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Comment by crooked-v | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this was eminently predictable for anyone with, you know, sense.

Some companies, e.g. Square Enix and Ubisoft, invested significant amounts of money to NFT-ify their main products. The first of these NFT games were released recently. Not sure how they are doing but the previous SE CEO was pushing crypto a lot and then he got replaced by another guy.

Wonder if they are still on this path.

Even Peter Molineux seems to have given up.

I feel like the rest were riding the hype train for investment or just looking for the next free-to-play to cash grab.

I would agree, except I thought they were as worthless as crypto in general — turns out I was half right.

Well, crypto has still not demonstrated any use cases. The coins are just pumping for another round of ponzi scamming.

I kinda like the distributed ledger aspect, but there are lots of ways to do that. The thing that annoys me about crypto is all the wasted compute; it's not like when we succeed in factoring a large number, that creates sufficient downstream utility to be a positive externality. A lot of the alleged advantages over other kinds of currency only make sense if you're a) paranoid enough to think governments are out to get you on general principle but b) optimistic enough to believe in society where property rights are taken seriously and digital abstractions will continue to be convertible.

You’re referring to Proof Of Work (PoW). There are other methods which aren’t energy sinks.

Being able to transfer funds internationally instantaneously (or near enough), and protection from both censorship and confiscation are not use cases?

A better way to phrase this: why has it had no real impact on the market if those claims are true? Companies like PayPal and Western Union don’t seem worried, people never suggest it for in-country transactions, etc. suggest that the marketing isn’t true and the high transaction costs and lack of security matter more.

Because it’s happening slowly and people aren’t paying attention.

If a decade and a half with many billions invested is getting such slow adoption, why do we think that’ll change?

You have oddly fast timelines for adoption. These things take time.

None of the competitors needed anything like decades. Companies like PayPal, Venmo, Square, etc. had far more usage with a year or two of launch, and nothing like the high percentage of companies who started using them and removed the option because the fraud / benefit ratio was dismal.

The iPhone came out the year before crypto.

One of them literally changed the entire world.

The other caused totally unnecessary climate change and a bunch of people lost all their money.

So, I’ll ask the question that I seem to have to ask in every thread. It’s been 15 years. How long do we have to wait? 30? 50? 100?

I got involved with bitcoin in 2010. I never expected it to take off (price-wise) so soon. I thought maybe 2050, and I still think that's a reasonable guess. Overturning the global financial system from the bottom-up takes time.

ARPANet started in 1969. The internet as we know it today didn't take off until the late 90's, and wasn't a profitable world-changing sector until the 00's.

Maybe in edge cases, e.g., Ukraine where the money conversion is not a primary concern. But for any real use case beyond "illegitimate" businesses, like Scams, it seems that the censorship and confiscation is not really stoppable.

This starts and ends with the conversion from regional currency <> crypto where, e.g., a country may coerce exchanges to blacklist your wallet(s). This even has precedent in the US with wallets containing stolen assets being blacklisted from major exchanges making them hard to use at best.

If you're using an exchange, you're missing the point ;)

So it’s a fungible store of value that cannot be turned into useful currency.

Lovely.

So everyone just needs to buy enough bitcoin until every business randomly decides to start accepting bitcoin?

Can you provide any examples in history of a similar non-government currency having to wait for such a circumstance? Or a government one that wasn’t just waiting for a predetermined switch over date?

Why do you need to turn it into dollars or euros for it to be useful currency? Just transact directly.

not instantaneously, and with outrageously big fees (which will only increase due to the limited supply). And no recourse if someone manages to steal stuff? No, that is the opposite of protection.

Lightning transfers are instantaneous and low fee. No recourse is the complement of self sovereignty. It is a tradeoff to be made.

Right. That’s why the FDIC and police exists.

Society decided this 100 years ago. We don’t like the Wild West and scams. We like safety.

> transfer funds internationally

ttc fees increased since lightning became a thing.

It gains speed by compromising security. Lightning enables whole new classes of attacks. You also need to have a server or something constantly online, or trust someone to do it for you. Trust, for a supposedly trustless system.

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