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Comment by Judgmentality | Hacker News Reader

> But coming from a third world country, the promise of a decentralized, permissionless market seems extremely promising. Particularly if it doesn't restrict me because of my location or capital or identity.

Your entire argument is about the promise of blockchain and not the actual current applications people are using. Your argument is theoretical when OP is asking for practical use cases. You mention many hypotheticals but not a single "I use blockchain for X" or "my mother uses blockchain for X" which is what actually matters.

> While I won't talk about the idealized vision of blockchains

As far as I'm concerned that's all you talked about, and you don't even realize it.

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I literally gave a real world example: Curve.fi that's used to swap between stablecoins. You can literally go right now to swap between tokenized USD and EURO.

Or you can go to the bank and pay their exchange rate. Maybe they'll ask you for your ID too.

Another example of the second kind: www.Ape.tax, where anyone can deploy an investment strategy and beta users can try them out, and if they are successful, they can be integrated - voted on by a DAO - into Yearn.finance, the primary project with several billion $ in investment.

There are existing projects already using the situations I talked about. It's not theory. It's not idealized vision. It's happening right now.

Blockchain is moving so fast that Yearn.finance, the platform with billions in investment, wasn't even a thing a year ago.

You gave a hypothetical example, not something you use. And to answer your question in your original post - no, blockchain would not be more convenient than using my traditional bank. I can do it entirely on my phone inside an app. And every time I've compared it's significantly cheaper not to use blockchain to send someone actual money.

You're giving me possible applications, not talking about you being an actual user. There are products for lots of things, that doesn't mean they have enough people using them that they're going to last.

> Blockchain is moving so fast that Yearn.finance, the platform with billions in investment, wasn't even a thing a year ago.

You're talking about something I've never heard of before as proof of blockchain having made it. We are on different planes here and I don't see us getting through to each other.

Anyway, agree to disagree. Cheers.

Curve did $1 billion in volume over the past 24 hours https://curve.fi

That isn’t hypothetical. It’s like you keep getting refuted and then ignore reality because it disagrees with you.

“Blockchain is unused.”

[a bunch of links with billions of dollars in actual daily usage provided]

“Oh, well, I’ve never heard of that before so it doesn’t matter.”

What kind of arguing is this?

Much of HN is stuck in 2017 Blockchain era. Most haven't looked it serious since that crash. Many still think of Blockchain and can only think of BTC, LTC, Doge and ETH. DeFi is so new that it even caught HN off guard.

Much of HN is also middle of the curve and don't care/know about finance. Finance, financial engineering and P2P is a different beast compared to deploying bloated Docker containers running React frontends. It's a shame because there are a lot of smart people here that could help working on sustainable economics for fun and profit.

This seems to be one of the problems. The other is just a weird contrarianism -- many on HN want open source software and systems, but in no way do they want an open economy or money system.

Curve is just leverage for speculation: deposit token A, withdraw token B, earn the appreciation on both token A and B. Speculation is still the only use case.

DeFi provides absolutely nothing novel. Nobody said it wasn’t used. They asked for a non speculative, “real” use case.

By that standard, majority of Wall Street has no use case either, since much of the money is made entirely on speculation. Is betting on whether oil price will go up or down really that much of a use case?

Unless you count making money as not enough of a use case.

I give up though. HN will willfully ignore crypto and miss out not only on life changing money, but one of the few places in tech that is still fun and exciting and hasn’t been “corporatized”.

> Unless you count making money as not enough of a use case.

So then you're agreeing that the only real use case for crypto is speculation, and not something normal people should care about.

> By that standard, majority of Wall Street has no use case either, since much of the money is made entirely on speculation.

I think most educated people would agree that Wall St is a drain on society the same as targeted ads. The world is better without it. Are ads also useful because of how much money they make?

> HN will willfully ignore crypto and miss out not only on life changing money, but one of the few places in tech that is still fun and exciting and hasn’t been “corporatized”.

I really hope you're not so naïve that you don't realize crypto markets are being manipulated by big banks.

Right now, if I want to invest in US stocks, I have to go through a handful of local brokers. They want a minimum of 10k inr in the trading account. I have to clear kyc and get my account approved. Once approved, they can shut down the account anytime for any reason.

And all of these are recent developments - until a couple of years ago, it wasn’t even possible to invest in US stocks.

Alternatively, I can buy tokenized versions of popular stocks. This will be an erc-20 token that I will have full custody of at all times. I do not have to get “approved” or have a minimum amount in my account. I can be an investor in, say, AAPL with any amount of money from any part of the world. Unlike my own local stock markets that are filled with insider trading and subpar companies, I get to invest in and gain wealth from a more competitive market - without ever needing anyone’s permission.

Do you consider financial inclusivity a bad thing? Would you say that having control over your own money and removing gatekeepers is good?

I know plenty of people in India who trade US stocks and they don't have to put up that much in assets. You've made so many other factually incorrect statements I don't know if you're lying or ignorant but I know for a fact you're wrong.

> By that standard, majority of Wall Street has no use case either, since much of the money is made entirely on speculation. Is betting on whether oil price will go up or down really that much of a use case?

Absolutely. Price is the single encapsulation of all information in a market. But this is only the case because oil is a scarce resource, which needs allocating, and efforts are made to ensure that markets are fair. That is not true for crypto.

However, your presumption about “mostly speculation” also isn’t true and just reeks of someone who has no finance experience. I’ve spent my career as a hedge fund trader, focused in commods. Oil markets exist principally for bonafide hedgers to exchange risk. I cannot tell you how important hedging is to global market efficiencies.

What do you mean is happening right now?

For example, you mention foreign currency exchanges. According to Wikipedia, trading in foreign exchange markets averaged $6.6 trillion per day (April 2019). [1] Is there any indication that foreign exchange markets are moving towards adopting this trading of tokenized currencies that apparently is so much better than the system they're using now?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_market

You're being disingenuous if you're trying to compare the mature foreign exchange market with a technology that's barely half a decade old and still obscure by most standards. Curve.fi, the example I shared, was launched in Jan 2020 and peaked at a daily volume of $1B.

Personally, I can't buy USD without going to the bank and filling out paperwork, submitting ID documents and clarifying why I need the USD and adhering to prescribed limits.

I have no such restrictions with their tokenized variants.

But you said it was happening right now... no you say it isn't happening, okay.

> I have no such restrictions with their tokenized variants.

Regulations don't apply because you're trading fantasy money. Once you try to exchange these virtual tokens for real money, then you will be required to comply with the regulations.

Have you tried to convert currency these days? I do it on my credit card for 0% at the Reuters fix window. If you actually go through your process above, it is so much more expensive.

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