This remains a fundamental problem with crypto: we're 13 years in and the only practical use cases remain speculation and money laundering. Even DeFi seems to consistent mostly of navel gazing (crypto derivatives etc) and leverage.
Tons of people said the internet was a fad too and where are we now? It’s ok if you don’t get it, you will, or your kids will. The main point of crypto is that traditional finance is insanely bad ux. It’s just not internet native and never will be because of the entrenched forces.
Crypto is internet native money and we’re not going back.
FWIW, I was into crypto during the previous peak, and transferring it around involved copy-pasting strings of gibberish and sacrificing chickens to the gods so I wouldn't mess up and nuke it all. As far as I can tell things have gotten worse, not better, since.
Crypto is a big space and there's a lot of variety, but yes. Not that many banks where I am offer effectively free and quick transfers with the ease of scanning a QR code, which I have done with crypto.
Even better is the experience of using ripple on keybase chat, which is far superior to anything I've seen offered by a bank in my area.
Sure, some cryptocurrencies are more painful, but that's not a necessary characteristic of the whole space, and perhaps even more important - we can innovate in the crypto space more easily than we can innovate in the traditional payments space.
Actually traditional banking has got a lot better at payments recently, and I think it's to some extent because they realize that they need to compete.
2. In poor countries where monthly phone bills or lack of banking is an issue they often have prepaid.
3. Almost every adult in the world has a phone, you don’t even need a smartphone for some of these payment systems.
4. If you’re a poor Kenyan farmer that has been using your phone to pay anonymously for over a decade, I highly doubt you care that you need “permission” from Safaricom to do it.
So no, I really really don’t see the point. And I am someone that raised (a tiny amount of) seed money for a crypto based money transfer system for Africa in 2012. There could be improvements on the margins but there’s really no disruptive advantage to it being “decentralised”.
Registering phone numbers with the state is the global standard for a majority of humans, so don’t give me that “I don’t have to register”. Try that in China, Brazil, India, etc. With permissionless systems, as long as I have an internet connection, I can send and receive money.
If you don’t see this value, I’m sorry.
You are arguing for a state run centralized closed system of monetary control, and I am arguing for a non-state open monetary system in which anyone can participate. Do you understand how vastly different these two things are?
I'm not "arguing" for anything, I'm just stating the fact that you can already transfer money peer to peer, and it isn't controlled by "the state" just because in some countries your phone number has to be registered. Or are you saying they also register each transfer?
How would your "permissionless" money transfer system work, do you have any ideas or is it just slogans?
And if you don't want to use a phone, you would presumably need a computer. That seems less inclusive, not more.
I know I’m rare in my beliefs and paranoid understanding of geopolitics. Phones and cellular networks are not technologies to liberate the soul, no, far from it.
By 2000, E-commerce was huge.[1]
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/philippsandner/2020/12/02/will-...
Does the oracle problem still apply?
No, it isn’t. There are some pilot projects but more have been abandoned than completed. And you don’t need blockchain for this.
Economy has a risk-free rate of return, that of 1-year treasuries, at 0.05% currently. Anything above that involves risk. A rate of return of 7%/year means there's 7%-0.05% chance of the instrument being worthless after one year, ~14% chance of it losing half its value, ~28% chance of it losing a quarter of it's value, etc. There's no free lunch, and there's no financial arbitrage
This is a textbook example of a "gray swan".
Do they though? I recently did the math and people mostly seem to use crypto markets for what you described. Only about 10% of Bitcoin transactions actually have any blockchain involvement, the rest is all handled internally by markets. And that 10% was on a good day, there are many days when that number is much lower.
Depends on how you define bitcoin transaction. The majority of BTC <> USD transactions (or any other currency) has no involvement of the blockchain at all. They happen purely within the databases of the markets.
> the same could be said about nearly any financial instrument
Well, that's kind of my point. People say that Bitcoin, the technology, is being used for lots of transactions already. However, most BTC, the cryptocurrency, transactions don't use the Bitcoin blockchain at all. They use the same basic technology that traditional banks and markets use. So where's the value add in the blockchain if it isn't being used?
Different banks and financial services use different protocols, some instant some deferred, to interoperate.
So, for those of us on the outside, DeFi just looks like a bunch of crypto enthusiasts finding exotic new ways to gamble with each other. It's neat and all, but I don't see how it ever really affects the rest of us.
The whole point is that you now have interoperability between many projects and their tokens, data, stablecoins, etc.
that's pretty much what I meant by
> crypto enthusiasts finding exotic new ways to gamble with each other
Interoprability between cryptos is all DeFi can do. What's the other use case? If I said, "I was going to do X, but thanks to the power of DeFi it makes sense to pay the fees and absorb the volatility risk to do it on a blockchain", what's X?
I don't know what kind of remittances you think I'm in a bubble for being unaware of. The best way to explain would be to actually answer my question: what's the non-crypto use case that can be solved better with defi than without it?