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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

Lending (Aave), borrowing (Compound), saving (Yearn), multisigs(Gnosis Safe), on-chain governance (DAOHaus), which makes it easier to coordinate capital across distance and jurisdictions, gaming (Axie/Illuvium), art (Foundation, OpenSea), tokenized and resalable access for software (using NFTs as access tokens), real life events (Bored Ape Yacht Club), etc, options (Dopex), perpetuals (Dydx), exchange and trading (Uniswap), entertainment (Stoner Cats), collectibles (CryptoPunks), programmable stable coins (USDC, USDT, LUSD, DAI, etc), lossless lotteries (PoolTogether), open markets (Uniswap, Sushi), gaming platforms (Sandbox, Decentraland), insurance (Nexus Mutual), charity (Pawthereum), distributed lobbying (Lobby Lobsters), retroactive funding, zero knowledge proofs (Starkware, zkSync), censorship resistance, store of value, hedge against inflation, public goods fundig (Gitcoin), decentralized naming service via smart contracts (ENS)...

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ENS is interesting. Definitely a convenience feature built atop Ethereum. Remembering those wallet addresses/having to recall them whenever it’s necessary is impossible. And similarly to PayPal, it aims to allow transactions between recipients using emails.

Edit: fixing babble

But even this is circular. ENS is useful if Ethereum is useful.

I am interested in this space, but I do share this criticism that so many of the things touted as evidence of it being useful are fundamentally circular. Take the first three things from the parent comment: Aave, Compound, Yearn. None of these make sense if there is no value in the cryptocurrencies they allow you to lend, borrow, and invest. But then they can't themselves be evidence that there is value. It's circular. Same thing with Gnosis Safe; it's only useful to have a multisig controlling crypto assets if those assets have value.

I think the current thought is that NFTs are what does / will bring inherent value or value connected to the rest of the world in some way onto the blockchain, and then everything else derives its value from there. This seems like a tenuous and somewhat shaky foundation to build so much hype atop, but it's at least a theory of the case that makes more sense to me than the circular "ethereum is valuable because of Uniswap and Aave".

ENS can be useful outside of Ethereum. I can sign a message and you can look up who it's from via ENS. I can also use it as the domain name for a site hosted on IPFS.

It's a way of tying names to public keys in a decentralized way. It doesn't have to be used only for identifying Ethereum wallets.

Good point.

Do you have a single example where people don't abuse the system to treat it like a speculative asset?

On queue

> self-referential babble

First, HN is not the place for this sort of flippant Reddit-tier style of dismissal.

Second, crypto boosters -- I am not one, but interested and not pessimistic -- would say that an economy or a monetary system is nothing but a closed, self-referential bubble that has the useful property of sometimes correlating to predictable real-world activity. It's an abstraction over the real world: not the real world itself, but a way to influence it. It it were the real world, you would presumably have a much easier time determining whether and how much inflation is actually rising. As it is, you have a debate over it today because numbers say one thing, and people experience another.

The crypto people are attempting to bootstrap just such another system, except one that doesn't rely on central banking. So I don't think self-referential is an effective critique then, because that's the intention.

This is a very sensible comment. The difference between the two abstractions (thus far) is that the traditional financial system attaches itself to the real world through the legal system, and the crypto system does not aim to do that.

Maybe the core question of this entire endeavor is whether the legal system is a necessary component for layering a system of abstraction on top of the real world, or merely a useful one.

How is this helping the conversation Brian?

He is right. None of this has any obvious utility.

You never provided counter arguments. How can I trust you if you’re just an anonymous person online stating something without backing it up? At least the crypto guy had some examples. How about you state why those applications in questions have no utility?

chrisco255's post was a textbook gish gallop. I would not blame anyone here for not bothering to do an item-by-item refutation.

Oh poppycock, it was not gish gallop. It is a list of in-production applications that you should research and understand before you do some drive by criticism of a rapidly evolving and growing technological ecosystem. If you lack basic curiosity, there's not much anyone can do to convince you. Anyone can be an arm-chair critic, go find the fundamental flaws in these in-production systems and tell me why they're not sustainable. Tell me why they're not the future. Be specific.

A project's mere existence say nothing about how useful it is. Your argument would be a lot more convincing if you just picked one or two projects and showed evidence of their widespread use as something other than a speculative instrument.

Well, for example, the Amazon AWS is a self-referential babble for the traditional web. But I guess it doesn't make it useless.

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