You know what will save the crypto revolution? Actual uses that are not gambling, speculation on crypto itself, or scams.
I think the problem is actually deeper than that. It's not just a lack of good use cases, cryptocurrency's fundamental design goals are things that most people not only don't care about but would actively try to avoid. An immutable financial ledger where you manage your own keys is actually a terrible solution for the average person, so you need a super compelling use case to make up for the downsides.
It can't just be an alternative to traditional finance. That's fine for people who are ideologically sold on the concept, but people who just want to go shopping or save money aren't going to find that super compelling. It has to do something way better that normal people actually care about. Really the best use case that's developed is cryptocurrency investing as a get rich quick scheme, but it's hard to see that as a sustainable model for any "revolution".
Flatcoins seem interesting to me. A stablecoin that moves in line with inflation. https://decrypt.co/155775/flatcoins-new-thing-on-the-horizon...
IMO we need financial alternatives. If you see what happened in Argentina, Turkey, Lebanon...people's life savings being stolen overnight.
There is a problem that needs solving. Whether thats a problem that can be solved with technology or not, IDK. I doubt it.
https://web3isgoinggreat.com/charts/top (“$68,004,906,103 has been lost to hacks, scams, fraud, and other disasters since January 1, 2021.”)
Would love to see how much money PayPal and stripe freeze on a yearly basis.
If you want to avoid that you have to follow the original Bitcoin vision where everyone had their own node, but I don't think anybody actually works like that these days, to a very small rounding error. Everything interacts with some sort of very centralized service that can screw you over.
Yeah, you can theoretically operate without any of that. Just pretty much nobody does.
Who measures inflation? Why, the same central bankers crypto people inveigh against. This coin will give them a lovely arbitrage opportunity against all the holders.
And we see the same happen with cryptocurrencies with astonishing regularity.
Sounds like crypto to me.
You forgot buying drugs and money laundering
I use my crypto to buy extra credits on my private tracker!
> You forgot buying drugs and money laundering
Let's not neglect ransomware and spam.
Still a lot of US banks that block card usage in Cuba, but they don’t need to from what I can see: https://ofac.treasury.gov/faqs/738
That isn’t to say that the existing systems do things well, but the networking effect they have and the friction, risk, and learning curve of dealing with crypto tend to make it less fluid of the options.
Frankly, I’ve not heard of a use case that fits that description. It isn’t to say that it doesn’t exist, but I don’t expect to see crypto regain its hyped status until that generally accepted case comes up.
That’s all crypto has ever been and all it will be. But that’s pretty big. Gambling is one of the most enduring and appealing activities humans engage in. Lock people in a prison with only walls and cigarettes and they’ll figure out how to do it. People will populate an empty desert to do it.
So there’s that.
At least in the western world these are synonyms, and everywhere else it's still more often that the tech is used for theft than for authorized-but-illegal transactions. Irreversible, censorship-resistant transactions are like rocket fuel for cybercriminals.
The original killer app for crypto was sending people money in exchange for drugs, which fits my description quite neatly.
And I don't mean abstract ideas like "smart contracts", but specific things being done that aren't scams, illegal activity, gambling, or speculation.
Eth is now POS, a laptop in a corner can now "mine" eth.
That's overhead.
It's only people trying to tell me that the overhead is negligible who seem to be under the impression that low technical overhead means low overhead in general. Gas prices are evidence to the contrary of that.
Cost and value are two different things. Ethereum blockspace is in high demand with respect to its supply and that drives its value (gas prices), and this is irrespective of its cost to settle that blockspace (energy consumption, HW costs, etc...).
That's because like fine art, the mechanism that produces block space can only generate a very limited amount per unit time, and latent demand is always orders of magnitude higher than the supply. You can't just flood the market with fresh Ethereum block space any more than you can flood the market with fresh Banksies.
...no? Duplicating a painting has a huge overhead. Either paying an expert to laboriously reproduce tiny intricacies of the original, or building and programming a robot to do it.
And of course you'd have to research all the paints, strokes, etc, involved.
> You can't just flood the market with fresh Ethereum block space any more than you can flood the market with fresh Banksies.
And that's the overhead, yeah. Even after PoS, it's still a network that doesn't scale. Thousands of computers are doing the same thing, repeating the same calculations and therefore not improving capacity in any way.
Duplicates don't sell. This is very similar in crypto - if you duplicate an existing blockchain, its block space doesn't sell. Art - and blockchains - sell because they are original, liquid, come with durable social proof, and have resale prospects and/or utility (real or perceived).
> Thousands of computers are doing the same thing, repeating the same calculations and therefore not improving capacity in any way.
I think I get what you're saying - if a blockchain were able to run on a single computer, then gas would be very cheap because each calculation would only need to be run once.
Current blockchain protocols, of course, do not work like that. So if I might try to paraphrase your argument about overhead, it boils down to "if blockchains did not work the way they do, then gas costs would be cheaper." Which I can't really argue with.
On a side note, "can't be done without blockchain" is not the bar to clear here. The bar is "could be improved by blockchain".
"This allows people to break the law", which is what you are saying, is not a good thing, even if a subset of the laws being bypassed are unjust. It's the opposite of utility as far as I'm concerned.
Your second point is entirely fair, but only insofar as the added value provided by blockchain cannot be attained by other means.
That said, in many countries it is only illegal for residents of that country to facilitate foreign money services for others, it's not strictly illegal for them to take advantage of money services that do exist. In those cases, a borderless app doesn't actually break the law.
Basically, I can't agree with you that it's "not a good thing" that Argentinians are able to hold 10 dollar balances on their phone so that they can afford groceries next month. I think that's a good thing. People can afford groceries who weren't able to before.
By the way, I'm going to adjust that bar one more time. Good applications are ones where the added value "cannot be attained with less effort by other means", not where the added value "cannot be attained by other means".
By breaking the law. People can do the same thing without blockchain for less.
I would be hard pressed to find someone who could more cheaply and easily smuggle physical dollars into Argentina than they could smuggle in stablecoins.
Or maybe that's fundamentally an unrealistic viewpoint [0]
[0] https://blog.dshr.org/2022/03/vitalik-buterin-vs-reality.htm...