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Comment by stouset | Hacker News Reader

Nearly 14 years in, where exactly is this “ton of real world utility”?

Surely someone somewhere would have a product providing this utility, even amidst the sea of fraud and grift. I still don’t see it.

Some utility? Okay, sure. A ton? Not even close. Consider that the web launched in 1993. By 2007 (14 years later), virtually the entire planet had changed dramatically as a result. That is a technology with a ton of real world utility.

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Thanks to Ethereum (and specially now that there are L2s which have cheaper tx costs) I can distribute revenue from my business between different types of collaborators, without incurring in paying 120% in taxes for having "employees".

In Argentina if someone works for you more than 15/20 hours in a given month you are legally obliged to hire them for, at least, 3 months. The legislation doesn't fit in tons of cases, and led the country to over 35% of working people outside the legal framework.

Crypto gives people living in dysfunctional democracies a chance to participate in the global economy, something that people living in Europe or North America cannot comprehend.

And don't even get me started on why ownership of your money is important but if you are willing to read take a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corralito

Even if the laws are stupid, the killer feature you are describing is called crime.

Yes and we need tools to route around stupidity to keep checks and balances on stupidity. Otherwise locked-in stupidity can get even more stupid and that’s how suffering occur at scale.

If you don't like the law, lobby politicians to change it.

You don't get to decide that speed limits are stupid and go 100. You don't get to decide that taxes are stupid and not pay them. You don't get to decide that rules against murder are stupid and ignore them.

Wait, why didn't you use these examples:

> You don't get to decide what to put into your body and smoke weed. You don't get to make a choice about your pregnancy and have an abortion. You don't get to not be a chattel slave in 1840.

> If you don't like the law, lobby politicians to change it.

Some laws are unjust and it's your duty as a human being with free will to disobey them.

Drop the persecution complex. You're being asked to pay taxes, not commit genocide.

If I pay taxes I can't pay wages.

If you can't afford to:

* pay a living wage

* pay your taxes

* comply with health, safety, and employment regulations

* comply with all the other laws (this is a crypto thread, so that includes weapons laws, securities laws, international sanctions, and so many more)

Then you don't have a valid business. You have no inherent right to run whatever business you think you want to.

Also, to your immediate claim, I do not believe you.

What I can't afford is to deal with a regressive tax legislation [], while trying to get US currency in the black market [2] to save and pay for imported goods and without a line of credit because the rate is ~190% and inflation ~130% [3].

I do pay my taxes, also think high worth individuals should be subject of taxation, but your rigid framework leaves out many people that use crypto as their only way to get paid and/or save money because traditional banking system is broken in their countries.

2. https://brazilian.report/liveblog/latam/2023/10/10/dollar-10...

3. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-12/argentina...

"amassing currency to purchase imported goods without a line of credit" is not a human right.

I'm sad that tariffs mean I can't bring in dirt cheap liquor from the Caribbean to sell for massive profits but that's not an excuse to not pay my taxes.

I disagree, it is if you need the goods to buy supplies for you to work.

If I need syringes to work, national syringes costs 3 usd a pack (and they are out of stock) and I can get the same pack for 85 cents in Chile, I'll exchange pesos crocante for dolar blue, cross the border to Chile and get them there.

I wouldn't call it human right, but the idea of amass currency to buy goods seems pretty essential for our modern life.

Although it's sad that tariffs make selling cheap liquor unprofitable in your country, I think we're thinking about different scales of income.

This really is the key thing. Crypto allows for the evasion of laws. That's its key contribution. In authoritarian states this is probably a net good. In the rest of the world this is a harm.

"The killer app for this technology is crime."

I'm not condoning crime, but do you recognize that changing laws in an authoritarian state is next to impossible right?

Lives lost in Venezuela doing a serious attempt at changing. Do you prefer blood shed on streets?

I think that allowing people to protect themselves from authoritarian governments is often a good thing. I also think it is important to understand that if this is the killer app then we need to be honest about what it is and how that affects people in states that are more just. The benefits to those suffering in Venezuela cannot be separated from the harms done to people in non-authoritarian states.

Tax evasion is not its killer app, but I reckon cryptocurrencies can be misused that way.

Tax evasion is possible with or without mechanism. Real world example in Argentina: the way most landlords evade taxes is by charging tenants in cash. They expect you to go to their place with an envelope full of 1000's ARS banknotes.

So far I've not seen rents paid in cryptocurrency, but by extension, would you say cash's killer app is tax evasion indeed?

Yes, cash's killer app is crime, too, which is probably why governments like China don't want it.

People making the argument that payments are hard to trace with crypto & that's the reason it should be banned or ignored are 1) ignorant because crypto transactions are easier to trace than cash and 2) making a dangerous argument against cash for which authoritarians will be thrilled to have support

I'd say crypto is not very good for tax evasion. The immutable record on a blockchain thing may be a pain compared to cash in hand.

Nobody "prefers" it (psychopaths need not apply), but against a regime where literally their prevention method to getting replaced is "bloodshed", what is your suggestion?

To starve the government financially, through mechanisms of tax evasion.

As a very last resource, because again, I do not condone crimes, but: When tyrants rule, it's our human right to disobey.

Would you accept to be subservient to a power structure that doesn't work for you? For the "We The People"? Vote them away yes, given voting is not a deceptive theatrical show like it is in Venezuela. So, what are the other alternatives? Ruling out violence of course.

> To starve the government financially, through mechanisms of tax evasion.

I'm curious if this has ever worked before.

I accept that next time might be different, but previous examples would add to your argument.

Some folks in the US have been attempting to starve the beast for approaching half a century now. The only thing they have succeeded in doing is passing on trillions of dollars of debt to their children and grandchildren. They keep trying though.

I think tax evasion won't ever work as mechanism to fight tyrannical governments because it's your neighbor who suffer the lack of funds, not the ruling class.

I think more specifically it enables the evasion of current unlawful activity prevention controls, however evasion overall is a questionable assertion with the inherent traceability of public ledgers.

> In authoritarian states this is probably a net good

Crypto doesn't fix the problem with authoritarian states (or the drug war, or backwards prostitution laws), though, it's just another workaround. There's no shortcut around actual social change.

And the idealistic notion that crypto could allow mass civil disobedience didn't really pan out; these days, "civil disobedience" is usually too marketable and monetizable for it to not get co-opted by scamvangelists and corporations (which reminds me of the Black Mirror episode where they monetize the guy's suicidal protest against everything being monetized).

"If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear."

I'd say the ability to avoid penalties from "victimless" laws is beneficial, irrespective of the governing state.

Tax evasion is not a victimless crime.

It's actually easier to perform tax evasion with cash, as it doesn't leave a transaction history.

There's nothing to debate. Everyone living in society benefits from taxes paid - food inspected, fire service and toll-free roads provided, and so much more. Evading taxes is theft of service from everyone.

There's so much value in roads. You'd think that they could be funded on a pay as you go voluntary model rather than expropriation under penalty of imprisonment. Not to mention the opportunity costs of misallocated resources. If there were nothing more to say here, centrally planned economies would deliver the utopia their proponents promise. Somehow history hasn't played out that way.

I'll allow that pragmatism has an important role in tempering the extremes. Claiming that there is "nothing to debate" is a leap into absolutism.

Taxation is not a victimless crime.

Taxation is the price you pay to live in civilization. You can always give that up. Most people prefer the benefits they get from it though.

I literally cannot give that up. The US government demands taxes on all of my global income, will not allow me to renounce my citizenship without another citizenship, and the state department refuses to grant me a passport or disclose the reason why they won't grant me one, even with FOIA requests.

I'd gladly pay $100k for the privilege of renouncing my citizenship and legally becoming stateless. I'd actually have more rights as a noncitizen than I do as a citizen these days inside the US, especially when it comes to KYC and AML rules.

The federal government is going to print the needed funds regardless of how much tax income they receive

It is, under any remotely common usage of the term. A victimless crime is one where the directly involved parties all consented to the action.

If you consider the government itself as a "directly-involved party" then you would consider no crime to be victimless, since it's always the government who prosecutes a crime.

If you invoke something like "society at large" as the victim, then again you can exclude any action from being a victimless crime if you happen to think society is worse off if that action happens (e.g. certain sexual acts between consenting adults, certain types of drug use, etc.).

Tax evasion, along with similar crimes like smuggling and insider trading, are widely listed as examples of victimless crimes.

net harm in other parts of the world?

Illegality is not directly corelated with harm, sadly.

I mostly agree - but would argue its a lot more gray than black & white.

>in the rest of the world is a harm

Have you ever considered what might happen if that distant, authoritarian state suddenly appeared within your country? It has happened many times before, and I don't see why we should think it won't happen again.

Things turn around faster and faster as technology progresses, at least from my perspective

> In authoritarian states this is probably a net good. In the rest of the world this is a harm.

Most of the world is authoritarian and that's if you consider that the Western world is not.

> Crypto allows for the evasion of laws.

Uber allowed anyone to drive without a taxi medallion.

AirBnB allowed anyone to turn a home into a hotel.

Amazon allowed anyone to buy a book online, without having to go to a book store.

Not everything is about evasion of laws.

The first two examples were probably illegal (taxi laws, zoneing laws) but since big tech did it they weren't crushed and now it is de facto legal.

"probably"... also ask yourself who lobbied the hardest to make those laws...

Uber was absolutely about the evasion of laws. They went out of their way to break the law and to avoid detection of their lawbreaking. It's the main reason why I will never use Uber.

By extension of the argument, does this mean you also won't use USD? Plenty of people and even governments use it to break laws too.

That's not a parallel argument. It would be a better one if I avoided using Uber because other people used Uber for criminal activity. That's not my stance. My stance is that I avoid Uber because of Uber's criminal activity.

“I avoid USD because of US govt criminal activity.”

Great examples. Heavily subsidized under-employment scheme, profiteering squeezing residential space out of communities where young people are paying upwards of half their income in rent and giant logistics sweatshops laying waste to local commerce.

"how it started / how it is going" analysis of what happened to some, not all, markets.

Your first two examples were predicated on the evasion of laws, and the taxi example literally states what law it was evading.

Tax medallion's were created by the Taxi industry to regulate "cabs" and keep the grift going.

Using your own car as a way to give people rides, and get paid for it, fell into a grey zone because nobody had actually thought to do that before.

Let's also not forget that this is a global business with different "laws" all over the place.

LOL. Uber literally had systems that would detect suspected LE usage and actively lie about rides.

AirBnB openly listed properties that it knew (NYC) were illegal and had been told so.

Wasn't the same thing said about a lot of encryption techniques which are now widely used for non-criminal activity?

Not by thinking people

I bet the people making the argument at that time were convinced they were "thinking people."

Exactly, or to state the inverse: When a decent legal system can be leveraged by the actors, competing approaches all pull ahead.

[US specific] Without evasion of laws, women wouldn't be allowed to vote, black folks would be slaves, interracial marriage would be a crime...I can go on and on. The ability to disobey unjust laws is absolutely essential to the health of a society.

And what unjust laws in the US is crypto letting people circumvent?

paying for marijuana?

If that's the best it can do, meh. It's already legal in what, 40 of the 50 states? Sure, not at the federal level, but that'll happen sooner or later.

Plus, I think the vast majority of people pay for it without cypto as is, no issue.

Women didn't get the vote by illegally voting, slavery was outlawed in the end not just circumvented - the ability to change unjust laws is what matters in the end for the health of a society.

Just some sort of disobedience technology without plans for change and active work on that (including majority building and policy proposals) is not going to cut it.

You want functioning societies not some dystopia with a tech underground.

Wow you.. really shot your argument in the foot. All those unjust laws were, you know, changed. They weren’t evaded. And there are mechanisms to challenge laws you don’t like that don’t involve simply deciding you’re not going to obey them. But those mechanisms involve real costs that tend to blow away the moralising of most crypto bros.

If those unjust laws were changed what makes you think that regressive tax laws that keep coming up year after year won't be changed in the future?

>And there are mechanisms to challenge laws you don’t like that don’t involve simply deciding you’re not going to obey them.

I'm curious about those mechanism to challenge laws.

Is this true?

I mean, let’s buy in on the idea that it is good to enable tax evasion in dysfunctional countries, just for the sake of argument.

Isn’t the bitcoin ledger publicly visible? It seems to me that bitcoin isn’t providing a good way to perform tax evasion. It is creating a totally immutable record of tax evasion, that local authorities just aren’t looking at yet. This is, like, the last place I’d store records of my crimes. If anything it seems more like a (maybe) unintentional honeypot.

Of course, it is possible to obfuscate your identity through various means when using bitcoins, but it doesn’t happen automatically. And the US government basically beat Tornado cash, right? If you want to be anonymous on the ledger you have some pretty scary enemies I think…

Crypto allows evasion of banks for a direct money transfer, this is key thing. The laws are funny in that area.

You're engaging in tax evasion by misclassifying employees as IC's. Call it whatever you want, the essence doesn't change.

Tax evasion for a business that makes less than 5k usd a year in reveneu?

If you think that's a crime you are delusional about the uses of money.

Crypto allow me to create a structure where people can work in an animal health control for rural parts of the Patagonia (which is around 2000000 squared kilometers, five times the size of Germany and has 1/80 its population) and provide this kind of services for free in many cases.

I can now quit/leave/die and anyone can take my place to coordinate it in the same immutable structure.

And the best part? The state can track all the transactions if they really want it. But I'm sure no one is going to work to find out how six veterinarians got 125 USDC in their digital wallets in July 2023.

> If you think that's a crime you are delusional about the uses of money.

If it wasn't a crime, why do you have to use cryptocurrency for it?

Or is your definition of "crime" more abstract, not a literal interpretation of the law?

Because to hand over the money I'd need to travel 1000 KMs [1].

And if you want to know "why you don't simply transfer through a bank?" I encourage you to read the Corralito wiki.

Just before the Corralito ended, there was an asymmetric pesification of bank deposits. This meant that if you had 100k USD in your account on Monday, by Friday it would be converted to 100k ARS at a rate of 4 ARS = 1 USD, effectively leaving you with just 25k USD.

This event left a general feeling of discomfort regarding leaving real money (in terms of store of value) in the bank.

1. https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Viedma,+R%C3%ADo+Negro+Provi...

> If you think that's a crime you are delusional about the uses of money

Tax evasion is against the law and therefore is objectively a crime. Whether or not the law is good is a different discussion entirely.

Maybe you have a heavy US centric point of view?

I don't condone tax evasion, but if I can't work because the State wants to go broke before I can even start running my business sorry but no one will do it.

I suspect that you misunderstood my point. My point is that if you are doing something that is against the law, then it's against the law by definition. It's just logic, not cultural bias.

I'm not commenting on whether this particular case of lawbreaking is morally supportable or not. Even if it's 100% morally justified, it's still lawbreaking.

Ahh, now I got you.

Perhaps it's against the written law, but I think in most countries I am aware of, laws are subject to the judges' interpretation.

If you want to start a business you need capital. No access to capital does not give you carte blanche to break the law.

It's not the magnitude, it's the mens rea (motive and intent).

Really, thats your selling point?

"Shitcoin allows easy fraud, destruction of employment, and subversion of laws we dont like at scale, because it's not a fiat currency"

Seriously, if that's your selling point, kill it with fire and bury it in the desert. (shitcoin, not you).

Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

If you associate crypto only with shitcoins maybe your twitter bubble is a bit fucked up.

>Crypto gives people living in dysfunctional democracies a chance to participate in the global economy, something that people living in Europe or North America cannot comprehend.

Corruption (which tax evasion is a facet of) is how you end up with dysfunctional governments. Endemic corruption breeds corruption breeds corruption. Crypto facilitates corruption and crime, which is antagonistic if your goal is a healthy society or good governance.

>I can distribute revenue from my business between different types of collaborators, without incurring in paying 120% in taxes for having "employees"

Paying in ethereum, gift cards, gold, etc doesn’t change if they are employees or reduce how much tax you owe

> I can distribute revenue from my business between different types of collaborators, without incurring in paying 120% in taxes for having "employees".

I'm always fascinated when people come right out and say that the primary use case of crypto is evading laws and taxes.

The strangest part is that using crypto doesn't actually exempt them from the law any more than using a bank account to wire money around. There's just something about crypto that makes some people think it's a safe haven from legal oversight.

There's just something about the "techiness" of cryptocurrencies that makes people think current financial laws don't apply to them.

>Thanks to Ethereum (and specially now that there are L2s which have cheaper tx costs) I can distribute revenue from my business between different types of collaborators, without incurring in paying 120% in taxes for having "employees".

That's not a technical feature, that's just tax fraud

You're evading taxes and worker protection laws. Congrats I guess? If your business model is dependent on flouting the law, then maybe it's time to rethink the business model.

???

The workers are the ones who can't get a job because of the "worker protection laws" you evoke, so you clearly don't understand the problems of Latin America.

This structure only gives them an incentive to travel hundreds of kilometers to a ranch where a bovine died for unknown reasons, for amounts that a western european would spend in a single take-out dinner.

> If your business model is dependent on flouting the law, then maybe it's time to rethink the business model.

Or maybe it's time to rethink the law...

Are you admitting a crime (tax evasion)?

Yea same. Really still unclear what utility it provides that fiat currencies do not. Not theoretical utility, like real world utility.

I think crypto will go down in history as an amazing example of the importance of institutional knowledge and regulation. Like how did nobody see fraud coming in an unregulated financial instrument? Did folks genuinely think that "decentralization" was going to sidestep all of the typical problems that we've been using regulation to solve for the past several hundred years?

It is perfect for laundering large amounts of value, transacting in business that might not be legal but is between consenting adults (sex work and all the shades of that, pharma/recreational drugs), or for storing your value somewhere that can't be confiscated or inflated away by your local government. You might be willing to tolerate some loss if these are your threat models or use cases (versus being wholly unable to transact).

Everyone else is better served by instant payments with utility pricing provided by a neutral party, such as a central bank or their delegate responsible for implementation and ongoing operations of the system.

You have no idea what you're talking about, right? https://www.axios.com/2023/05/11/stripes-crypto-strategy

"Accepting money is one thing, but paying out money to the rest of the world — especially long-tail countries with poor banking rails is another thing," he said. "It works better than fiat payments in a lot of cases," he added."

Okay ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If you want to bet $10k on the success of this, outline the success criteria and deadline for evaluation of the bet and we'll spin up a Long Bet [1].

Stripe talks a lot, while TranferWise (among others) gets shit done wrt cross border payments on real rails. Crypto is slowly dying while central banks raise rates globally, making the casino attempt at yield unpalatable (most crypto trading was gambling). Africa, for example, is going digital payments faster than some developed countries [2] [3].

Stripe's problem (along with Visa and Mastercard for that matter) is that developing countries are leapfrogging developed world financial infra, and owning it themselves to prevent "light colonization" of this critical financial infra. This compresses the global TAM for the for profit folks who are skimming off rails volume.

[1] https://longbets.org/

[2] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-i...

[3] https://papss.com/

Of course, moving the goal-posts are we?

> "Stripe talks a lot, while TranferWise (among others) gets shit done wrt cross border payments on real rails."

Stripe has also shipped theirs though and it is available and is in use. [0] So have Moneygram [1], Visa [2], Checkout.com [3], PayPal [4] and beyond payments, Walmart Canada is using one right now. [5]

The fact is, they are using blockchains and they are not going away (or dying) anytime soon, like it or not.

[0] https://stripe.com/gb/use-cases/crypto

[1] https://stellar.org/products-and-tools/moneygram

[2] https://usa.visa.com/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases.rele...

[3] https://www.checkout.com/solutions/crypto

[4] https://www.paypal.com/us/digital-wallet/manage-money/crypto...

[5] https://hbr.org/2022/01/how-walmart-canada-uses-blockchain-t...

I don't believe crypto is the future of payments, domestic or international. That's my thesis, and I'm fairly confident in it. If I'm wrong, after evaluating all available data, such is the peril of attempting to predict the future. I will eat crow and say I was wrong if that is the future we arrive at.

PIX in Brazil and UPI in India are evidence of what instant payment systems do to incumbent instant (credit card) rails. Central banks are coming for cross border payments next. For profit firms need profit and investors. Central banks (or other nation state monetary policy orgs with similar functions) simply need mandates. Congress told the Fed to build FedNow (to prevent private/for profit instant rails from gating access), and they did, because they were told to.

Visa, Paypal, and others in the space have an existential crisis, no different than Intuit with the IRS preparing to offer filing for free. A Paypal stablecoin? Are you kidding me? Why would you use that versus an FDIC insured deposit account or a money market fund?

https://archive.ph/vh3Dh | https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-23/brazilian...

https://www.livemint.com/economy/indians-pick-upi-over-debit...

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecb.wp2693~8d4e5804...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37920633

https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/cryptocurrencies-tnc?loca...

https://paxos.com/stablecoin-terms-conditions/

None of the examples you mentioned are even world-wide, given that you can't use UPI in Japan, or FedNow can't be used outside of the US or PIX outside of Brazil so are totally useless for users outside of those countries.

These 'rails' are just meant for the introduction of a CBDC in their respective countries which will just have the same issues that Nigeria's eNaira 'CBDC' had which once that was tried, it was a complete failure. [0] [1] which UPI and PIX will have the same problems and will be no different.

[0] https://business.cornell.edu/hub/2023/04/28/nigerias-enaira-...

[1] https://www.pymnts.com/cbdc/2022/nigeria-cuts-atm-cash-withd...

You seem to be very pro crypto, so I don't believe we're going to find middle ground. Appreciate the debate regardless!

the things you're talking about are the selling point, not the problem. the foundational idea of cryptocurrency is that it is unregulated and therefore allows for fraud, crime, privacy, secrecy whatever. if you don't want to expose yourself to that, don't engage with crypto. much like with TOR, they're a necessary evil to provide online freedom

the problems as I see them are too much private regulation of the market—centralised exchanges that have too much power—and public regulation—KYC—which has largely removed the intended benefits in the first place

> what utility it provides that fiat currencies do not

Forex (for travelers) perhaps? Technically, fiat itself does not provide exchange. you always need a broker or a counterparty. crypto provides liquidity that can replace a paid service (yes I know crypto also has fees).

I have never owned crypto but I think it's a great idea as a currency that should have been able to compete with paypal/credit cards, but somehow didn't. I think that's its greatest failure: the fact that 12 years later I can't buy a sandwich with it.

If all you're buying is sandwiches, you don't need crypto. Crypto is for when you buy things that are a lot more interesting than sandwiches :)

If I'm selling sandwiches, I could make a lot more if I accept an alternative payment with the same convenience as credit but lower tx fees. Privacy conscious buyers may prefer crypto than a bank that sells their purchases to advertisers.

Maybe rather than seeing it as _a_ currency we could see it a special purpose currency for money exchange? A transport medium?

If you are trying to keep your coin over a longer period of time you suffer the high volatility and are at the whims of gamblers. But if it is only used to perform a money transaction which otherwise would not be possible/too expensive/too dangerous, only to be exchanged against a fiat currency immediately after, that could be its role.

> Forex (for travelers) perhaps?

Again, we're talking real world. Have you ever travelled abroad and used BTC to buy something? Has anyone you know ever done that?

so the goalposts just moved from "having utility" to "myself-or-someone-I-personally-know got utility from it"?

> travelled abroad and used BTC to buy something

not the scenario I described. Forex is short for foreign exchange. as in, exchanging to local fiat.

What, no. The goalpost were always “real world utility”. Real world.

I did. Used to refill my eqyptian sim card at bitrefill.io. Much cheaper and easier than go search for refill card at merchants all looking to rob a touristo.

How else can you do private digital transactions other than with something like monero? Given that cash is dying, and mass surveillance on all transactions is incredibly dystopian for reasons I hope are obvious, it fascinates me that HN doesn't see the importance and utility there. What is one meant to do in a few decades if they want to pay for an abortion, buy a copy of 1984, or some weed, receive onlyfans money, or whatever the society doesnt accept in x years?

Imagine you're in a different thread about social credit scores, or mastercard selling user data, or Canadian protestors having their bank accounts frozen...

>Given that cash is dying

And famously, humans did ZERO transacting before the US invented paper currency, right? Or maybe a market exists externally to the financial instruments that can operate in it? Crypto isn't needed for barter. Crypto isn't needed for secret barter. Hell, swap buy sell guides were a thing in my childhood, before anyone paid for anything on the internet.

China invented paper currency, in 7th century AD.

> Really still unclear what utility it provides that fiat currencies do not. Not theoretical utility, like real world utility.

Because it gets you away from the fiat aspect of it.

I'm not talking about the arguments over monetary economics and whether we should just trust central banks not to print too much money; I'm talking about the other type of fiat. If you contribute money to the wrong protesters, "liberal" "democratic" Western governments can and will freeze your bank account. If you live in the wrong country, Visa and Mastercard will cut off your access to your own money as collective punishment for the actions of a government you didn't even freely elect. If you want to trade in goods the government doesn't like, they have ways of making that difficult for you.

Crypto got sold to finance bros as some sort of respectable financial instrument, which it clearly is not. If you're a respectable normal person in a Western country, crypto probably just isn't for you.

Right I am not trying to say that fiat doesn't have problems. I am trying to say that in the real world, crypto has solved none of those problems.

Really? I know lots of people who have used crypto to buy things the government didn’t want them to buy.

Okay, but why is it valueable or useful for us to boost up a financial system whose entire purpose is to bypass any form of non-violent geopolitics. Do you know what happens when you make things like sanctions less effective? You remove one of the only tools for countries to work through the serious disputes that doesn't involve literally shooting each other.

The sanctions were already ineffective, but that’s neither here nor there because none of my examples involve actual, official sanctions. Most of my examples involved people working around their own domestic governments. Even when it comes to Visa and MasterCard locking out Russians, that was, officially at least, purely on the initiative of those two companies rather than any formal economic sanction.

Blockchain tech isn't 14 years old, it's 30 years old, or even 40 if you want to go back to the '82 paper. Still no world-changing tech has come from it, aside from monopoly money.

Sounds like the wrong monopoly's Monopoly money.

I find it ironic that challenges to the state's monopoly on currency issuance are described as "Monopoly money". Also funny to observe that Binance is reacting to the regulatory moats created to preserve the state's monopoly.

Say what you will about the grift and VC backed pump 'n dump schemes. There's no disputing that. The controversy will be around central banks, the legitimacy thereof and Cantillon effects which result in much of the same via similar means.

The blockchain as described in 1982 is a perfectly good niche data structure. Maybe it's not "world-changing," but it's useful enough for our team to use it at work.

Private blockchain implementations exist--including fairly large ones. But it's fair to say that it hasn't had the impact a lot of people thought it would.

> Blockchain tech isn't 14 years old, it's 30 years old, or even 40 if you want to go back to the '82 paper. Still no world-changing tech has come from it, aside from monopoly money.

that's like saying that submarines were invented when Jules Verne wrote about them (i.e. you're wrong)

blockchain technology requires the internet, hence it cannot be older than the internet

What? No it doesn't. I can download the text from each comment here to put it offline and in a blockchain. All blockchain is is a datastructure, nothing more.

No, blockchain is a protocol allowing to insert data into that data structure in a decentralized and secure way. Do you know what "block" in blockchain is for? It is there solely for more efficient application of proof of work algorithm. If you appended each transaction to the chain individually, there would be a lot of reorganizations, unneeded network traffic and wasted energy, hence the "block" that clamps thousands of transactions together.

The internet existed in the 80s. How old are you?

the internet is a global network, but I suppose the telegraphs really is that old

Again, the internet goes back to the 60s. But yes, telegraphy was global a century ago.

The internet started in the 60s. Even if blockchain needed the internet (it doesn't) the internet was absolutely around in 1982. Even TCP/IP was being used in 1982, becoming the standard across the entire net Jan 1, 1983.

Blockchain the data structure is what Git is based on. However, it’s hashing function is optimized for speed/min collisions.

>Nearly 14 years in, where exactly is this “ton of real world utility”?

People usually qualify this with "moral" or "legal" uses -- crypto currencies are absolutely useful for tax evasion and moving money across borders illegally -- it's why many people use them. It's these exact qualities that draw in the 'scammers' and 'get rich guys' as well. So it absolutely has real world uses just ones you don't like. The next question naturally then is why don't we shut them down? Now you can see how powerful they actually are because they're aren't fragile either and very persistent.

>The next question naturally then is why don't we shut them down?

TBH I think one of the larger reasons why authorities haven't taken more aggressive action against cryptocurrency blockchains is the "prosecution futures" aspect. The capabilities of the system attract illegal use, and truly staying unidentified requires really tight opsec. This gets even harder if you want to be able to pull some value back into traditional currency anywhere in the process.

It is effectively a distributed honeypot the authorities don't even have to run themselves.

Sending money to other countries? You don't need to hold the coins long. Just buy some stable coins, send it, and other person sells them through a broker.

From what I understand sending money across counties is very expensive. Not to mention "bad countries"

Do people use it for this in real life?

Yes, I do. I'm originally from a bad country (Russia) but right now live in a good country (Poland). I still do some work in the bad country and USDT is basically the only inexpensive, easy, and fast way to transfer money from the bad country to the good country.

So the big use case of crypto is evading and violating international sanctions?

I don't violate any sanctions by sending my personal income from Russia to Poland. And it's still possible to send Swift from Russian bank to Polish bank. But it takes a lot of time to arrive and commissions are ridiculous.

Well they use it to avoid international sanctions but International Remittance is extremely common.

The fees of which are estimated to be over 5% [1]; I mean imagine losing 5% of your paycheck just because of currency problems!

The current Etherum TX fee is 0.0004 which at 1 ETH / 1,573.09 USD comes out to 62 cents.

Would your rather pay 5% of your transfer to send money home to your family or 62 cents?

[1]: https://fbf.eui.eu/what-explains-international-remittance-fe...

I would gladly pay 5% to support enforcement denying funds transfer to war criminals.

Are you paying your 5% dues? And why aren't you?

Talk is dirt cheap.

Do you realize the OP's use case involves funds transfer FROM war criminals? An average European, however, filling her car by gas imported from Russia (by way of Indian refineries), is transferring funds TO war criminals.

Arpanet started at 1969 and it was not immediately labed with certain groups as a scam, like here for years. That literally blocks the perception. So 2007-1969 is 38 years and not 14.

Are you claiming that in 1983 - it was mainstream even in the investment world that the only usage of the Internet was fraud and crime?

Are you claiming the investment world believes that about bitcoin today? Maybe dig a little deeper. Not everyone gets their info from mad money.

https://www.fidelitydigitalassets.com/sites/default/files/do...

People were very hesitant to enter their credit card numbers into any website. This is a financial technology, it will bring more risks and justified hesitancy until the right projects iterate past the tests of time.

We’re in the MVP stage as an industry with plenty of problems. Unfortunately those problems can impact lives in much more negative ways than a communication tech like the internet could during its “MVP era”.

And people started putting credit cards into websites where there were standards and government approval for it. So that fraudulent websites can be procescuted and the credit card companies will refund your money. ie the user is not at risk.,

When will there be this backing for bitcoin?

It was pretty useful for sending money to people. If you regularly need to send money to friends in other countries, the current apps and bank account transfers are a pain.

It may be useful for transferring money, but not because the technology is inherently better for that.

In technical terms, it costs more for a bank to send an email in between branches than to transfer money in between branches. If, using current tech, some U.S. bank would offer transfers anywhere in the world for $0.20 a transfer, they would still make money, and you would feel much more confident that the money will be available for withdrawal.

Now, I realize that due to various factors, it is not legal to transfer money to all nations, and there are some nations that dont have the infrastructure to reliably get you cash - but those are not advantages of the tech, they are advantages of the lack of laws.

You could build a equivalent, illegal, "bank" with headquarters in, I dunno, Russia? Transfer money worldwide for $5/transfer, and figure out how to avoid the feds. No blockchain, and you have acheived the same.

Strongly depends on where you are and where your friends are.

As someone who has been regularly transferring money between the US and UK for nearly a decade, using standard banking means has always been faster and cheaper for me than any of the crypto solutions that I've been presented.

Do you believe your own personal experience with those two English-speaking countries can be extrapolated to every other country in the world?

No, I've worked in enough countries to know that my experience cannot be extrapolated to the remainder. I'd love to hear your experience and how this did work out for you.

It's only cheaper if you and your friend are inside the system. The two eco-system are separated and this makes friction and cost high (if you are onboarding/offboarding liquidity).

It still requires getting people's IBAN numbers, which they usually don't remember. Inside each country you can usually send money with just an email account, like Venmo or Zelle, but internationally it's just cumbersome.

Or look at much newer LLMs, or even Gaussian Splatting. Clear use cases, rapid innovation, certain impact.

Cryptocurrency has two main applications: illegal transactions, and speculation. It's high time to stop pretending it got popular for any other reason.

The people still into crypto are the epitome of sunk cost fallacy

>Cryptocurrency has two main applications: illegal transactions, and speculation.

So, two of the most valuable applications possible?

The utility is distributing the money – if you don't see it, then you are alright with the bank system, having a credit card and a bank account. You are probably lucky enough to be born in a country which is not hated by the whole world, so it is integrated in the global economics. So as national of such well-regulated and established country, for you letting money to flow free always sounds like fraud and grift, but to some it is a matter of buying food and clothes, and it is an only mean of international money transfer left because well they are in a different situation and the current world can not provide you with even basic economic rights without discriminating

The utility is on the name: cryptoCURRENCY. Before it became a speculative asset, crypto faced the issue of adoption, now that it is one, it faces the issue of not being useful as a way to facilitate transactions.

Do you think it is possible that—despite the name having the word “currency” in it—the technology might just be poorly matched to what most people expect and need from a currency?

That might explain its almost complete lack of real world use as a currency outside of a few scenarios of economic collapse.

It doesn't help that the most popular cryptocurrency is intentionally deflationary. Deflationary currencies are terrible units of exchange.

Gresham's Law: Bad money drives out good. If cryptocurrency is deflating, it's becoming more valuable with time. The dollar is inflating - it's becoming less valuable with time. So given the choice, I would pay with dollars and hold crypto. That's just normal human behavior. But while that may make crypto a good investment, it makes it a terrible unit of exchange, as you say (or at least a unit of exchange that will only be used as a last resort).

But cryptocurrencies were designed to be deflationary which makes them shitty currencies. There's no point in spending a cryptocoin today when its value will be higher tomorrow.

But fiat currencies were designed to be inflationary which makes them shitty store of value. There is no point in saving in fiat today when it’s value will be lower tomorrow.

Exactly, working as intended.

You want people to hold real assets, not imaginary ones like a currency, because you want people to be invested in your economy. The only intrinsic value a currency have is taxation.

Currencies aren't supposed to be a good store of value, just a predictable store of value. Investments are supposed to be good stores of value. The government very much does not want people hoarding currency.

We don't want people just stuffing dollars in a mattress. That doesn't help either themselves or anyone else. So we encourage putting dollars/currency into interest bearing vehicles or real assets.

We don't want dollars to sit in hoards. We want them to circulate. If I can be without access to dollars for a while I can loan them to you for some enterprise. Then you pay me back more than I loaned you (and more than inflation we hope) because your enterprise created additional value.

If my excess money circulates I benefit from access to the things that money is used to build in addition to the interest I receive. Since I'm not a medieval landed noble my economic value isn't measured by the productivity of the serfs on my land holdings.

Most cryptocurrencies were designed that way, but some have a so-called tail emission making them disinflationary. One even has a completely linear emission of 1 coin per second forever since launch.

That doesn't help because inflation needs to be in tune with the economy, so somebody has to be able to adjust the amount. If the tail emission is too small then it's still deflationary. If it's too big, then there's too much inflation.

To adjust properly there has to be somebody who decides what "in tune" is. We're either back to centralization, or it's some sort of popularity vote which is unlikely to produce the right result.

It might be possible to have it self-tune to transaction volume, no?

It's not about the volume, but about the economy though. If somebody keeps sending coins back and forth between their own wallets, that's not economical activity.

Assuming there is a charge for transfers, that sets a minimum bound on the expected global utility of a given transfer, the sum of which, would intuitively be correlated with the size of the economy.

This is one of those Richard Feynman moments where perhaps it's more useful to consider the properties of the bird than its name. The technology doesn't have a soul, it's up to us to decide when and where to use it regardless of taxonomy.

I can call my fists "cancer-eradicating super-machines". Does that mean my fists are good at killing cancer?

While it may be hard to see in first world countries, imagine being in a third world country and having a place you can store value that can't be debased by your crackpot dictator. That's huge.

Why hasn't it been adopted in those places then?

It is always the same debate in any cryptocurrency thread. People from economically free countries cannot understand cryptocurrencies because they are not meant for them and label them as scam. They cannot understand what 85% income tax is, authoritarian governments freezing (or emptying!) bank accounts for no reason, etc.

I disagree. I think people in economically free countries can and do understand this. But, as you point out, cryptocurrencies don't have a great deal of utility to people who don't have to interact with economically oppressed countries.

It can't be debased by a crackpot dictator but it can be debased by the crackpot market. If you "stored value" from 2021 in BTC, you'd only have about half of that value right now. Granted, if you "stored value" from 10 months ago, you'd have 50% more than you put in.

But, I think those big swings make it a poor instrument for most people to view it as a real way to store value.

It sucks because in theory all the "smart contacts" exist to create an instrument that holds its value. But that whole space has been saturated by wannabes, grifters and imitators. With all the day traders out there, I'm sure you could find a counterparty for a 5% X-year CD (dollar pegged, let's say). And I'm sure somewhere on the cryptosphere this exists, but good luck distinguishing it from a rugpull.

>But that whole space has been saturated by wannabes, grifters and imitators.

You are missing the extremely important point that crypto is saturated by these types exactly and explicitly because of design decisions that are inherent in crypto!

The lack of transaction reversal is an explicit choice and explicitly empowers fraudulent activity over legitimate. What business or individual wants to lock up any value/cash/work they have in a system with zero recourse for fucking up?

I don't disagree with you. I think it's a strange case where the tech-smart "code is law" proponents really think, in their minds, that it's invincible "because encryption!", and every time a new heist/scam occurs they dig their heels in deeper and say "that's different, it wasn't the _crypto_ that failed..."

Even if it wasn't for elaborate rug-pulls, you could still lose everything to an evil-maid with a $5 key logger. That is just untenable.

Cryptocurrencies have a sort of value as a kind of collectable like art. Similarly to how people may like to buy paintings, have them appreciate in value and maybe trade them to other art collectors, other people may like to collect bitcoins or similar to likewise have them appreciate and maybe trade to other bitcoiners. You could say it's illusory but if it makes people happy does it matter? There's a lot of theoretical value there. I mean we'll all be gone in the end so if it helps you enjoy the journey.

I've conducted a handful of actual real transactions using it (over 10+ years) and I'm hardly a crypto advocate. I suspect that I'm the exception, and that even those who had the glowing eyes in their avatar and changed their username to "something.eth" rarely ever use it as an actual currency.

if presence of crypto accelerated various central banks towards faster digitization like India's UPI or very recent US FedNow then I'd consider that a success of crypto. you cannot claim otherwise just like you have to acknowledge role of Linux in us not be completely beholden and nickle & dimed to death by the likes of MS/Apple.

to be clear I still think crypto is completely take over by grifters & charlatans & the environmental footprint of proof-of-work is abysmal but still its good to have a decentralized alternative to central bank fractional reserve paper money. its as close to gold as we are ever gonna get now. if it were not so they (not just US but all around world) would not be trying to kill it that hard.

PS: dont own crypto

> Surely someone somewhere would have a product providing this utility

like tor escrow markets? monero is a great way for us to obtain things that haven't been legalized yet. cryptocurrency has already found quite the niche for transactions that don't want or need government meddling

-vicuna

Decentralized ledger tech is just starting to get there - blockchains are the first inefficient implementation, and newer technologies like Hedera Hashgraph can do it far more cheaply and efficiently. Services are dependent on network effects and independent contributors. As long as people are discouraged from using it we won't get solid examples of usage.

Wouldn't it be ideal if open source apps and platforms could go beyond the slow and risky traditional donation model, and not have to be entirely user-hosted or hosted by a paid company? Imagine social media platforms not susceptible to the pettiness of absolutist employees and owners, MMORPGs not debilitated by IP holders, cryptographically secured cloud software that follows the needs of its users. Perhaps like communes such projects are forever limited by the requirement of a modicum of participant interest and cost-sharing.

> Nearly 14 years in, where exactly is this “ton of real world utility”?

I don't think cryptocurrency has much value, but I think block chain has lots of potential for trading things that have unique ids and are owned by many people. I paid $1500 for research on a title claim and my lawyer came back with "It's looks solid, but I'd get the title insurance just in case". If property deeds were on the block chain then it'd be trivial.

Car deeds, property deeds, stocks, concert tickets, air line tickets, hotel reservations, all these would benefit from being frictionlessly traded on a block chain. That said, to be useful the entities have to be tangible and the owners don't really benefit (though hotels would benefit from the speculation since it'd even out their cash flow) or the owner is the government.

Like too many people, you have confused "blockchain" with "digital signature", which doesn't require a blockchain, and typically already is used to verify things.

If you need to trust a central authority to hold up their end of the bargain, for example trusting a Hotel to actually provide the room, then a decentralised system adds absolutely no benefit over the hotel simply digitally signing a ticket themselves.

The hotel must be trusted to actually provide the room, so why not trust the hotel to also store the booking information?

That’s the thing. Cryptocurrency and blockchains (at least thr way the Bitcoin protocol works) provides for an “easy” way to verify transactions in a low trust or even no trust environment. However most if not all transactions you engage in need some level of trust. You want to trust that the hotel has a room, the car is not a lemon, a house is not condemned. Putting these transactions onto the blockchain adds nothing to the trustworthiness of these situations and whether you get what they say you are buying and since a lot of advocates push “code is law” the finality of the blockchain will mean you have no recourse. You bought the nft of a house. The house being in ruins is not their problem. The blockchain is the sole source of truth, not reality.

Society should probably be a high trust environment and if it isn’t we should work to fix that.

> The hotel must be trusted to actually provide the room, so why not trust the hotel to also store the booking information?

Because the hotel then has to swap the reservation whenever it's traded. Let's say I want to book a hotel in the future for downtown Chicago Cubs making it to the World Series. As the season progresses it's a future whose value goes up and down depending on how they are playing. If the hotel is in the loop they could play shenanigans and charge you a fee every time you reschedule. The idea of the blockchain is that it's out of their hands.

The owner of the room at the time of the booking shows up with the private key, and swaps it for the room key.

If you involve the hotel enshittification will ensue to make sure they grind out every last cent.

Also, being on a blockchain allows for trades such as swapping rooms across chains, trading rooms for cars, etc. The blockchain unifies ownership and rights as tradeable like money did for barter. There is a common unifying method of exchange.

You're literally suggesting turning hotel stays into speculative financial assets. This is, fundamentally, a really dumb idea. Whilst hotels do price sometimes unfairly, your suggestion where a selection of speculative traders engage in (at best) zero sum - and it doesn't even benefit the hotel providing the service. Just faceless traders.

> it doesn't even benefit the hotel providing the service.

It does. Unused bookings are pure profit for them. It also means that they get the cash now. It means they don't have the uncertainties of unusually low or high demand so it smoothes out their finances.

* To be clear, for this to make any sense, the booking has to be prepaid, or at least a significant portion of it. Maybe just minus a room cleaning fee etc that is due on check-in.

> Unused bookings are pure profit for them

They want to be fully booked, because not only does it avoid the appearance and vibe of being a "ghost town", they also make a lot of money on things like the hotel bar, minibars, laundry services, etc.

If a room stays un-used, the marginal cost to the hotel does not actually decrease much, especially not in the short term.

They still pay the same to their laundry contract, they still pay the same rent, they still pay for the front of house staff and the chefs to be there, and they still pay to heat / AC most of the hotel.

They might save very marginally on some room AC not being on as much, and eventually if the reduced bookings was noticeable might negotiate a smaller laundry contract, reduce head count, but at that point you just look like a failing hotel.

I'm confident if you looked at the accounts, it's more profitable for a guest to turn up than not, even if the guest still paid for the booking.

IMHO, this is a perfect little example of why so much blockchain/crypto/NFT stuff is silly.

a) Everything you mentioned here can already be done with just a database. Trading a hotel room, rescheduling, swapping across chains, etc.

b) The hotel has no incentive to allow any of this

If the hotel ultimately owns the room then I'm pretty sure they would simply have software to look at exchanges on the chain and could charge you if you've swapped it. They could also simply not honor your booking. I think this is the point regarding "the real world" vs the idea of "digital ownership". You can have a token that says you get to stay a week in a given room and I (as the hotel) can say "no, this token is no longer valid within our system and the room has been rebooked". Crypto/blockchain can't enforce anything in the real world. The hotel though, backed by real-world laws, can say "there is an additional fee for swapping the reservation and you're outside of the refund period.". If you attempt to stay, you'll be arrested. So you see there's no actual power behind a digital representation of ownership unless governments (which crypto doesn't want involved) grant them.

> Crypto/blockchain can't enforce anything in the real world.

Exactly! At some point a real person has to choose to honor your hotel room NFT or not, just as easily as they could choose to honor your driver's license or not. There's no advantage to mucking up the entire system with crypto and blockchain.

If you put the property deed and your best attempt at its history in a public database, such as a blockchain, then all you've got is your best attempt at the property deed's history. You're still going to want to buy title insurance.

> If property deeds were on the block chain then it'd be trivial.

True, but then a ton of other things would be much, much more difficult.

Like, what happens if Joe has the deed to a home, but then Joe dies, and nobody has the key to his wallet?

If you have some kind of way, on the blockchain, to solve this problem, and reassign the property without Joe’s private key, then what you have is a situation where human decisions take priority over cryptographic guarantees. You can’t have it both ways—either the human decisions are trusted over the cryptographic guarantees, or vice versa.

This is essentially just a reinvention of centralized real property registration systems, where the current owner of a particular piece of property must be registered either at some government office (in a registration system) or on the blockchain (hypothetically). One of the reasons you want title insurance is because some deed (a piece of paper) may be defective for various reasons, and having a centralized registry (either at a government office, or on a blockchain) makes this problem much less likely. I don’t see what advantage blockchain has here.

> If you have some kind of way, on the blockchain, to solve this problem, and reassign the property without Joe’s private key, then what you have is a situation where human decisions take priority over cryptographic guarantees.

I have thought about this and it's solveable. Physical goods have to have some sort of "sanctioned violence" to enforce, so there is always a government. They have a public key that is known and publish updates. So if something gets legally confiscated, there is a message published by the government that amends the chain. "The owner of X is now Y".

> I don’t see what advantage blockchain has here.

Because it unifies ownership under a central mechanism and you don't need to wait in line at a government office. You have an API and a log. It doesn't really need to be distributed just public I guess, but having the ability to have a private copy for reference would be a benefit.

I still don’t see how blockchain is a part of this. You can have an API and a log anyway, if you want one.

The problem is that "simply put it on the blockchain" also means "change the laws around edge cases in nontrivial ways".

For example consider title on property. Just putting it on the blockchain would run into trouble when you try to implement squatters rights https://propertyclub.nyc/article/squatters-rights-in-califor..., or the government takes the title back with eminent domain https://ij.org/issues/private-property/eminent-domain/califo..., or you fail to pay taxes https://www.sco.ca.gov/ardtax_public_auction.html, or the bank forecloses https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/california-foreclosu....

Additionally what happens when the keys and person separate? Some scammer gets your key off of your computer and sells the title to themselves? Or someone loses the computer on which they had their title, and now can't sell because they can prove that they are them?

The real world is messy. And for most of the messy cases that the world has to deal with, the blockchain makes things worse. Not better.

If property deeds were on the block chain then it'd be trivial.

This is a gross misunderstanding of what property deeds record or how they are recorded. Property deeds record the real property owned, using geographical features and descriptors. It's irrelevant whether deeds are stored on paper or in a blockchain, because the method of storage doesn't do anything about the features/descriptors changing.

For example, if a river widens, or a tree is cut down, or plots shift because of an earthquake or ground settling, or if someone oversteps the boundaries of a plot...these are all situations covered by property insurance. The point is to make the homeowner whole for those situations where the deed as recorded (however it is recorded) no longer matches reality due to changes in the world.

> Nearly 14 years in, where exactly is this “ton of real world utility”?

You can exchange cryptocurrency for goods and services, even the ones governments and banks don't want you to buy.

It strikes me as a bit silly to set the bar at the World Wide Web, which is easily one of the most transformative fast-moving technologies in human history.

There is literally only one kind of "utility" that matters in money and money-like instruments.

ONLY ONE.

"Do people believe it will retain or increase in value?"

That's IT. This goes for the things you think are scammy, and it also goes for the things that you perhaps expect to retire on.

There is nothing there besides "what people choose to believe."

So there it is, even for crypto. If enough people believe in crypto/the stock market/social security, then it will work and do the thing. If they don't, it won't.

> Nearly 14 years in, where exactly is this “ton of real world utility”?

That's not a helpful comment, and you aren't even correct. the web was around in the 80s, 70s ... no wait the 1960s.

The number of years its been around is irrelevant to its current or future usefulness.

No. The web is NOT arpanet. This is an American-centric lie, like saying apple/Steve Jobs invented the mouse. The web was invented in Zurich by an English man in 89.

Saying arpanet is the web is like saying Minitel clients are personal computers. Yes, the underlying tech is basically the same, but the design and philosophy is different.

you are being dishonest in your arguments. the point is the technology was around for decades before the said creation date. their argument is the tech for crypto has been around for 14 years so if it didnt take off by now, it never well. you are trying to get around my argument by nit picking over details 'what is the web and what isn't', which is a dishonest approach do discussion.

Technology is usually around for a very long time before adoption.

Hey, someone bought a pizza with Bitcoin one time ! /s

There's a lot of utility outside of the US, in countries without stable currencies.

It's no web, but its a lot more impactful than say self driving cars (thus far), 3D-printing, or vegan meat.

Edit: This is not to discount those technologies, rather to emphasize that crypto is used by millions worldwide for real transactions.

Crypto is not more impactful than 3D printing.

3D printing has built real things, real products and has immense significance to fast prototyping.

Crypto hasn't built a single tangible item.

Crypto is used everyday by millions in many countries including turkey, argentina, africa. You may be lucky to have a great financial system in the US but thats a very narrow POV.

Is that utility somehow better than just moving assets into dollars or Euros?

And just how exactly do you propose moving those assets into dollars? Dollars are the first thing that becomes scarce.

Dollars and euros are in areas with the strongest economic regions in the world. What about the billions of people in emerging markets such as turkey, argentina, africa etc that dont have a stable currency to transact?

NFTs. It's like Steam's marketplace, but without having to have one company have control to ban anyone. It lets you safely make trades without having to pass your items to sites for them to hold on to your items for you.

> It's like Steam's marketplace, but without having to have one company have control

...and without payment processing, fraud detection, customer service, moderation tools, user reviews or a refund policy.

The network does the payment processing. The rest can be implemented at a higher level. It is like offering customer support for open source software. Technically anyone can build a company on top of the software and start providing support.

> The rest can be implemented at a higher level

Eg. the rest is optional and doesn't come with the same guarantees as the base network.

I don't hate cryptocurrency personally, but it's not hard to see how 99% of users would prefer "the rest" implemented well over a properly transparent blockchain.

Why can't the host of the image just delete the image? At that point, the NFT is effectively banned.

Also, something like OpenSea can block you and you're effectively banned for all practical purposes.

> Why can't the host of the image just delete the image?

If it's a blockchain, there's no single host who can do that.

The receipt is on the blockchain. The thing the receipt applies to (generally) isn't. The thing can be destroyed without the receipt being altered at all.

Only if the nft project host the image on ipfs. I wonder how many nft projects do that?

I level mentioned anything about images. If you have a LoL skin and the game shuts down it similarly becomes useless. Digital items becoming useless is nothing new. At least with NFTs they can at least be collectors items that you can keep if you want.

What does it do better than a classic centrally run steam marketplace? Why hasn’t Valve switched to NFTs?

It destroys the monopoly Valve has over item ownership and gives power to the people. Valve hasn't switched because having a monopoly is good financially.

It really doesn’t. Steam or other stores still have to cooperate ro implement the items on each of their stores to make them work on their platform and then have to honour what the NFT claims. That’s still very heavily replying on the platforms and they can still ban you or pull the item out form under you (and we can trivially see this by the fact that people have been selling things they don’t even own as NFTs).

For it to truly destroy the monopoly, the items that the NFTs represent would have to stand on their own, outside of any particular platform, implemented entirely in the NFT smart contract itself, but outside of the most trivial use cases (eg displaying an image) that’s not a technology that exists as platforms would have to at a minimum agree on a standard interface and functionality of items. Right now, it’s also held back by storage and transaction costs (although some blockchains are cheaper than others).

But even then, if there was a common item standard and you could use that to somehow implement cross platform (or cross game or whatever) items, any particular platform could still decide not to honour it or to ban you or whatever they want.

But why would any company want this? You’re giving away control of your projects for… what exactly?

Why would any company make a website instead of requiring people to install a native app where they have more control?

It does not. Whoever implements the NFT integration into whatever game you want to play is in COMPLETE control over your item. If they want to not let you use it, they can do that. If they want to turn it into a floppy penis because they think it's funny, there is zero cryptographic assurance the object wont be modified in any way between the blockchain and the GPU APIs that actually put it on screen.

NFTs "in games" is just laughable. It's a perfect microcosm of how crypto boosters NEVER know anything about what they are talking about, like even the most basic, first sentence of wikipedia things.

There is no system agnostic way to program videogame object behavior. Your NFT can pretend to have whatever functionality it wants, but it's up to the game dev to honor that. If your NFT is a jpeg that you want as a weapon skin, the game dev has to take that blockchain data and pull or parse the jpeg out of it, and there is NOTHING the blockchain can do to enforce that. There's NO cryptography protecting that jpeg after that moment.

And that's just the physical, technical implementation, completely ignoring that it won't get to that step because no game studio will ever care to build anything like that for any reason other than just to sell crypto coins on a marketplace for quick cash.

Or do you somehow actually think EA and Ubisoft and everyone put pay to win mechanics in their games because players are desperate to give them more cash?

It's also possible to make a browser game that uses the open protocols of the web, but target a certain user and instead of the game send them the floppy penis version of the game. In practice this doesn't happen. Game creators simply make games on top of these open platforms without the need to bully people.

>NFTs "in games" is just laughable

Microtransactions and in game economies already exist. Moving that economy to a blockchain is not laughable. If a developer doesn't want to spend development time working on features for the in game economy they can use the cryptocurrency ecosystem to accelerate their project.

>because no game studio will ever care to build anything like that for any reason other than just to sell crypto coins on a marketplace for quick cash.

If you think microtransactions are not a way for game studios to get quick cash you are misleading yourself.

No. NFTs let you trade some bullshit token. The token's provenance and ownership doesn't have to be respected by anyone.

The state of any particular blockchain doesn't confer any copyrights, license, or real world ownership. It's about as valid as me writing "I own a pair of Air Jordans" on an index card.

Unless a game developer decides to honor any particular blockchain and NFTs on it those NFTs mean nothing. There's no upside to a developer honoring third party NFTs because they make no money off them but do have support and development costs.

Correct. NFT's are the adult equivalent of the gold stickers we got on assignments in grade school.

You are still relying on sites to hold your item for you. Items don’t exist in a vacuum, having ownership over an NFT doesn’t suddenly mean things will just interoperate.

For example, if it’s a game item, you still rely on one or more games to honour your NFT that claims you own it, and to implement that item in the first place. If it’s an image, that image is still hosted somewhere (and even if it’s embedded into the NFT directly, those bits are given meaning externally).

An NFT is just a receipt claiming ownership, what that receipt allows you to do still relies on external services honouring that receipt.

NFTs only solve one small part of the puzzle and I’d argue it’s not even the most important one.

You can buy and sell digital assets without cryptocurrency. Also, the blockchain is not authoritative over ownership of those assets. Good old fashioned contracts are what enable transfer of digital assets. Crypto is just a terrible payments system on top.

Can you explain in a few words how an NFT is different from a certificate stating you own a piece of land of the Moon?

The NFT was issued by the creator of the artwork. It’s like a moon certificate issued by god plus we don’t have space flight.

An NFT could be a bond that provides 1 USDC to owner every day for the next year.

A certificate saying that you own the moon can not be a bond. NFTs are much more versatile.

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