers and funelling it to producers? Do users not depend on coil for the client code and platform?

Certainly creating an open protocol, is a way to build the product - but it does not appear to be quicker or easier than a more traditional, centralized solution?

Honestly you don’t know what you’re talking about. What do you mean better results? What’s your metric? In terms of security it does achieve better result.

> there's not a single blockchain based solution that achieves better results than a classical solution

The following

> trustlessness, decentralization and permissionlessness

Are better results.

But I do admit, that they come at _performance_ trade-offs.

but they don't achieve any of those, either.

All of them rely on a centralised authority, as can be seen with the bitcoin & ethereum forks - if something goes bad, the people in control will step in and make it better. That means there are people in control. This is not trustless, decentralised or permissionless.

There's degrees in everything.

Permissionless--nobody can stop a transaction from taking place because of ideology.

Decentralised--the miners and the software devs have to agree on something to make a hard change. This has happened so rarely as to be a non-issue. When it does happen, the currency forks and those that want to use it can do so as they please.

BTC became LiteCoin, BCH, and BSV from hard protocol forks.

Ethereum forked from Ethereum Classic.

Hive forked from Steamit as Tron tried a hostile takeover.

Trustless -- Here trustless really mean visibility. I can verify everything is correct in the chain myself. I don't have to believe there are gold bars in a vault somewhere, but to a degree it also means I can trust there's no central authority that may be ponzi-ing or ready to abuse the protocol.

Yeah, but you probably rely on a wallet provider, which messes with most of this. The wallet provider can absolutely block a transaction for ideological reasons, and requires you to trust it, and so on.

You need to be pretty techy to verify a transaction in the chain yourself, or do any of the other things you talk about. A non-technical person can't do this. They have to trust other people. This really isn't different from trusting that there are gold bars in the vault.

It's been what, 5 years ish, since this all blew up? In 5 years you can name 5 hard forks in the major currencies. That's not "rare".

> You probably rely on a wallet provider

Nope, Cardano, Monero, Polkadot, Tezos and ARRR all kept in my own wallet--backed up with seed phrases.

I don't keep BTC as I think it's basically crippled (TPS). I have individual wallets for each on both my PC and phone. I'm staking DOT, XTZ, and ADA from my PC wallets.

> In 5 years you can name 5 hard forks in the major currencies.

BTC has been around for 13 years--not 5.

The forks are success stories. Further, forks grant holders equal amounts on each chain--so no coin is lost in this way.

The Hive fork remains a great example of on chain (Proof of Stake) governance, and having beat back a centralized hostile takeover, came back valued higher in post.

> A non-technical person can't do this.

But it's at least possible. Would you discount science and technology purely because you don't understand it?

> No it's not that, there's not a single blockchain based solution that achieves better results than a classical solution. Not a single one. Never has been. Not in 14 years. I'm open to one showing up! But, well, it hasn't.

Mind helping me with my assumptions??

From what I see, the classical solutions assume the central authority will always exist and provide its services at reasonable prices, that the authority will be benevolent and just, and the central authority is usually single purpose.

Regarding survival, crypto space has a similar assumption that at least some people will run nodes - but I like it's robustness to being 'killed off' because only a few people need to participate in mining or validating.

Regarding benevolence, I think there are plenty of examples of hostility towards users in the payments space specifically.

Regarding single purpose, blockchains are fairly interesting as they allow for any purpose that's signed with the participating parties. Which is a wildly open means of coordination amongst groups -- which is also why blockchains look a lot like currency at outset, because currencies have been the tool for eons to coordinate human efforts.

But looking at it closer, a lot of the world runs on IFFT logic, which seems ripe for smart contracts - the only issue is the interoperability between traditional world and blockchain world to become like Daniel Suarez's Dameon.

ILP is (could be) the "interoperability between traditional world and blockchain" but only for payment/money/value We dont really know yet what else there might be. NFTs is the current hype but who knows what/if that will turn out to be in the future.

I’m jaded with the crypto-scammery too, but isn’t lower fees with 24/7 instant transactions the selling point? (For low fees think Binance not Coinbase).

That doesn’t require the blockchain. The US is moving from ACH to RTP, which is 24/7 instant approximately free transfers between bank accounts. [1] My understanding is the reason it took so long was small banks wanted to figure out a risk management model.

[1] https://www.theclearinghouse.org/payment-systems/rtp

These system do not work outside the justification where they are made.

Domestic Tx are fast and cheap because all parties involved have agreements and the same laws etc. etc. Cheating between local banks is rather useless because there is some kind of overload (the sate/a judge) that can order stuff to be reversed.

Blockchains are for when no such trust/power based system is in place.

So if you send USD to Mexico for example. You exchange USD to crypto send crypto to Mexico and sell it there to get MXN. The crypto transaction is final there is no reversing, it can not be unfunded, frozen or anything. The receiver doesn't need any kind of trust relationship to the sender. Its either transacted or not and both sides can independently verify that. Its not just a real time transaction its also a instant settlement (clearing). Other way to make settlement is if you move physical cash or gold but there goes the "instant" part.

> The crypto transaction is final there is no reversing, it can not be unfunded, frozen or anything.

People keep saying this like it’s a good thing. It’s dreadful.

> Blockchains are for when no such trust/power based system is in place.

And exactly what situation are you transacting with somebody you do not trust and you cannot find a mutually acceptable intermediary? If no such situation exists you probably should not be transacting. You are exposed to too much counterparty risk.

Do you have a concrete example of a time that this has been a problem for you? Because I can’t think of a single one.

Bitcoin is a worldwide network storing $1 trillion in value without a central party or government. That has never happened before. Are you sure you're just not open to considering the technology at all?

Ethereum is another one to look more into. Smart contracts are doing things that no classical solution has ever done. Have you done a deep dive on how the technology of Bitcoin or Ethereum actually work?

FWIW, I think plenty of the altcoin tokens are garbage, but some of the top players, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, are doing things that classical solutions simply do not allow today.

There’s a difference between the cryptocurrency world’s definition of “innovation”, and solving longstanding problems for humanity.

How does Bitcoin solve inequality?

How does Bitcoin solve world hunger?

How does Bitcoin solve disease?

Bitcoin — and cryptocurrencies more broadly — do none of those things, with only one notable exception. Bitcoin — being a global currency of fixed supply — stands to usher in a global deflationary economic system. Investors in a deflationary environment have little incentive to invest in the future, and consumers have little incentive to spend. These two things could grind the caustic consumerism destroying our planet’s natural ecosystems to a halt. However, there’s room for interpretation even here; many humans would likely not trade off their own survivability for that of the planet’s natural ecosystems.

All of the hullaballoo about “Defi” and Ethereum only amounts to a Wall Street reskin, i.e. better high brow gambling. This does nothing for humanity either. Very innovative (!), lots of money being made, nicely exascerbating inequality of course. But achieves nothing.

(The S&P is actually down since 1970 as measured in gold [1]. Wall St is a carnival, and defi is just that carnival, squared.)

[1]: https://www.longtermtrends.net/stocks-vs-gold-comparison/

Cryptocurrencies by virtue of being digital money accessible anywhere in the world and not manipulatable by central banks can do a ton of good in countries that are experiencing currency mismanagement. It was particularly popular in Argentina, and right now Lebanon is experiencing hyperinflation as well.

Controversial opinion — but I'm of the mind that the world is about to experience massive inflation due to the horrifying Covid response of massively expanding the money supply, so we might be able to see even more of a need worldwide.

Thing is though it’s not being used in those cases even though it’s available because of fundamental limitations. Concretely over the last few years a full 66% of all transactions in Venezuela are now conducted in USD. The USD is simply a far superior currency along every metric. Stable, fungible, cheap, internationally accepted.

>Bitcoin is a worldwide network storing $1 trillion in value

It hurts man. Market cap is not how much money is stored.

Have a read https://coil.com/p/XRPFax/Understanding-the-Crypto-Market-Ca...

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