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Comment by EvilEy3 | Hacker News Reader

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EvilEy3

Name one.

Crypto is one huge scam and pyramid. Period.

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So far, the only valid use case I've seen is buying or selling things on the grey/black market.

Remittance is a huge use case.

Remittance has (at least for me) become way easier in the last few years, using Wise (Transferwise) or even my own bank. The fees are smaller than I'd pay buying and selling crypto for way less hassle and price risk. Unless you mean circumventing capital controls, which is definitely a grey market thing.

Depends on the size of the remittance and whether the receiver is well banked, has photo ID and a smart phone.

You can send $50 via Western Union for $1.25, but it might cost 10x to 20x that in BTC transaction fees alone. The receiver can pick up cash at any WU location without an ID, but the last time I checked, to cash out cryptocurrency into a currency people actually use, exchanges require bank accounts, photo IDs and smart phones with cameras that can verify identities, and they charge their owns fees on top of the network's transaction fee.

> The receiver can pick up cash at any WU location without an ID

In which country does this happens? Makes no sense to me.

Any country, the sender just has to set a test question and the receiver has to have the transfer number and the answer.

Interesting. Not in my experience tho, I've sent money to 3 different countries and they all required the receiver ID

if there is forex involved WU takes a much bigger cut than $1.25. Tried to send $120 bucks the other day and it cost over $10 taking into account the lame ass forex rate.

Remittance to Mexico using a credit card is $1.25 and that pays out in MX$.

If you call cryptocurrencies pyramid and that implies scam, then you need to call a lot of other things scams as well if new money is paying out old money. This includes notably most of pension funds which are underfunded and underyielding.

Here is my post that has more discussion on the topic:

https://capitalgram.com/posts/history-of-cryptocurrencies/

Ethereum? This is a pretty small minded view, considering the amount of talent and resources dedicated to building blockchain and crypto infrastructure.

I like the idea of distributed computation but I've not really understood a good use case for it. I know you can use smart contacts to make tokens and NFTs and what not, but that all seems like saying a thing isn't useless because you can use it to make stuff that is useless. It's not much of a use.

Do you have an example of something useful or valuable done with ethereum?

Entire financial system is a bigger scam and pumped by unlimited fiat printing that lend to certain people/banks/business at no cost.

What are you talking about?

There is an interesting use case, web monetization API.

https://webmonetization.org

It is a proposed standard (not accepted) that allows you to use micro-payments in crypto to pay for access to sites as you browse the web. While it isn't perfect, a web free of paywalls and ads is something I would pay for, if it was easy to use, secure, and integrated into the browser. I'm not sure it will have enough momentum to become a thing, but it is an interesting idea.

And, to your point, the only legit use case for crypto I have seen.

USDC

Sam Altman (among others) is an investor in https://reserve.org/. Is that a scam?

Theranos had a lot of well respected investors too. It was still a scam.

This is an Appeal to authority fallacy.

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