I know very little about the subject, but my initial thoughts lead to things like ransonware payments, money laundering, etc. Certainly there are other useful ways that people regularly use cryptocurrency. What are they?
I felt like games/fantasy sports/betting would have come online by now. But, actually using crypto to buy anything is usually a convoluted process.
For betting and fantasy sports, you have better options. Most the games are still fumbling around/obvious vaporware. Your best bet is probably Axie Infinity, and it's not very fun, and also hard to play for free. Also, 80% of the people playing these games are using them for income streams, so they get min-maxed to hell, and there is even more botting than usual.
All of these altcoins, even bitcoin to a degree, are all barely usable unless you're letting them sit on an exchange somewhere.
I've had a good experience purchasing a good or service with exactly one altcoin.
Even all the DeFi stuff you hear about in articles/podcasts is too complicated, or you're going to have to pay $500 in gas fees to do anything.
It's pretty obvious most of the people who are "into" crypto, aren't really doing anything with it besides honing their investment skills once you actually talk to them about what they do with it.
The other games I've tried (Gods Unchained, Axie Infinity, MyCryptoHeroes, Splinterlands, Sorare) are either too expensive or not fun.
Augur (prediction market) is pretty interesting, but it's off limits in my region. It's also Ethereum based, so high transaction fees.
I've also bought a few pizzas, gift cards, domains, supplements, VPN access, that sort of thing as well. I still check for a crypto option at most places I shop (including SaaS services), but I don't see it most of the time.
The way to think about it is that crypto is reinventing all of the historical aspects and nuances both of money and also of public systems of record- both of which are millenia old- on a much faster timeline.
There are orders of magnitude more people alive and participating in this money/ledger maturation process than all the previous times put together, of course. Much of the learning is just being implemented, rather than discovered. (Many of the mistakes, however, are being rediscovered.) So it is going very fast, but there is still a LOT to cover.
I would posit the system of record use cases are much more profound than the money use cases. Those are still years away- we don't really know how far- but it appears to me the infrastructure is still on track to have a role there.
In response to a question- in X years will there be jurisdictions using public blockchains for, eg Real Property ledger, rather than the mix of paper and digital non-blockchain systems variously in use now- I would say yes, and put greater than 50% odds that X is less than 10.
Real Property ledger is much more important than money. You can use any old thing for money, but in any civilization there is only one Real Property ledger.
The big selling point of blockchain is trustless decentralization. How does decentralization improve a property registry? There's a finite amount of land, most of which has a fairly clear paper trail. The existing paper trail has well established legal credentials that any replacement system would have to re-create.
I guess the vision is that if you had immutable records of changes, it would self-resolve ownership disputes. I suspect the vast majority of such disputes aren't about "did he file deed A or B, and when" and more informal "the property line was only vaguely defined" or "we're trying to understand a will written in 1855 without context" situations that may not resolve to a document, and probably require a judge, not an algorithm, to decide.
In a general sense-- supply chain tracking, ownership tracking-- there's usually a single or small cluster of of "end consumers" of the data being stored. For supply chain integrity, it's the end consumer/manufacturer who needs to be able to produce a report saying his cocoa is Fair Trade Certifiable. For land ownership, it's the local taxation and legal system who needs to know who to send the bills to. They become the obvious steward of a centralized record system.
A centralized system also allows for sensible gatekeeping to prevent misuse of the system. I can imagine a blockchain land registry letting people develop a software package to play Monopoly with real land, while a traditional centralized county recorder would probably start penalizing you for filing frivolous documents before you got to the green properties.
Not only illiquid, but mispurposed. Only a portion of the individual assets have humans living in them, many are really just holdings, suitable for Monopoly.
There are plenty of structures that convey portions of real property legal rights in more or less efficient ways, but overall I don't see how it isn't inevitable for value to flow to those mechanisms that enable more liquid and efficient trading, and those mechanisms I think are most likely blockchain based.
It will take a long time, to be sure, and all kinds of new law has to be developed, new kinds of disputes (rhyming with old disputes but in this new medium) have to be subjected to governance and resolution.
But assuming an increase in human movement, climate-driven property value change, nation-state resource volatility, will there be a jurisdiction that adopts an on-chain registry in the next n years? I think so.
Is it better? Does it align with the needs of many stakeholders in the current registry systems? Likely not. But seems still like it will happen.
Real property is fairly hostile to commodification-- even if you have "100 square metres of grade-XYZ commercial space", the guy with a different hundred metres can say that his averages 4 minutes closer to where your workers live.
It might be viable in some level of the market-- perhaps large commercial property owners disinterestedly trading bundles of bulk assets in between themselves-- but even there the time for the transaction to settle is secondary behind things like 'arranging funding', 'inspections', or 'finding a suitable property for needs.'
El Salvador is experimenting.
Alternative form of payment on some sites (haven’t needed it yet)
Also, I didn’t comment on whether the experiment is ethical. Crypto and morality is a whole can of worms that I find hard to understand in a satisfactory manner due to the high stakes of different groups abd they all seem to have a point.
Right?
Though it's not a very satisfying use case because it's like "hold bitcoin because we all agree we should hold bitcoin"