Comment by LouisSayers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LouisSayers | Hacker News Reader

All anyone talks about in crypto is how to make money from crypto - this is the number one use case for it.

Sure, it's used on the dark Web, but when was the last time you heard someone talk about how great it was to buy something with crypto?

I can't get over the fact that crypto seems kinda useless - in the sense that it doesn't actually get used for anything other than on crypto exchanges.

Talk of Web3 is also equally confusing to me. It seems to me that people want to spend less time with tech these days, not more. If anything it seems that web3 is going to be more about interaction with the real world, especially after pandemic lockdowns.

People talking about social networks paying its users and smart contracts etc... I also just don't understand - these things are already possible but have not been done with existing tech, so why would anything change just because we have NFTs or whatever?

It all smells of greed and feels like people peddling some new MLM system.

You can talk about gov and how the man has us all entrapped in the system or whatever, but we don't typically store lumps of gold in our homes, so why would you do the same with crypto (which is arguably easier to steal)?

Getting and spend coin in the early days was the draw. Too much money poured in making everyone afraid to spend because everything is worth so much. I remember people dropping coin in reddit to anyone with a positive comment.

Yup

Every "currency" (even the legal ones like USD) are in the end "assets"

If people predict that the value (not price) will rise, they hold.

If people predict that the value will drop, they sell (i.e. swap it with something else).

Currencies however, are expected to drop in value slowly

Depends on the "currency" type

Some legal currencies are issued more and more based on "government credit" instead of real assets like gold will likely have their value drop (supply > demand).

For "Cryptocurrencies" (let's discuss whether they quality as "currency" or not in another place)

Some types of them has limited supply by design (but the supply can still increase slowly for the next N (e.g. 10) years with slower rate each year)

So if the demands goes up (which can also go down) and the supply does not grow too much, the value per "coin" would increase.

Maybe for some, but not for the majority. I don't view my dollars as assets. I view my dollars as a way to get goods and services (mostly as a way to pay bills). I don't hold on to dollars if I expect the value to rise (I don't really have a choice), like most people, I live paycheck to paycheck paying for a roof over the heads of my kids and food in their bellies.

The only people I know who "hold" fiat currency either are ridiculously rich, are single with no serious responsibilities or when I was in the Navy, there was scheme thing going around that to get rich quick enough to get out the Navy and fuck off for the rest of days, day trade foreign currency (didn't really work out for anyone).

That's due to you are valuing "goods and services" higher than your dollars. (Certain amount of it not all of it)

Unless you spent every dollar or convert all remaining dollars into something else, you are holding those dollars. And some "convert all remaining dollars into something else" actions are sometimes called "investment".

Storj DCS is a pretty cool real world use of crypto. I'm using it every day to make backups of my cloud data.

I could be wrong, but I don't think storj is "crypto"/web3. It's decentralized and encrypted, but it's not like files are being stored on a blockchain. (I think they did to an ICO way back in the day, but I don't think that has any bearing on current Storj).

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that decentralization and cryptography obviously predate all this blockchain nonsense and we shouldn't let the crypto hucksters try to "own" those terms.

People who host nodes are paid in STORJ token, so the entire thing is financed through crypro. https://www.storj.io/node

Oh great! A shit coin to run infrastructure that doesn’t accept the shitcoin. Very sustainable.

The risk is that if the price of STORJ crashes or even sharply corrects, many nodes could come down resulting in data loss.

Ah, I thought this was no longer the case. Thanks for the info.

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