I think people here on HN keep underestimating the relevance of crypto for four reasons:
What crypto is already useful for is not to replace the cash in your pocket and your savings account. It is useful to replace SWIFT and Fort Knox.
What crypto will be useful for in the future is uncertain. But uncertainty does not mean pie in the sky. How the internet would be used was uncertain in the 70s.
Yes, nerds were already excited about the internet in the 70s. Have a look ath the "Mother of all demos": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
It takes decades to iron out the details of how to use fundamentally new technology.
Fear of change. Is there any new technology that HN is in favour of?
Have a look at the "Mother of all demos". It dates from 1968.
Some of its use cases such as having a "smart" personal/digital assistant on the computer helping organize your day are only popping up now thanks to the combination of LLM tech, model self hosting and MCP protocols.
No, because in the '80s there were already real use cases. Business was being done over email, thousands of home users were paying to get access to chatrooms...
How are there not real use cases for crypto already?
Surely more business is being done with crypto today than was done using the internet in the 80's.
I've been paid my salary in crypto for the last 8 years. The company I work for pays nearly all their expenses in crypto. I pay for my rent and most major purchases with crypto. A significant portion of my savings is in crypto. For fiat purchases, I'll use a reloadable crypto visa card. When I travel to foreign countries that mostly use cash, I'll usually exchange crypto for local currency rather than carry large amounts of USD or deal with sketchy ATMs.
> I've been paid my salary in crypto for the last 8 years. The company I work for pays nearly all their expenses in crypto. I pay for my rent and most major purchases with crypto.
Where's the value creation? At some point value has to be coming into the system, and as far as I can see that side still all bottoms out in crime or scams.
> For fiat purchases, I'll use a reloadable crypto visa card.
I've always felt those were an admission of failure of the whole crypto enterprise. All of the downsides and none of the upside.
> and as far as I can see that side still all bottoms out in crime or scams.
A lot of the value is technically from crime, i.e., using crypto to skirt government laws and financial regulations that I believe are unjust.
> I've always felt those were an admission of failure of the whole crypto enterprise. All of the downsides and none of the upside.
Ideally they wouldn't be needed, but they still allow one to take advantage of the other benefits of crypto (like unrestricted cross-border transfers) and still have access to a large markets of products and services.
This ignores that the internet exists now, and ideas spread millions of times faster. No other tech has needed that much time to mature and find use since.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m really sick of the “ok, crypto doesn’t have any uses now, but they’re coming eventually” defense. For one thing, it’s unfalsifiable, and I suspect this is why it’s so popular, since unfalsifiable claims are pretty much the only ones that crypto boosters have left. It’s also just pathetic: Bitcoin is coming up on 20 years old; how many technologies had no compelling use cases after 20 years? And this hasn’t been a neglected 20 years, it’s been 20 years of massive hype and tens of billions in investment and R&D, with nothing to show for it.
As I pointed out last time, Bitcoin was released at roughly the same time as the iPhone. Nobody needed to wait for use cases for the iPhone: the global economy immediately reoriented itself around the smartphone, because it delivered massive amounts of obvious value to customers. If this isn’t happening around cryptocurrency, at some point you have to face facts that it’s because the value isn’t there.
I don't buy it, crypto doesn't bring anything to the table that improve either SWIFT or the gold reserve that we actually need, but I understand crypto product developers see an advantage in switching from something they don't make any money on to something they do. As a consumer, or in this case as a citizen, crypto presents no advantage.
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.
Why is crypto better at replacing SWIFT and Fort Knox rather than, say, SEPA or fiat currency (which replaced Fort Knox shortly after the invention of ARPANET)?
I would love it if the whole world signed on to SEPA, but I'm not holding my breath. And even if it worked worldwide, I don't want to rely on a payment system that can be used to censor even legal artistic expression (see the recent Steam removals) or political protest (remember the Canadian truckers?).
What crypto is already useful for is not to replace the cash in your pocket and your savings account. It is useful to replace SWIFT and Fort Knox.
What crypto will be useful for in the future is uncertain. But uncertainty does not mean pie in the sky. How the internet would be used was uncertain in the 70s.
Yes, nerds were already excited about the internet in the 70s. Have a look ath the "Mother of all demos": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos It takes decades to iron out the details of how to use fundamentally new technology.
Fear of change. Is there any new technology that HN is in favour of?