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Comment by imdsm | Hacker News Reader

I mean, to say crypto has no real use cases is wrong. A lot of people are against crypto, and I can understand that, the whole cultural side of it is tough to digest. But if you strip away all of that: the twitter bots, the airdrops, the spam, the shills, the whole cultural lot, and you just look at the core, there are real use cases. Buying the pizza with bitcoin was the first proof.

That being said, I can understand why people dislike it, same way that my grandparents only use cash, they don't trust bank cards. Imagine if we still only used cash?

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I get the analogy, but banking without cash is pretty convenient. I mean, I don't even have to carry a wallet around if I don't want to (my cards are on my phone). I can send money anywhere in minutes, I can pay online, or over the phone and everything is pretty secure (and insured).

I'm sure there's some niche edge cases I'm missing, but where the 'post cash'/bank cards world has real advantages, how would cryptocurrency improve any normal persons day to day? I see no real advantage, it all seems more "you could also do this with crypto" - except maybe not as well/fast/cheaply/securely?

FWIW I don't hate crypto at all, I just can't see it becoming 'the thing'. AI I can definitely see having a place (already). I find ChatGPT insanely useful for some things.

I don't think crypto will become the only thing (which I assume is what you mean by the thing), just as bank cards and NFC isn't the only thing. Cash still exists. In the same way that we still have traditional centralised banking alongside decentralised crypto etc.

> How would cryptocurrency improve any normal persons day to day?

I see your point, but I can think of at least a few situations:

1. Global transactions with lower fees

2. Remittance, if you're working abroad etc, no more WesternUnion fees

3. Alternative to cash for previously cash transactions (less chance of being mugged etc)

There are definitely arguments for it, but anything you can do with it you can do without it, so it doesn't invent new use cases really, but I find the arguments against it are never based on pragmatism and logic, but on emotion and bias.

Typically "use case" means not just something a technology can do, but something it's better at than the common alternatives, in some way that matters. Not so with blockchain and financial transactions. Everything it treats like a bug is in fact a valuable, critical feature (i.e. reversibility and tracking). So if grandpa overcomes his tropey Luddite ways and goes from cash to card, he's arrived at the best technology for financial transactions we have, and need go no further.

Crypto's only true significant/impactful use case in finance is money laundering and facilitation of other types of crime.

People love to claim that NFTs can only be used for signed pictures of gorillas, but imo they are probably one of the most interesting utilities on a blockchain. Have you ever tried to buy a ticket through ticket master? It's not a wonderful experience.

Digital event tickets could be sold directly from the venue to the attendee without any of the hassle of TM. Tickets that are non-fungible (ie an assigned seat at an event) can be represented with NFTs. Fungible tickets (ie no assigned seats, maybe access to any event within a period) can be simply tokenized.

That isn't a use case that exists now, and because of the toxic association that the term "NFT" has, it probably won't exist. It's a shame though, because the technology exists, and works better than existing options.

Sure, but is there any reason this cannot happen without NFTs?

I have bought assigned seat tickets online direct from venues without TM nor NFTs, worked fine.

I have also bought tickets to exhibitions (no seats nor assigned time) direct from venues online without TM nor NFTs, worked fine.

Seems that the only problem is TM and you won't make them go way with NFTs.

> Sure, but is there any reason this cannot happen without NFTs?

There is no fundamental difference if you swap the TM brand for another. By using an NFT-based solution, the middleman can be cut out entirely, while maintaining feature parity, and without introducing extra burden on venues. An OTS Free Software application can expose the same functionality to venues without needing to maintain any infrastructure, and without dealing with TM.

Sure, Ticketmaster sucks. But just to give one example, 11 years after Tim Berners Lee invented the web, Ticketmaster was selling tickets to the 2004 Olympic Games online: https://web.archive.org/web/20040206011648/http://www.ticket...

The Bitcoin paper was published in 2008. It’s been almost 15 years now - plus all of the advantages that you have with modern development practices that were unavailable in the early 2000s - and yet still nobody uses blockchain at scale for this use case.

If this worked better than existing options at a lower cost, then businesses would be rushing to adopt it.

What competition did Ticketmaster have in the digital ticket market at that time? What competition does a nameless digital ticketing company in the modern day have at this time?

The reasons for NFTs not being used for this use-case are way more nuanced then "it should have found success in the exact same number of years as selling tickets on the web".

> Digital event tickets could be sold directly from the venue to the attendee without any of the hassle of TM.

And venues could do that (they’re not limited to selling tickets via Ticketmaster), but then they have to maintain technical and operational expertise which is a distraction.

And there could be an OTS Free Software solution with far less operating costs than TM.

> And there could be an OTS Free Software solution with far less operating costs than TM.

Sounds like you've spotted a business opportunity!

Things like ticket master exist to solve the problem of every venue having to take care of ticket sales as well. This is again a feature out of touch people treat as a bug to fix.

That's exactly what an NFT-based ticket system would do also.

Buying pizza with a bitcoin? Is that the only use case you can come up with?

Electronic money, instead of paper or coins, is there to stay. However, bitcoin is a very poor implementation of this. The mining alone has contributed significantly to the earth's yearly electricity consumption.

I bought a car with Bitcoin while the banks were closed on the weekend.

There are tons of legitimate use cases. However, most of them aren’t immediately apparent to affluent people in the United States as it solves problems most of them don’t have.

> I bought a car with Bitcoin while the banks were closed on the weekend. > There are tons of legitimate use cases. However, most of them aren’t immediately apparent to affluent people in the United States as it solves problems most of them don’t have.

Are you implying that you cannot buy a car on a weekend in the US?

If you Google, you’ll see that not only can you buy a car on the weekend, but there are articles from insurance companies on adding car insurance, articles about whether it is better to buy on a week day or weekend, and even articles on buying on a 3-day holiday weekend!

Good luck effecting a wire transfer outside of banking hours.

> Good luck effecting a wire transfer outside of banking hours.

the beautiful thing about accounting and trade is that cash flow doesn't have to coincide with the transaction.

This might be more indicative of poor US banking systems than anything else. I can initiate a wire transfer on my phone pretty much anytime of day.

I'm able to make legal purchases that payment processors will deny pr otherwise aggravate with btc. The fact that a third party isn't involved with with transactions is important and serves as a reminder to payment processors to not politicize transactions lest they lose more of them to btc and other cryptos.

"grandparents only use cash, they don't trust bank cards"

You may not have meant it but it sounds like an argument made in bad faith. Cash has real world application and can be used anywhere. Not trusting bank card is a choice but the alternative can be used anywhere which is cash.

Crypto at best is used for get rich quick schemes, scams, dark web payments, ransom demands etc. You said buying pizza with bitcoin. Where ? Is it an anecdote ?

> Crypto at best is used for get rich quick schemes, scams, dark web payments, ransom demands etc. You said buying pizza with bitcoin. Where ? Is it an anecdote ?

To unpack this:

1. Crypto at best is used for get rich quick schemes, scams, dark web payments, ransom demands etc.

I think this is the bad faith in this discussion. Cash is also best for scams, crime, ransom demands etc. Knives are used to stab people, so should we limit cutlery to spnorkfs?

2. You said buying pizza with bitcoin. Where ? Is it an anecdote ?

https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/05/22/celeb...

> Buying the pizza with bitcoin was the first proof.

While some thing might work, it doesn’t imply that it is practical.

Perhaps I'm just a bit older than some of the folks here but I'm referring to this: https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/05/22/celeb...

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