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Comment by sjsdaiuasgdia | Hacker News Reader

The "not good for" list is "practically everything."

The "good use cases" effectively don't exist. Every crypto solution falls into one or more of these buckets...

- Has substantial centralized elements, could be done vastly more efficiently with a DB

- "Decentralized" but still requires some central authority to provide critical features (particularly any form of conflict resolution)

- Depends on one or more smart contracts to effectively be perfect code with no bugs or unintended behaviors

- Primarily used for illicit goods and services

I'd prefer my tax dollars to not be spend advertising negligible positives. Now an ad campaign focused on crypto's problems? That I could get behind, would have far less peripheral damage potential.

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"The "not good for" list is "practically everything."

This line of debate is quite tiredsome. You don't see the advantages of crypto because you live a privlidged life with good banking, and thus don't see the use cases personally. But they do in fact exist.

"Has substantial centralized elements, could be done vastly more efficiently with a DB"

Second, this idea that anything you can do in crypto you can do "more effeciently" in a typical db is just plain discouting the benefits of decentralization. For example, when we centralized our supply chain in China, it was more efficient, but boy did it hurt when the pandemic hit. Now i'm never going to argue about putting everything in the blockchain, but there are substantial benefits to putting the important stuff in it.

"Depends on one or more smart contracts to effectively be perfect code with no bugs or unintended behaviors"

The Airplane you fly in needs to be engineered near perfect, or people die. Crypto development can't be "move fast and break things", it means slow and methodical development.

"Primarily used for illicit goods and services"

Because the regulatory framework is undefined, legitimate people don't want to risk going to jail because they accidently created a security. It's not because the technology is ONLY good for lillicit things.

> Primarily used for illicit goods and services

This is the only actual use case. And it’s not a great look.

Crypto has very limited good use cases. In countries where inflation has gone haywire (worse than Bitcoin) and the government and banks have put strict controls on the ability to exchange local currency for another, cryptocurrency can be a last resort for keeping money in some kind of value store exactly because the government can't regulate it effectively. With decentralised payment providers, this allows for normal exchange of money for goods and services in a time when your last paycheck may not be enough to pay for a single bread the next month.

It's hardly usable in countries with stable economies, but in countries like Turkey and Argentina I can see crypto being a better alternative than the official currency. It just comes with the caveat that the unregulated nature of the money means it can stop existing or become worthless without warning and that a power or internet cutoff will make your funds useless.

Smuggling foreign currency can be illegal or even dangerous but crypto can often be bought from the comfort of one's own home.

Balancing that risk against the terrible mismanagement of one's nation's official currency can be a worthwhile effort for a very select group of people.

This is counter argument always comes up but no one ever has numbers for all of these people in shitty environments turning to cryptocurrencies. In theory they might do so but the majority have not. At best are anecdotes about some small number taking payments in crypto.

In a country with strict currency controls crypto is little better than foreign currency. They need to pay their bills in local currency. Their corner grocer wants local currency. Their taxes will be in local currency. Crypto users are in a worse situation than people using foreign currencies since they have to deal with not just black market exchange rates but wildly variable crypto exchange rates. They don't get to just HODL because they need to pay bills. They have to accept whatever that day's wild value swing of their crypto holdings.

The places with broken currencies don't have strong rule of law. The authorities will shake people down for their wallet passwords as effectively as they do anything else.

The masses in broken economies turning to crypto is a fantasy.

> In countries where inflation has gone haywire (worse than Bitcoin)

Other comment has addressed the rest, I just want to point out that Bitcoin (and most other cryptocurrencies) are not _inflating_, they're _deflating_.

If the buying power of a currency goes up over time then it is deflating.

While this makes it (arguably) good for speculation, it actively punishes using it as a currency since what you buy today will be cheaper tomorrow. This - in turn - punishes the poor that would have to use crypto for necessities (food, shelter, water, etc.) since they will always have to buy necessities when they are expensive (today) rather than when they are cheap (tomorrow).

Just felt compelled to add this since a lot of crypto discourse talks about how the traditional market is seeing record inflation or whatever, and crypto doesn't suffer from as much inflation. While this is _technically_ true, the reality is that a deflationary currency is significantly worse for the people using it than an inflationary one. Especially when it comes to things like concentration of wealth in the hands of a few rich people.

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