[mvzvm]

Scam after scam, that's all blockchain is. Just another way to fleece the average consumer.

There has not been a single valuable use, a single product, that actually improves anyone's day / process / life / anything. I am very open to changing my stance if someone presents evidence to the contrary.

[cinntaile]

Just by the way you describe it you already signal that you're not open to change your stance. Which is fine by me, but don't fool yourself.

[mvzvm]

I am very open. Focus on the statement, not the person.

[cinntaile]

You received a lot of replies, did you change your mind?

[conception]

Remittances are better/easier. That’s the only thing I’ve seen and the tech to do that is trivial now and Bitcoin is terrible for it specifically now.

[lottin]

How are remittances better/easier exactly? With BTC you need to exchange currencies at least 2 times, as opposed to one.

[mvzvm]

Are they? I've had no issues with remittances outside of blockchain. In places where I have heard remittances are difficult, it is usually due to regulation, something this does not solve either.

[splintercell]

My Spanish teacher in Peru has to travel one hour by bus to reach the destination for Western Union money transfer. With crypto using local crypto exchange, he receives the money directly into his bank account.

[noxer]

Its difficult because it requires parked money (nostro accounts) in foreign currencies. This imposes a risk and act as "dead capital". At some point the cost to maintain the corridor is higher than the profit so the corridor is closed. Transaction then are routed trough other corridors which means multiple currencies swaps. More loses and more parties who want their cut. + it can takes days and the system are one-way so you have to ask the recipient if he got it to know.

Public ledgers can make a difference See https://ripple.com/ripplenet/on-demand-liquidity/

[crispyporkbites]

If this scaling blog post is accurate, a global payment network at 1m transactions/second, decentralised, is massively valuable.

Imagine if the only way to send a message to someone was through fb messenger or WhatsApp, and then someone invented email. The UX might not be great, but the benefits are huge.

Additionally if the eth virtual computer can scale with very low gas costs, there’s a lot of accountancy and banking functions that can replaced with eth code. Potentially some legal functions as well.

[jbverschoor]

You should look at it as a public service of authenticity.

Notary services / time stamping. But also noncustodian assets. Although still not usable for daily life, I think the more we move into digital, the more we will want and need better licensing/ownership of digital content. For example when blizzard bans your wow account, which is worth many hours and dollars.

Big tech has too much control over these things, and the road to get a response se or to go to court is way too long and expensive for the average joe

[mvzvm]

Your example makes no sense. How would blizzard banning a wow account (I don't know the game particularly well, but let's just use this since you brought it up) be solved w/ Blockchain?

[ec109685]

Guessing that those accumulated digital assets couldn’t be wiped away with a key press and instead transferred to someone else.

Still nothing stopping WOW from simply ignoring those assets as part of account deletion process, rendering them worthless.

[YuriNiyazov]

This is what people mean usually when they make this argument:

Blizzard can ban WoW accounts and take away your hard-earned in-game assets, and that makes people unhappy. Therefore, because capitalism, a competitor to Blizzard's WoW can arise whose killer feature is "we technologically commit to not being able to take away your assets because those assets are distributed through a decentralized blockchain."

Of course, it's pretty far-fetched. The "banned account had lots of assets" problem happens to a tiny minority of people compared to how many enjoy WoW because Wizards and Goblins or whatever, so to compete with WoW on the basis of "we can't take away your assets and they can" is not going to appeal to anyone. You have to also be better than WoW in other aspects that would make people want to migrate.

But the general idea is, "if part of your offering is 'virtual assets' you can use this technology to commit yourself to never being able to take those assets away". Hence ICOs.

[puranjay]

I can buy any amount of an asset that I think is more stable than my local currency.

Say, switching my Venezuelan Bolivar for USD, without restrictions.

[Ar-Curunir]

Maybe try commenting something at least somewhat related to the content of the article?

[asah]

1. Instant collateralized loans, e.g. BlockFi, with arbitrary complexity, all enforced in software

2. Fractional ownership and dividends for digital and real world assets, e.g. NFTs, real estate title

3. Tax optimization strategies

4. Hedges against nation-state fiscal policies that e.g. inflation - which in turn allow consumers and businesses to derisk investments

5. 24x7x365 financial transactions

6. tiny financial transactions without crazy fees

7. giant financial transactions without unnecessary paperwork or delays

I can keep going, but each is a multi-billion-dollar a year business.

[dehrmann]

> Just another way to fleece the average consumer

How? No one credible has claimed it's a good investment. The most you'll get is people suggesting bitcoin as an alternative asset that's a small portion of your portfolio.

[dandanua]

Silkroad, money laundering, tax evasion, exit scams, pump&dumps, crypto pyramids, ransomware – all this improves someone's day / process / life. Why don't you want to see the opportunities?

[c01n]

- Fuels research for applied cryptography (example Zero knowledge cryptography) and privacy technologies.

- Pressures existing systems (Fiat, Paypal ...) to improve and keep up.

- Gives options to people living in censored governments

- Shows us that one of our most foundational systems (Money) can be re-engineered using modern tech and experience of studying what happened in the past.

[base698]

Only if you consider the ability to afford food an improvement.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/22/world/middleeast/lebanon-...

[baylor121]

Someone from africa or russia can buy tokenized american stocks (like aapl/goog) that they wouldn't have access to easily in their national stock exchanges. I'm really excited to use tokenized stock projects like mirror that are popping up.

[legulere]

It's pretty useful for scammers, extortionists, drug sellers, money launderers and all other kind of people that want to bypass or break laws. But that's about it.

[parksy]

A couple of points, the first is criticising lack of real-world use-cases for nascent technology is like criticising the web in the mid 90's. It's like expecting the cart to lead the horse.

Having said that, there's plenty of projects big and small that have merit. Granted, a lot of published "case studies" are just marketing fluff to attract search traffic, that shouldn't be an indictment of the technology itself which shows a lot of potential, especially where complex transactions need to be brokered between parties with competing interests.

DHL & Accenture have investigated and prototyped uses in supply chain logistics for pharmaceuticals -

- https://supplychaindigital.com/technology-4/dhl-and-accentur...

- https://www.dhl.com/au-en/home/insights-and-innovation/insig...

- [PDF warning DHL case study] dhl.com/content/dam/dhl/global/core/documents/pdf/glo-core-blockchain-trend-report.pdf

Banks are serious about blockchain for reconciliation -

- https://australianfintech.com.au/cba-westpac-back-r3-blockch...

Use case for trading distributed power generation with power ledger smart contracts -

https://www.powerledger.io/clients/tata-power-ddl-india

You'll find most of these projects are in prototype phase or early adoption, and as I said there's loads of disinformation, but if you filter through the crud and look for serious projects with demonstrated applications or investments you should be able to see the potential.

Again if you recall the mid 90's, companies like Amazon were just an online book shop, or Google was just an idea in a statistician's thesis. Far more ideas bombed that were successful; there was a time when the internet hadn't decided what to do about advertising and settled on Google's model. There was a bubble that popped and lots of investors were left in the lurch. But eventually the ideas that worked survived and these companies are the largest in the world today and spawned entire new industries.

In light of this, my view is that it's a stretch to say "scam after scam, that's all blockchain is." at this point, although there are plenty of scams surrounding it, definitely don't write it off entirely just yet.

[wespiser_2018]

All of these commercial blockchains should really just be "traditional" databases. Byzantine fault tolerance is a ridiculous requirement for a project that runs inside a trusted networked, or between trusted peers. These companies are doing blockchain for PR and/or as projects with consultents, not as serious integrated software projects to solve actual supply chain management problems.

[mvzvm]

In comparing it to the mid 90s web, you miss three things:

Everyone I knew was using 90's web. Home pages, websites for companies, movies, etc. It just wasn't really monetized or centralized into the big tech brands you listed. There was already real use for it, even if it wasn't remotely close to its final product form.

There was very little scamming involved. Nothing the likes of which we see with ICOs, pump and dump schemes, etc.

There was also a real spirit of openness and transparency, people pushing open source, an advocacy for a "world wide web", etc. Blockchain is the opposite, where everyone is trying to carve out their own little kingdom and push their own scam coins up.

[john_alan]

Monero.

It’s provided a private money for the internet.

That helps people. It’s valuable.

A permissionless, censorshipless decentralised private money.

[deadalus]

Are there any other significant untraceable cryptos other than Monero and Zcash(using privacy fetures)?

[john_alan]

I work in applied Cryptography so I’m well placed to judge.

Other than Monero and ZEC (the latter of which has some issues for me which I posted about before) Grin is the only other project that isn’t a clone.

[tromp]

Grin is currently not untraceable (it only hides amounts and addresses, but not input-output links, which are mostly visible in the mempool), but could be if the coinswap proposal [1] is implemented and widely deployed.

[1] https://forum.grin.mw/t/mimblewimble-coinswap-proposal

[Sargos]

Ethereum via Aztec (zk.money)

[john_alan]

Not default privacy, trusted setup.

[Sargos]

OP listed Zcash which is the same so it seems fair game. I think it's also important to list it as Aztec can interact with DeFi privately and also be programmed which allows for complex interactions and an economy where money goes in and doesn't come back out often. This increases privacy and also allows people to actually use money instead of just temporarily hiding it.

[john_alan]

Yeah I agree that Aztec is more flexible than ZEC. But their weaknesses are a dealbreaker for me.

[noxer]

https://ripple.com/ripplenet/on-demand-liquidity/

This is a real product, real people use it (without knowing that they do).

[mvzvm]

Can you elaborate?

[noxer]

ODL is a product that uses a DLT (the XRPL) and a digital asset (XRP) to facilitate cross bolder transaction.

Instead of finding a bank or payment provider that hold the foreign currency you want to deliver somewhere and exchange it for you currency, this system converts you local currency to XRP send the XRP to the destination and sells it there for the local currency.

If you send money to the Philippines or Mexico you may have used it without knowing.