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Comment by byefruit | Hacker News Reader

Genuinely interested in what products you've developed that weren't possible pre-crypto.

I built an ICO platform that allowed companies to raise funds and I did not escrow the money or get approval from any financial institution. We operated outside the US. It would have been impossible to do anything remotely similar in terms of UX without crypto. Best alternative would have cost $XX millions to set up and would require users to wire money to an escrow entity. Nobody would have used that. We built ours with 2 engineers and very little capital in less than a month.

So, you’ve built a platform to help scam people (that’s what ICO were) in a way that doesn’t involve financial institutions (that give people at least some protection).

Yeah, that’s what current uses of blockchain are all about.

Regardless of where you stand on the value of financial products, undeniably the technology was enabling. I'm not a luddite, so I put a nonzero value on all new enabling technology even if in practice the technology is currently not used productively.

I’m all for selling shovels during gold rush. But I’m less into selling guns during gang wars.

> that doesn’t involve financial institutions (that give people at least some protection).

What protection? They take the wire. Charge fees. That’s pretty much it. Corp clients don’t have Reg E.

Your UX is easier because you punted the hard part to the crypto on-ramps.

Yeah that's the point.

But this is sort of like saying Moderna has it easy because they punted the hard part of deploying an mRNA vaccine to global shipping and distribution chains that they did not build.

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