You're doing yourself a definite disservice by not investing a smidgeon of your time.
You are looking at a garden and remarking about the rotten veggies on the soil floor.
Most of us have looked at this space extensively over the last decade plus. Can you offer pointers to the things you think are delivering real benefits to anyone whose primary goal isn't finding buyers for random hashes?
I add that last qualifier because literally every time this question comes up the only things people seem to come up with which aren't outright scams are projects which only make sense if you've already decided that everything you work with should be on a blockchain and you need to deal with the ensuing problems. I'm looking for things where someone who works at a normal non-crypto business — say a coffee shop or a company which makes toasters — could go to their boss and say “If we spend money setting up X we'd save $Y over what we're doing now or gain $Z from new sales”. The closest people come are things like supply chain verification, which is certainly useful but nobody can explain why that idea only works if you pay the extra blockchain overhead relative to just using basic digital signatures from the human you're already trusting to do a particular task.
Also as a starting premise, remember that most of us are quite familiar with things which aren't great now. The idea of getting rid of PayPal or not having people login using Facebook/Google sounds great to a lot of us, but that needs to be predicated on system which would actually get normal people to switch by being cheaper, safer, etc. Appeals to ideological purity don't tend to get traction when the “Login with Facebook” button is right there.
But it's quite the opposite of an appeal to ideological purity. If you care about building out widespread truly decentralized cryptography, the practical results of cryptocurrency are nothing short of incredible. Because of crypto, millions of people now self custody their own private encryption keys without any dependency on centralized services. Yes, they're doing so because they want to play in a giant on-chain casino. But the same ECDSA key that secures your Ethereum wallet can also serve as your decentralized cryptographic identity.
It's hard to overstate how much of a miracle this is compared to what anyone expected 15 years ago. Hardcore cryptography engineers would joke about how even their small, highly committed community couldn't build a decentralized a web of trust with decent opsec. Now even dentists are self-custodying their crypto keys with decentralized identity powered by ENS.
Quite the opposite the only reason to dismiss this achievement is an appeal to ideological purity. The cryptography infrastructure may have been built for the "wrong reason", to gamble in the world's largest casino, but a once undreamt of decentralized infrastructure now exists.
This also sounds like idealism. And I speak as someone that works in cryptography-related spaces including PKI.
How many of those millions of people get compromised in some way, lose their ‘money’ and are then chided for poor opsec? How many don’t even bother with self-custody and just use centralised services like exchanges?
Honestly it all seems ideological.
I'm not even talking about digital assets. I'm purely talking about the ability of someone to sign their own emails without being dependent on a monopoly like Gmail to do it for them.
What is blockchain adding for this usecase that's beyond what PGP [1] offers?
The centralized platforms and social networks you reference have tens of millions to billions of users.
I would not be surprised at all if between all of them they do millions of password resets daily.
No matter how much the crypto community tries to force it people forget stuff and mess things up.
The concept of average users managing their own keys is DOA.
Edit — And whether we agree or not, this really seems to fall into an ideological space rather than being a practical thing.
You mean the exchanges the vast majority of cryptocurrency users rely on have control, right?
I mention that because a greater number of people already have cryptographic keys to use to assert their identity (every iOS user, most Android, and Windows Hello users) in the form of WebAuthn passkeys. Unlike Ethereum, that system does not cost money to use, is free for anyone to implement, and does not depend on a slow centralized data store being available.
One important note: ENS doesn’t in any way solve the question of identity, any more than DNS does. In both cases, they link a name to a machine id without solving the much harder problems of verifying identity or disambiguating people with the same name.
Most importantly, not conflating money with identity makes attacks harder (if I get your keys, I can compromise your brokerage account but I still have to convince them to transfer your assets) and lowers the costs of errors because I’m not pushed into having to decide whether I’m more concerned about losing access to my money if I don’t make a backup and having my money stolen because I did. That’s going to matter to their next of kin if our hypothetical dentist is run over by some SUV driver on their next bike ride.
That last part gets to back to the question of goals. Self-hosting cryptographic keys isn’t a goal anyone has for non-ideological reasons. People care about things like communicating privately and not being impersonated, and will gravitate to the systems which make that safe and easy. Cryptocurrency projects haven’t delivered on either of those so far and since they inevitably depend on real-world systems to handle identity or resolve disputes, it’s hard to offer a compelling reason to pay the extra cost to use them.
Going back to my hypothetical person at a non-crypto business, he goes to his boss and says “we should have our customers login using self-managed private keys”. When she says “how does that make us more money?”, what’s the answer?
Will it pan out? I have no earthly idea. But it's cool enough to try.
[0]: https://internetcomputer.org
[1]: https://internetcomputer.org/docs/current/developer-docs/dep...
[2]: https://oc.app
(unfortunately obligatory: I am not a bot. please do not downvote singularly because of linking to a blockchain service, in response to a question about them.)
I prepared this post summarizing the real world usage of Bitcoin just for people like you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095
Another news from the last couple of days: https://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/nyic/project-cedar [submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33479015]
At the risk of sounding somewhat cold and calculating:
Is that worth the carbon emissions of the entire country of Argentina? How many people are dying from the resulting climate impact?
How many lives have been ruined from the gambling related to bitcoin? How many times have bitcoin forums had to post suicide hotline numbers?
How many criminal enterprises, oppressive governments (like North Korea), etc have been enabled by bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies from ransomware and countless, endless scams?
While I do acknowledge the use cases you’ve provided and truly do sympathize with the (relatively few - tiny) people who benefit I cannot see how it could possibly be net positive.
That last part is significant because while the Bitcoin marketing team likes to talk about it being anonymous or “censorship resistant”, it's extremely risky for anyone to use when their threat model includes the government they live under. Yes, I'm sure someone has been able to transfer money to a Russian or Chinese dissident but once that becomes at all significant, consider the incredible risk that poses to the recipient. They can't make a transaction without making highly-distinctive network traffic, they can't use the funds locally without finding someone willing to take them which is risky to both parties since you're betting that the other party isn't compromised, and unlike regular currency transactions you're leaving an immutable public audit trail. If any party involved ever has records which the police obtain, they now have hard evidence to go after everyone they've ever transacted with rather than just the ones they observed after learning of that blackmarket activity. Better hope that you and everyone you ever do business with has perfect opsec…
This isn't some idle speculation, either — there have been a number of cases where Bitcoin provided key evidence linking people's activity and allowing the police to wrap up an entire group rather than the one guy they caught. Here's an example of where that was used for good:
https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-in-the-dark-welcome-to-v...
Now, I personally would not like to see political dissidents in China or Russia meet the same fate so I would not want to tell them Bitcoin is suitable for this task.
Speaking of dissidents subverting their governments, I personally know people who are using cryptocurrencies to assist their families stuck under the said governments. There might be some risks, but when they don't have any other way to exchange value, crypto is a lifeline.
> trying to be a separate currency.
None of the serious crypto projects I am aware of (which are Bitcoin, Ethererum and its L2's basically) claim to be a currency. Bitcoin is an asset. ETH is a currency only for the ETH ecosystem and does not claim to be something along the lines of a popular definition of currency.
It feels a bit like an unfalsifiable premise. You should do your own research until you find one that is good. If you haven't found a good one yet, you just haven't researched hard enough, so keep going.
I'm not sure what's to really get excited about. It does solve a problem which makes it miles better than most crypto things. Nonetheless its basically solving a problem that only exists due to crypto currency stuff in the first place. So it doesn't really get me excited about the promise of "web3".
And are you using the blockchain co-opted “web3” here, or the general “web3”?
I've done some serious searching. There is absolutely nothing exciting in this space for people who aren't already bought in to it. It's like a cult
The graph protocol - decentralized blockchain indexing feeding a network of graphQL servers hosting the data powering dapps https://thegraph.com/en/
Chainlink - decentralized on-chain oracles for basically any piece of data from the real world - https://chain.link/
MakerDAO - creator of the first “soft pegged” stablecoin, it is a series of smart contracts that allow people to lock up crypto as collateral and mint DAI, uses a number of neat and novel mechanisms to keep peg by adjusting interest rates and incentivizing economic behavior https://makerdao.com/en/
Compound - a decentralized lending and borrowing protocol with no centralized authority handling liquidations/collateral pricing/etc. https://compound.finance/
Uniswap - a decentralized exchange for swapping assets in a trustless way, has neat features like flash loans where you can borrow a large amount of money (millions of dollars) for the length of one transaction, as long as the money is returned with a fee. This allows anyone to do things like capture arbitrage opportunities, liquidate large positions, or whatever else can be done in one transaction. https://uniswap.org/faq
A lot of these are DAOs using smart contracts to propose and vote on binding proposals on chain and adjust parameters within the protocol or paying contributors and whatnot. You can see an example here https://compound.finance/governance
Beyond that there’s other blockchains focused on specific use cases like GameFi, bridges connecting together different blockchains and moving liquidity between them in a mostly seamless way, massive research attention being paid to zero knowledge proofs (which have a lot of potential implications in the real world), and multi-sig contracts for only doing things when a quorum of key holders come together and signal their intent.
The general idea is that you precompute a bunch of proofs and store them on disk. Challenges are issued and if you have a matching proof, you can claim the token for that challenge.
The part that I find interesting isn't the tokens. It's the concept that an algorithm can prove you've committed some disk space to the network. The reason I find it interesting is because, for small amounts of disk space, the incremental cost of participation is $0. If I plot proofs on unused disk space and only try to match proofs when my computer is on anyway, it basically costs me nothing.
Compare that to someone trying to farm (aka mine) on an industrial scale and they have a real, non-zero cost starting with the first byte of storage they buy. I find it interesting because it's different than normal economies of scale where a large operator eventually outperforms all the small operators (economically).
Unmatched, but valid proofs, are a byproduct of mining the tokens and those are what proves you have some idle capacity. Since normal PC owners pretty much have to buy excess capacity for something like a hard disk, participating in a system like that doesn't have much downside. It's that byproduct that I think is interesting.
I'm not sure if there are any pragmatic use cases, since the 500GB of free space a normal user has might not exceed the value of pretending to be a real person, but being able to say "I have $50 of idle capacity and I can prove it" could be a novel way to combat large scale networks of bots and bad actors.
It’s a horrible set of ideas.
- ex chia farmer
Its essentially gmail/docs alternative that e2e encrypts the content and saves them on their servers. Services like protonmail have been working like that forever.
I am not saying its not a good product just that it doesnt require blockchain at all. They slap it on there to use it and get hype but thats all.
as a crypto skeptic, i did go through the exercise of learning about the space in various respects (Solidity + mostly niche, more cool, less-crypto-bro-y things like zero-knowledge proofs), and i actually must confess that i had a lot of fun, and was left with the feeling that there are certain classes of thing that the crypto mindset actually is valuable, or, at the very least, interesting.
for example: if you were to ask me "would you rather deal with the shitshow of oath, or use crypto-y / solidity-ish primitives for dealing with authentication/authorization?".... i have to admit that there are some blissful aspects to the crypto view of the world. which makes sense: it was literally built to "solve" some of these problems.
[written as someone who remains a "crypto-skeptic", whatever that means at this point]
The skeptical position on astrology is typically that the archtypes are so vauge that they apply to everyone equally, and people tend to discard any parts that don't fit.
Saying that the archetype applies to you isn't countering the skepticism. On the contrary that is precisely the outcome that someone who think astrology is bullshit would expect.
On a meta level, it's also interesting simply because so many people find that they strongly relate to their chart, even when they really do not want to believe that their time of birth has any meaning at all. You don't have to believe that there is actually some physical influence of the position of the stars to be curious about why it has that effect. Is it just one of the greatest magic tricks of all time? If so, it might be interesting to understand how that works from a human psychological perspective.