Here waiting for the usual fella to reply to you with the "but NASDAQ is also a lottery!!" argument. I agree with you, anyone who chooses to "invest" in crypto deserves to lose everything. Especially if you're putting money into a literal meme...
I have little to no crypto experience or knowledge. In what way does this expand the utility of the chain, and what problems does this allow to be solved?
What are the pros/cons of using this over something else?
"Blockchains" are just large distributed immutable databases, Bitcoin being the first working proof of concept to be a "public ledger," -- but pretty much only for "money."
Ethereum (really, the ERC-20 ethereum blockchain) is designed to not just be a "money" database, but a "general purpose" database. So you could theoretically build anything on it. One major use is "other coins," but you can do e.g. lotteries, NFTs, other forms of finance, game tokens -- anything where a publicly viewable/auditable database may be of some use.
And also, like other programming things, lots of footguns. :)
Say what you like about dogecoin and the early code-fork clones of early coins (BTC, LTC), at least they required some technical ability and maintenance of their respective blockchains (mining, nodes, etc). Ethereum enables ponzis on the scale never thought possible.
We are in scam times now where any idiot can clone an ERC20 contract and scam a million people (SHIB token has ~888k holders right now). It is still and will forever remain useless.
There are prediction markets, m-of-n digital wallets used by globe-spanning internet communities to manage their treasuries, decentralized social networks, hyper-scalable SNARK/STARK based validation of layer 2 state transitions, and decentralized markets for: permissionless/borderless trading and borrowing/lending of digital assets, buying and selling computing power, buying and selling bandwidth, hiring freelancers, and issuing and trading digital game assets.
Beyond that, DeFi opens up new possibilities like tapping the liquidity in your digital art via a self executing loan that uses the art as the collateral.
The extreme reliability of the Ethereum protocol allows massive amounts of value belonging to a huge set of mutually distrusting parties to be committed to self-executing programmatic contracts that, barring the managable risk of software design error, are guaranteed to execute as intended. This provides enormous value by reducing the overhead added by non-reliability of and bureaucratic limitations on contracts.
100% Correct. There are more 'ERC 20 tokens' than 'coins' like BTC or LTC these days. Now any Jim, Jane and Joe can mint their own tokens using cointool [0]. Seems like ETH is the main facilitator of these scams.
First it started with ICOs (Introduced by Ethereum), then it was the ERC-20 tokens (which influenced everyone else to do), then the first DAO which failed after a hack and created a Ethereum hard fork and now they have done NFTs.
Ethereum has scaled up creating new classes of scams and ponzis whilst generating massive fees for every. single. operation.
Isn't all financial crime an expression of economic empowerment and free enterprise?
Nobody, especially Bitcoiners, likes fraud.
Large ones meanwhile can provide competition to each other that ensures the consumer gets the best quality store-of-value/medium-of-exchange/smart-contract-platform/etc available. Generalizing them all as scams is really overly simplistic, and hostile to contract freedom.
That's the part that I understand the least, buying a random shitcoin costs 50$ to authorize the DApp and then another 50$ to process the actual transaction. How can financial transactions withsuch high transaction fees be considered innovative is a mystery.