| > I created an account just to respond to you. Honored. Thank you. I read the article. It seems Ethereum 2.0 will double down on its wildly successful model of collecting rent from all the ponzis that live on it. Good strategy. It's still not useful though. The litany of already-existing financial services the Ethereum community aims to replicate just proves my point--these use cases for crypto are already solved problems. It would be one thing if it's 10x better than the incumbent, but it's not even 1x better. A version of something that already exists "but with crypto" is actually a worse, slower, more expensive version of that thing. There has to be some hurdle uniquely overcome by decentralization that would justify the increased costs of this horrible implementation…like censorship by armed thugs. Who is censoring your ability to open a CD? A retirement account is the most boring thing in the world. I feel for the people in Iran and Venezuela who cannot (easily) access foreign banks, but these people are better served by using cryptography in other ways (e.g. TOR; E2E encryption/DHKE) to access back channels to funnel money overseas to a free country's financial services. People living under totalitarian states sanctioned by the U.S. will always be a superminority (let alone of the population with real money to invest). The answer to their problems isn't to blanket adopt a new currency with performance characteristics so poor they would only be feasible if we in fact lived under a totalitarian state also. Product-market-fit for Ethereum is designed for a dystopia where banking services are illegal; lending is illegal (and borrowers are required to over-collateralize their loans (?!!)); financial markets are inaccessible (stocks and businesses do not exist in this world, only lone wandering merchants with Trezors); every other currency is defunct or so volatile that somehow ETHEREUM is the best choice as a stable settlement layer; and you can't move because every country in the world is like this (yet somehow Ethereum coexists with global totalitarianism). Reimplementing financial services "but with ETH" is also very certainly not innovation. > You're too focused on the trees, you can't see the forest. Don't get me wrong--buy Ethereum. It is completely useless, but the price has nothing to do with its usefulness or anything I said above. It could be worth $100k without any use case because humans. |
There is no global, trans-national solution for financial services better suited for solving these issues than crypto. Your position of privilege in a first world country blinds you to the disruption available to bringing financial services to the 2nd/3rd worlds, though you are right -- it is the slowest moving gold rush we've seen from tech.
You also drastically underestimate the utility the global economy associates with tax avoidance -- disregarding the moral and legal implications, because that's what rich people do.