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Comment by wizzwizz4 | Hacker News Reader

> What I find interesting and promising is the ability to give uniqueness to THINGS in the digital world

That's hashes you're thinking of. NFTs require hashes, but hashes don't require NFTs.

Whenever any cryptocurrency-related thing seems useful, you're seeing the potential of the underlying cryptography. Not the potential of the cryptocurrency thing.

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Everything after that phrase does require the blockchain though- not individually, but as a sum it would be very difficult to bring that all together in a centralized manner.

Nope; you just need a P2P network. Exhibit A: BitTorrent. (Surprise surprise, the blockchain also requires an underlying P2P network.)

A blockchain is actually more centralised than the underlying distributed network; it introduces centralisation-related problems that wouldn't otherwise exist.

Yeah I agree. Though seems pedantic to imply blockchains aren't useful because they're "just" composed of cryptographic primitives. Shared state under potentially-adversarial conditions isn't an easy thing to achieve, and has usecases for which other P2P networks aren't sufficient.

I'm sure blockchains are useful sometimes. I have never seen such a case in real life, though. (Until a few months ago, I was still looking.)

I don't think they're useful to most people right now (or maybe ever), but there are some cool things in DeFi that are normally reserved for large institutions/not possible in traditional finance:

1. Being a liquidity provider to get a cut of exchange fees (https://docs.uniswap.org/protocol/concepts/V3-overview/conce...)

2. Flashloans for arbitrage (https://aave.com/flash-loans/)

3. Autonomous governance for protocol updates (https://compound.finance/governance)

4. Decentralized perpetual contracts (https://www.perp.com/)

5. Decentralized mutual insurance (https://nexusmutual.io/)

Many/all of these depend on speculation to derive value, but there's added value nonetheless

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