Comment by ertian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ertian | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, there's a line early in the article about use, the gist of which is "[unlike cryptocurrency] the utility of the internet was obvious from the start".

But it seemed pretty obvious to me more than a decade ago what cryptocurrency would be useful for. I remember the ideas flying around in the early days.

It's been a bumpy road...but then, I also remember through the late 90s (and especially after the dotcom crash) when there were countless takes on how the Internet (and PCs in general) had been vastly overhyped. "Computers were supposed to eliminate paper, but we're using more paper than ever! We were supposed to do all our shopping and get our news from the internet, but Sears is thriving and I still get my daily newspaper every morning!"

Somebody could absolutely have made a book out of all the overpromises of the "Internet Superhighway" era.

The path to general use for cryptocurrency has been, and will continue to be, rocky. Moreso than the net. It inherently involves money--lots of money--and so it's been rife with scams. "Nigerian Princes" on steroids.

But I can tell you guys: before the rush of investors and crazy bubbles, before the scams and collapses, long before hucksters like Trump got involved, there was a group of people to whom the potential of cryptocurrency seemed obvious.

I don't see anything obvious about the utility of cryptocurrencies.

Money is not that difficult of a concept, you use it to store value or transact. As a store of value it has no intrinsic advantage compared to any other alternative we have now, and same goes to transactions, it doesn't bring anything to the table than current systems already don't do.

All the features people keep mentioning like the immutable ledger are simply not something we actually need or government have asked for.

The only utility is making money for the people that work on it, there's no societal value in crypto at all.

Money isn't a difficult concept? Tell that to the people of Turkey, on Venezuela, or Argentina. Ask them about the utility of money as a "store of value" or means of transaction. It can be mismanaged to disastrous effect.

Assuming you're in the US or EU, you have a privileged perspective: your currency is widely adopted and has been (relatively) stable. I think smaller countries (and especially the businesses therein) are better able to appreciate a global-by-default, noninflationary store of value they can use to transact with anyone, at an established rate.

You could cut Visa and other CC companies out of the loop: they'd be obsolete. Their functionality would be inherent in the network. That's huge savings, reduced complexity, and you don't have arbitrary companies with the ability to blackmail you.

Microtransactions online would become feasible, and would use the very same infrastructure as multi-billion-dollar global transactions. Nice and simple. No fax machines or SWIFT codes or intermediary banks. No reliance on banks with a monopoly on access to the financial system, that can pull a plug on a project at any time for any reason--or prevent interesting experiments from happening in the first place.

You know some places pay like 20+% fees on remittances? That's a shitload of money that the (relatively poor) destination countries badly need! There's a lot of gouging and rent-seeking that goes on in the economy (https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/economic-termites-are-eve...), and a lot of it is enabled by the rigid, crufty and archaic financial system. A simple, open, global public system would fundamentally change that.

I dunno. Your attitude seems the same, to me, as somebody from 1994 who's happily using AOL to read the news, chat, and send emails (though only to other AOL members, of course) saying "What's the utility of this 'internet' thing? I can already do all that stuff! Networking is well-understood, and the 'internet' doesn't bring anything new to the table!" Their perspective on what was desirable or possible was strictly limited by the status quo. Just as was the case then, the best and most interesting use cases of cryptocurrency probably aren't even imagined yet: the infrastructure is necessary to imagine them.

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