"Last year, venture capitalists backed about 460 blockchain projects, spending nearly $12.75 billion".
And not one has produced anything of use to real people. That's a lot of billions for basically no return.
And not one has produced anything of use to real people. That's a lot of billions for basically no return.
So, "not one has produced anything of use to real people" should be amended to "not one has produced anything I personally consider useful".
How can you be so sure that you are correct, and that the people willing to invest $12.75B are incorrect?
Correct about what? I'm sure many people, memecoin flippers and VCs included, will make a lot of money for themselves, just like a lot of people made money on ICOs (remember that one?) Since a VC's job is to make money, many of them will be "correct". But if the only actual useful thing that came out of this decade-long hype fest is a lower-fee version of Transferwise... then it's just not very convincing.
However, when the OP says something like there isn't a single use it doesn't take a basket of use-cases to refute them, it just takes one example.
Do you really think that $12.75B is going into pointless NFTs?
1. Gold bars are just collections of atoms and always stay exactly how they are, the material never changes, so the intrinsic value of a gold bar never changes. 2. It seems that the only way to make money while trading gold is to take it from other people. The only way to win a return is if a bunch of people suddenly want gold and offer to pay you for yours.
Gold, and other commodities, seem to fit your definition.
This is not true for cryptocurrencies, the term shitcoin did not come out of nowhere. While there may be artificial scarcity within a single cryptocurrency there is no scarcity of cryptocurrencies. Everyone and (literally - Dogecoin) his dog can launch a new shitcoin and try to dupe investors into driving up its value, if only for a short while. By the time the hype is past those who launched the shitcoin will have cashed out already, making off with a large fraction of whatever they managed to dupe people into investing in the scheme.
[1] unless someone takes up asteroid mining, that is...
This can give the impression that all of crypto is a scam, that impression is wildly incorrect. I believe this is the trap that lern_to_spel and many others on HN are falling prey to.
In any case, here's another counterexample. People need ETH for its properties. Ethereum is necessary for payment for the execution of Ethereum smart contracts, which provide a service with no predecessor. You might disagree with me about the utility of the service that they provide, but there really is no pre-crypto smart contract alternative.
The smart contract itself has zero value because non-crypto alternatives are cheaper and actually enforceable.
Some day you might find someone you kind of trust who tells you that no, there really is something to this crypto thing. I hope this comment helps push you over the threshold of giving it a shot and looking into smart contracts.
There is a lot of noise but once you get through the noise there really is a lot of cool and actually useful stuff happening with smart contracts, you'll be pleasantly surprised.