[mynegation]

I am genuinely interested what are those problems that decentralized apps and cryptocurrency solve? Anonymity of payments? Bitcoin is a shitty way to pay for anything and I want convenience first and most of the time I do not care about anonymity at all. Smart contracts? After 2008 there was talk about including Python code into contracts to codify distribution of gains in MBS’s. Pretty low tech and workable. Did not happen, because finance is still largely a business of relationships and trust.

[EthanHeilman]

>Anonymity of payments? Bitcoin is a shitty way to pay for anything and I want convenience first and most of the time I do not care about anonymity at all.

Unfortunately Bitcoin provides much less anonymity than cash or credit card payments. Bitcoin provides excellent censorship resistance, in that Bitcoin lets anyone who has Bitcoin send Bitcoin to anyone that wants Bitcoin (assuming of course internet access and fairly technical users). Additionally Bitcoin lets people custody Bitcoins like cash or gold and also lets those same users send Bitcoins digitally. This is a new development and something people couldn't do before. We are still in the early stages of seeing how people use this new capability. Check back in 20-100 years.

Smart contracts, especially legally enforceable smart contracts, have existed well before cryptocurrencies, however cryptocurrencies provide a fairly natural setting for them.

>Did not happen, because finance is still largely a business of relationships and trust.

Relationships and trust mean a high cost of doing business, both because trust is expensive and because relationships are not able to be automated. Cryptocurrencies and smart contracts offer a technical substitute for trust. This substitute is not good in all cases and has some serious tradeoffs. However there are some areas in which it is a clear improvement.

[jjeaff]

I agree that cash is better for anonymous transactions ... Sometimes. But I don't follow that credit cards are more anonymous that Bitcoin.

You generally have to give up your ssn and lots of private data to get a credit card. Your name is tied to it.

Cash is great, but does require you or someone to physically deliver it.

But crypto can be laundered through a mixing service over a tor connection and when done properly and carefully, would be essentially untraceable.

[EthanHeilman]

>But I don't follow that credit cards are more anonymous that Bitcoin.

Credit card transactions are private between you, the merchant, the processor and your bank and anyone those parties sell your data to. Whereas Bitcoin transactions are recorded on a public immutable ledger.

>But crypto can be laundered through a mixing service over a tor connection and when done properly and carefully, would be essentially untraceable.

You can certainly obfuscate Bitcoin transactions. I even wrote a tumbling protocol for Bitcoin[0] and have been involved with other cryptocurrency privacy projects. I believe that cryptocurrencies can achieve a high degree of privacy, but we aren't there yet.

Note you can do similar things to make credit card payments more privacy. For instance by buying and trading gift cards or store credits.

At the end of the day if you buy physical goods online you have to have them delivered to your house, drop site or PO box. That means giving out a physical address which greatly reduces your anonymity.

[0]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/575.pdf

[xtracto]

> Bitcoin is a shitty way to pay for anything and I want convenience first and most of the time I do not care about anonymity at all.

As a side comment, just two hours ago I paid an IPTV service with BTC using coinpayments.net and it was easy (scan QR code and click send) and quite fast (at first I was going to pay for BCH because usually it is faster, but I only had BTC in my wallet).

Really cool as payments technology if you tell me.

[stale2002]

> I am genuinely interested what are those problems that decentralized apps and cryptocurrency solve?

Censorship resistant, electronic, financial transactions.

You can make an electronic payment to anyone, and nobody is going to stop you. No transactions are currently being censored on most of the big crypto platforms, so we have provable evidence that it works for this usecase right now.

[mynegation]

Thank you. So, electronic financial transactions is a problem already solved by other means (and much better at that). Censorship - I totally recognize my first world privilege - what are the contexts in which this is relevant? Even if payment censorship problem is somehow solved, the delivery of goods and services can still be blocked, be it by customs or firewalls.

[dmichulke]

> Bitcoin is a shitty way to pay for anything

I think following the reasoning of many BTC optimists, your quote is equivalent to saying "PPP (the one in OSI layer 2) is a shitty way to have globally distributed, secured real-time chats"