[useful]

Selling a future that hasn't happened is fine. If you saw the initial version of the internet or a cell phone you'd likely dismiss them.

Crypto is rebuilding the same things that already exist but that process has the chance to remove people from a system who used to provide services and replace them with an algorithm. Most people would dimiss a NFT but some of the use cases could be great. If most laws/rules were enforced in code for business transactions would you need to spend as much money on a lawyer in your lifetime? That's the future of money and it's exciting. Will that happen? Maybe not, which is why it is speculative.

The problem is that a large majority of people who are speculative and most crypto assets are highly centralized, which defeat the point of decentralization to remove a few large actors from having control. Plus the scams and idiots in the space that income without labor always attracts.

[rchaud]

This is all pie-in-the-sky theory that has already been used unsuccessfully to exhort the merits of cryptocurrency. Where is the evidence of any of these benefits in practice? Crypto has been around for over a decade, yet its only uses post-Silk Road have been for ransomware and NFTs.

The Internet changed how we communicated and shopped in well under 10 years, and in an era when 56kbps modems were a luxury, and nobody had a computer in their pocket. There is no comparison between the two, much as crypto-maximalists would like for there to be.

[Trasmatta]

Cryptocurrency has even become less useful as time has gone on. The utility of the internet and smartphones was immediately apparent. Cryptocurrency fans are always reaching for that analogy, but it's fundamentally flawed.

[useful]

I'd argue that BBS and compuserve/aol were in the 80s. It took 30 years before everyone had a computer in their pocket and Amazon took off.

A debit card is similar to crypto. Is a debit card any different than cash for an end user? Did it cause big changes in banking? I can show you my account balance with a debit card. It may convince you I have the assets to buy whatever you are selling. I can bring a debit card to another country and exchange it to local currency. The merchant is passing on the 2-5% fee to you so that you can use a debit card. There is a huge organization of people behind that debit card.

[rchaud]

Amazon took off well before the smartphone era. Bezos was Time Magazine's Person of the Year in 1999.

I don't understand what you mean re: debit cards. Is it that the transaction processing fee is passed on to the customer? That is already well understood. The issue is that crypto is nowhere near to matching VISA/MC's per-transaction cost.

[useful]

My point was that you need less people for a transaction to happen.

The cost will go down over time.

[rchaud]

> The cost will go down over time.

And the number of transactions will increase over time, adding to the cost. So what does it net out to?

It doesn't look favourable when the bloated payment behemoth can get by charging 2-5%, but crypto transfer fees end up being significantly higher, and prone to surge pricing if too many people are buying Cryptokitties at the same time.

[useful]

The prices on layer 2 like lightning and polygon/matic are pretty reasonable right now. I don't think its far fetched to say that the network capacity will increase with adoption.

I only have a hobby interest in crypto, but even etherum is planning on having side chains that operate independantly.

To me, crypto's biggest risk is a lack of decentralization. The bitcoin network basically votes to adopt bitcoin changes but the etherum developers can force changes on the etherum network. Whats the point of proof of stake if most of the coins are owned by the original developers? Ala Chia. Why not just run a sql database if 51% of the network is owned by a person/entity or a few. Bitcoin is pretty decentralized in ownership unlike every other coin attempting to be a currency but pooling in bitcoin has put too much hashpower into the hands of a few.

Without wide adoption, crypto is not decentralized. There is little point if the various networks retain their oligopoly.

[mypastself]

Wouldn’t most laws need a real-world source of truth and arbitration external to the network? It seems like a lot of work just to arrive at what is essentially centralization once again.

And the people who might have initially dismissed the early internet would likely have not understood it. A lot of NFT detractors are plenty tech-savvy.

[useful]

Any time you deal with physicals things? Yep.

I wouldn't need a lawyer if a digital contract enforced a 2% commission paid to a wallet address.

I would need a lawyer if all transactions weren't paid into that wallet address.

If I use software to play a song and it uses an NFT to make a payment to the owner. I theoretically cut out a lot of middlemen whos value is making sure the correct people are paid. There are tons of edge cases where anyone can argue that this wouldn't work but I think that the system only has to meet a bar where it is potentially better than what we have now.

[tomp]

You mainly spend money on lawyers when things go wrong (or in anticipation of things going wrong).

In crypto, when things go wrong they just fork the blockchain. YOLO