We'll stop asking the question when we finally get a good answer.
Just because you come from a place of great financial privilege and a liberal society does not mean others have no use for a censorship resistant form of money.
Afghanistan: https://theintercept.com/2022/01/19/crypto-afghanistan-sanct...
Argentina: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60912789
Russia: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/navalny-ally-urges-dono...
Lebanon: https://www.reuters.com/article/lebanon-crypto-currency-yout...
Nigeria: https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/10/16/nigerian-banks-shut...
Ukraine: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/ukrainian-flees-to-poland-wi...
If they'd put it all into USDC they'd still have all their money. It's by no means a perfect solution but it's spiritually in the right direction. Time for Rohan Grey's e-cash or a CBDC. That's how this actually gets improved.
A global financial system could very likely be built on top of a system like this. A global identity/credentials system could also benefit from such kind of properties.
If you disagree it would then be interesting you explained where you put the cut-off, i.e. define how many sigmas should be enough for any use case and define who should we be willing to trust the operation.
No it can't.
Two major reasons (and this isn't an exhaustive list, just the first couple that spring to mind): 1) the lack of scalability both in transaction rate and data volumes, and 2) the lack of transaction reversibility.
Scalability is already being tackled, rollups are already scaling Ethereum today. In combination with data sharding they will allow scaling Ethereum to the order of 10 million TPS by the end of the decade. But much earlier than that we will see multiple orders of magnitude increased scalability.
Transaction reversibility is a non issue. Any trustworthy ledger is non-reversible. The way you implement a reverse transaction in a pen and paper ledger is by writing a new transaction that undoes the effect of a previous one. Not by erasing the previous one. Ethereum itself is non reversible but this exact logic can be implemented over Ethereum in your smart contract if so desired. And, in fact, there is smart contracts that operate like that. For example, USDC the stablecoin by Circle has this logic built in, it can freeze funds and take control of them at which point it can do whatever it needs, send it to law enforcement, reverse a transaction, etc... This is one of the lamest counterarguments people put forward.
USDC is over $50 billion - https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/usd-coin - so clearly the market is seeing value in a stablecoin running on crypto rails.
But then the counterpoint is "BUT NO ONE NEEDS THIS HAVEN'T YOU HEARD OF VISA DURR DURR HURR" it's exhausting to try and argue.
We've had over 10 years of crypto. At some point it'd be nice if we moved past "projects with promise" to "projects that lived up to their promises".
So far? All we have is an ecosystem that enables gambling and a truly astonishing amount of fraud.
So I have to ask: How much longer should we wait? Five more years? Ten? Or do we just keep waiting because the faith is unshakeable?
Smells rather desperate in the crypto mines, doesn't it.
Bitcoin worth anything above $0 would have been an absurd thought 10 years ago, now it's a global asset class worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Unstoppable money not backed by any state is an amazing accomplishment. This alone is a mind blowing fact to me, but again, to the HN crypto hater it's meaningless, because the definition of "success" is constantly moving.
Blockchain and finance are deeply intertwined, so a lot of applications built on digital financial rails (blockchains) are naturally around capital formation, derivatives, trading, etc. but to the socialist / statist that should be outlawed (not just in crypto but likely Wall Street itself) so that isn't anything to you.
One counterpoint is the HN shibboleth of Stripe. Stripe is barely a tweak on PayPal, or at least it was at first, yet everyone on HN ejaculated in amazement at the ability to take a credit card with a javascript function. Of course I think Stripe is a great company, I just want to put into context how on HackerNews, Stripe = "Amazing incredible glorious $100 billion epic company" and cryptocurrency = "Wow a trillion dollar asset built on pure computer science and economic principles created by mysterious cypherpunk, who cares".
I'm not the one that picked that list of projects. You're the one who described them as having "promise", not me.
If there's some projects out there that have lived up to their promises and aren't just gambling enablement, please, list them!
I'll take a quick crack at a few:
Helium, which actually purported to use crypto to build a real-world impacting product? Fraud.
NFTs generally? Speculation, gambling, mostly fraud, rug manufacture (not in the textile sense).
Exchanges, derivatives, "yield" farming, etc. Mix of gambling, fraud, and simple wealth transfers.
Various DAO-style projects. My favourite is projects like Spice, buying real-world assets to leverage them in some way. All failures, some comically so.
Cheap money transfers? Nope. Gas fees, etc.
Store of value? Nope. Massively volatile.
Currency usable for real-world purchases/transactions? Nope. Too slow (also gas fees, etc).
And now I'm at the limit of what comes up off the top of my head.
The fact that billions of dollars have swept into a massively speculative market during a period of historically low yields isn't a surprise. The prospect of wealth transfers from the gullible to the rich will always draw in investors. But that isn't evidence of actual value or success, unless your measure of success is "how many people got rich on the backs of a lot of losers".
So what am I missing?
Someone asking me at the bar "but what's the value?" when they are an experienced technologist does not get my engagement. They haven't done enough homework to even propose a potential answer to the question they're nongenuinely asking
It has been interesting. The liberal technology community is so emboldened by "muh environment" FUD this cycle that they're actually more blind to the growing sector than ever before.
Ultimately, for the finance-minded developer, there is a gargantuan shortage of web3/crypto devs. I'm not talking about scammy VC web3. I'm referring to the people capable of building what's coming. Overnight, every company is gonna need devs and the shortage will be exaggerated.
As was the case with the Mozilla incident. Mozilla had been accepting crypto donations for many years. Until somehow this got back into the news and some influential "progressives" applied the very typical mob pressure, forcing Mozilla to stop.
And all is right again in the world. Except that people willing to give crypto (which is a form of money) now won't or can't. Less income for Mozilla whilst crypto in itself is in absolutely no way harmed. It's still there, same energy use, I guess it will now be spent elsewhere.
That's the new progressive. Obsessively cleaning your self-image, whilst outcomes are completely ignored or achieve the exact opposite.
Arguably the blockchain makes detecting and prosecuting money laundering easier than our opaque legacy financial system.
(plug warning)
Well.... I tried that, the HN comments seemed somewhat positive to me at least:
You can’t argue in good faith with people who don’t agree with the ideology behind crypto and decentralization. I'm a "crypto" person. I work for a "crypto" company. I do so for primarily ideological reasons. The tech is cool, but I'm here for the ideas and the possibility of a different world. Most people on HN are creating developer tools and SaaS software for corporations. Different ideology. They simply don't agree with the worldview that crypto is offering developers/users.