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Comment by unicornmama | Hacker News Reader

Even before the dot com bubble burst, we saw businesses with practical value producing applications of the Internet.

Today it’s over 10 years of crypto. I have only observed one application of crypto that touches the real economy - with a relatively obscure token.

Everything else, seems to be just be playing financial games inside of crypto, money laundering, side-stepping regulations, speculative meme assets and of course scams.

Can you point to an actual application of crypto that touches the real economy? I will be very interested!

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Crypto made producing ransomware a viable business model. Touching real economy in real ways!

Ransomware was a viable business model before cryptocurrency. The beginning of the winlocker boom slightly predates cryptocurrencies, ransomware was already the hottest thing on cybercrime forums before cryptocurrency appeared.

Crypto as in cryptography? Maybe.

Ubisoft is adding NFT in its new games. Ubisoft is a real company producing real games with real players all around the world.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/7/22822410/ubisoft-nfts-qua...

I'm not surprised - people want to buy them, so they'll happily sell them.

But is it actually adding anything? Even the article says what they are doing (reselling digital goods) doesn't require any blockchain technology at all.

It does make the ability to resell inalienable.

Of course it's worthless when the game will be shut down in only a few years.

Sort of. You can sell it but Ubi can just as easily blacklist any ID it feels like, preventing you from actually using anything you bought.

Which will probably happen the first time some high profile streamer gets scammed out of his special shirt or whatever.

Is this just protifing on a topical craze or does this have staying power? What experience does in-game NFTs offer to players that they otherwise cannot find in traditional database backed assets?

> Is this just protifing on a topical craze

Of course.

> What experience does in-game NFTs offer to players

The warm glow of feeling they're the trendiest kids.

And literally every single thing they are doing could be achieved with a simple database shared across games, as they already do. The only thing NFTs achieve here is just being used for marketing.

Yes, it's a "real" use in a "real" company, but that's like trying to argue that Bitcoins are useful and totally absolutely not a scam because a few real world companies decided to accept them as payment. Like, "sure, wink wink".

I think institutions will adopt it for real-time security settlement. T+3 caused the Robinhood debacle of shutting down retail GME purchasing. As far as I can tell from the congressional hearings, T+3 is because the incumbents feel secure that they have a monopoly on security settlement tech.

Fascinating. Hope someone here with experience in settlement and clearing houses could shed some light.

I wonder if any new solutions would need to use any existing crypto network or if they can just spin off their own.

I like two projects: One offering decentralized computation and the other one offers the most efficient/cheap transfer of value ever created. I expect both projects or some incarnation of their UVP to radically change the world.

The black market for pharmaceuticals are greatly touched by cryptocurrency, and that's certainly the "real economy".

It's deeply harmful, but it is part of the real economy

You can see the glass half full or half empty. I see it half full.

This is a good point. Black markets are indeed part of the real economy, whether governments and people like it or not. That being said, regulation is inevitible.

>Can you point to an actual application of crypto that touches the real economy? I will be very interested!

Yeah, cryptocurrency effectively replaced Liberty Reserve & co.

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