[chrisco255]

> These days I read a lot of cross-disciplinary commentary on the crypto asset bubble, and what strikes me as particularly strange is the sheer level of disconnect between people’s lived experience of this mania.

Rather than do an investigation or analysis of some of the broader trends and successful applications of crypto, this article proceeds to make sweeping accusations devoid of earnest research.

Here's what I would suggest to the skeptics, to research and understand this space better and why it continues to keep on ticking in spite of the snarky commentary:

Uniswap (xy = k) https://docs.uniswap.org/

the constant product model that Uniswap introduced made automated money markets practical. It's an elegant solution to the problem of creating an on-chain marketplace with a sub-1000 line smart contract. Uniswap has since improved and introduced concentrated liquidity for better capital efficiency. The exchange does multiple billions in volume each day and the best part is: it's immutable.

Curve (https://curve.readthedocs.io/exchange-overview.html)

While Uniswap is optimal for a long tail of asset swaps, Curve allowed for higher capital efficiency among stable base pairs (such as swaps between two stable coins like USDC and USDT). It achieves high capital efficiency for deeper trades with low slippage. It is decentralized and powered by a DAO.

Gnosis Safe (https://gnosis-safe.io/)

Gnosis is one of the most battle tested asset management and multisig smart contract platforms. Each Gnosis Safe is highly configurable, allowing participants to set up any m of n multisig arrangement and even reinvest treasury funds. A multisig can be seen as a light DAO and allows for participants to manage funds in a transparent way across distances and jurisdictions. This helps with coordination and development. The whole world of DAOs is interesting in and of itself, with many different organizational structures being tested and iterated on.

Aave https://aave.com/

Aave is a lending and borrowing platform that allows users to deposit and lend out their assets. The platform is kept solvent by oracles, which watch the price of the collateral backing the loans to liquidate them if they approach a danger zone. Currently holding nearly $30B in assets.

Chainlink (https://chain.link/)

An oracle platform that allows for off-chain data to be integrated with smart contracts in a maximally (but not entirely) decentralized way. This allows for anything from stock prices to weather reports to credit checks to verifiably random numbers to be integrated with smart contracts to influence their execution and state in a maximally autonomous and tamper-proof way.

If you interact with the above protocols, you'll learn more than reading any op-ed thinkpiece. There really is something there there, the decentralized finance movement is burgeoning and it is qualitatively better than what options exist today. It's more powerful, more universal, more programmable, even more antifragile than the systems in place today. It will win in the long run.

There are other movements too, with DAOs and NFTs. DAOs will reinvent all sorts of organizations and will make internet native communities self-funded and self-sustainable.

[paulgb]

What would you say is the best example of a concrete, real-world use case for one of those tokens that would refute the article's claim that blockchains are “a solution in search of a problem”?

I ask because a lot of these things (exchanging one USD-pegged token for another, borrowing a token for another token) seem like problems that wouldn't exist to begin with, without blockchains.

[brightstep]

Exactly, each of those examples is only interesting or useful to someone who already believes crypto has value. It's totally circular.

[chrisco255]

Your argument is circular. Lending, borrowing, human coordination, liquidity management, censorship resistance, art patronage, royalties, permissionless non-custodial 24/7 trading, community development, a global pool of start up capital that rivals silicon valley and will eventually eclipse it, transparent treasury management across jurisdictions, user ownership, etc.

There's no need to believe crypto has value. It has value. It trades 24/7 with a market cap approaching $3 trillion. The market isn't wrong about what has value, the market determines what has value. Deny that all you want, but it's not going anywhere, it will only evolve and grow from here. We've barely explored the design space for what is possible.

[prohobo]

Autonomous services (similar to vending machines): See PoolTogether, a service which before blockchain would be considered almost certainly a scam, and would be nearly impossible to audit.

Because it's on Ethereum the contract is publicly auditable, and the rules are simple: insert currency into a pool, and have a chance of winning a %age of total interest earned once a week. No one owns the service. If the site goes down nothing changes. The developers can't just change the rules (backend) on you. They also have a DAO so the users can manage the service themselves.

A similar service is Compound, which recently was found to have a bug that gave away something like $90 million worth of currency to random users. That's the main danger with blockchain services: exploitable bugs.

Besides that, I've been thinking about something like a blockchain based Wikipedia (or Research Gate?), with monetary incentives for research teams to answer questions posed by the community (when they can't get funding by other means) and a codified scientific process for grading the quality of papers, as well as mechanisms to reliably cite related research papers to use as supporting evidence or jumping off points. Think of this: a debunked paper causing a cascade of debunked papers that cited it.

The point of using the blockchain would be to create a decentralized repository of research information with strict rules to maintain integrity of the information submitted (as opposed to relying on a centralized committee that might become corrupt through perverse incentives).

[brightstep]

The first two are just gambling, which is not very different from the speculation the author talks about. Your idea is interesting and speaks to another desire that seems to me to run beneath a lot of interest in crypto, which is the desire to make social change without political action. My perspective is, we don't need a blockchain to reward that kind of behavior. We could decide as a society to create such a system in myriad other ways. The real problem I see is that we're (especially in the US) very much disconnected from the political process, which leads some to look for technological solutions to the problems they see around them.

[prohobo]

The first two are not gambling. There is no mechanism where you can lose your pooled funds. Don't believe me? Read the fucking contracts. How much clearer can this be?

As for the rest of your comment, I think your diagnosis is wrong. This is purely political action, which is why so many people can't see the benefits. They think blockchain tech was supposed to clearly change what's possible - but it doesn't: instead it decentralizes it and removes the requirement of trust, which indirectly enables new possibilities. There is no current system that doesn't degrade over time due to various influences, or is immune from corruption. Blockchain based solutions don't solve the physical aspect of trust, and so would require the buy-in and cooperation of society through politics. What blockchains do is solve digital corruption and codifying rules, which changes the way people interact with systems.

[paulgb]

But it is gambling, it's just that you're gambling your interest foregone rather than the principal.

Back to my original question, though, I don't see what real-world problem it solves to add stochastic variability to interest payments.

[prohobo]

That's not what my point was about. The point was autonomous services, and I also outlined an idea for one that would have real-world benefit (if properly designed). You can argue that there are no "useful" services yet, but not that there will never be any.

[theamk]

Hm... people put money into a pool, and then there is a random chance of payoff? Sounds like plain lottery, something that is sold at every gas station ever. for PoolTogether, there is a twist that this seems to be incorporated with interest-bearing accounts, but presumably you can get the same effect by investing the money manually, and periodically withdrawing interest and using the money to buy the lottery tickets.

And "blockchain based wikipedia" sounds interesting but has a lot of real-world interaction, and so is substantially harder than existing examples which purely interact with blockchain.

Overall, this whole conversation reminds me of the the new programming languages:

- "My new language is very great! Look, it can do HTTP requests!"

- "But existing languages could do HTTP requests as well?"

- "Yes, but my language automatically deserializes the request using Mozart-Rachmaninoff type system, which eliminates the whole classes of the bugs. No other language can do that! I am going to write a new OS in this language now!"

[015a]

Helium (https://www.helium.com/); a decentralized mobile internet network operator which enables anyone to host radios and earn tokens for usage, without compromising the connection security of endpoint users.

Filecoin (https://filecoin.io/); an incentive layer on top of IPFS to create a decentralized long-term object storage system.

Tradelens (https://www.tradelens.com/); in development, AP Moller Maersk's enterprise container logistics/coordination blockchain.

Anytime someone says "blockchains don't do anything which centralized systems can't do", I mentally interpret that as someone in 1995 saying "email can't do anything fax machines can't do". In the sense that: its kind of true, in that they accomplish a similar goal of sending a document from one person to another over wire, but it discounts as irrelevant the most critical, foundational thrust of why this new technology is interesting. For email: that it is all-digital. For blockchain: that it is decentralized.

In the 90s, the people who still clung to fax machines didn't understand why an all-digital future was important or would matter. They had spent their entire lives living in physicality, working with paper and file cabinets, and it was fine. The fax machine made sense. Email didn't.

Sure, centralized systems can do many of these things better. But they do so with the sacrifice of being centralized! Some critics inexplicably gloss over this like its an irrelevant, minor part of the argument. They've spent their entire lives among big tech billion dollar centralized multinational conglomerates, and its been fine. More centralization makes sense; email, I mean, decentralization, doesn't.

The point is not to make a better system, in every way; the point is making a functional system that is decentralized, so it can operate in a trustless, geo-distributed, multi-party way.

[phillipcarter]

>The point is not to make a better system, in every way; the point is making a functional system that is decentralized, so it can operate in a trustless, geo-distributed, multi-party way.

Let me preface this by saying that I think it's deranged how ad-driven and surveillance-driven modern centralized tech has become.

Why is what you are saying good for me and others?

I can see some value in a currency that isn't specific to a government, so that I can more freely exchange it for good and services anywhere in the world. But I don't live everywhere, I mostly just live in one country. If I wave my hands and imagine a future that doesn't exist yet, maybe if much of my life is stuck in the "metaverse" then that could have benefits. But none of these things require decentralization or trustlessness (in fact, the "metaverse" looks to be headed towards more of the same centralization we see today).

Please don't say "you just don't get it" or whatever that so many crypto people do today. That isn't convincing.

[chrisco255]

Crypto provides a global pool of capital, and smart contracts provide a universal interface for establishing programmable rules for how capital is managed.

This is a sea change akin to the discovery of double-entry bookkeeping or the common stock corporation. You may reside in one jurisdiction your entire life, but the whole point of the internet is to connect humanity. You have no doubt interacted with hundreds or thousands of people in your lifetime online that reside in other states or countries than yourself.

If you want to coordinate with people across jurisdictions to create a venture or a charity or a political movement or a software start up or a video game project or create an artistic franchise, traditionally you need a pre-established relationship to do so. Because one person ultimately has to be in charge of finances if capital is involved. This creates a touchy situation. What happens if your partner in China or Argentina or Zimbabwe wants to custody the funds? You need to not only trust the person to be the treasurer and not run off with the money, but also the local banking laws and rules guarding those bank accounts. This makes coordination across distances difficult and unpredictable and fraught with risk.

Contrast that with placing those funds in a multisig, where you and your 3 teammates (from 3 different countries) all must sign-off on every expenditure from that multisig smart contract. Maybe you're ok with 3 out of 4 signing off on expenditures, that's fully customizable, since it's all code. You can also effortlessly swap between different currency pairs, whether that be Ether, or Bitcoin, or USDC, or Japanese Yen, and reinvest the treasury into yield generating strategies (since there is demand for on-chain loans and there does exist permissionless 24/7 on-chain money markets).

Now, don't lose sight of the big picture, because there's 7-8 billion human beings on this planet, and currently it is nearly impossible to coordinate, raise, and manage capital in a meaningful way for the vast majority of these humans. This is unlocking the capital availability of Silicon Valley for the whole world.

[phillipcarter]

Distributed, borderless raising of capital seems like a great application.

But I guess where I'm not seeing it is here:

> The point is not to make a better system, in every way; the point is making a functional system that is decentralized, so it can operate in a trustless, geo-distributed, multi-party way.

A way to raise capital with less restrictions would support this statement. But that's just one application. And I'm not in the business of raising capital.

[paulgb]

> In the sense that: its kind of true, in that they accomplish a similar goal of sending a document from one person to another over wire, but it discounts as irrelevant the most critical, foundational thrust of why this new technology is interesting. For email: that it is all-digital. For blockchain: that it is decentralized.

This confuses the real-world benefit with the means of achieving that benefit. The benefit of email wasn't that it is digital, but that it is near-instant, accessible from anywhere, etc. It's able to do those things because it's digital, but the fact that it's digital is an implementation detail, not the thing driving people to use it.

It seems the issue facing blockchain is that it's stuck on the “it's decentralized” message without having a good story for why that matters (and matters enough to be worth the other trade-offs) to something like file storage or an ISP.

[Daishiman]

I'm not actually seeing how this helps decentralization.

At some point if you're a rich-enough party you can just take over these networks with enough money and resources. There aren't that many mining pools for BTC, and the distribution of ownership of most coins still follows a power law. These systems don't really do anything to discourage that.

Also you talk about the benefits of decentralization as if they were more important than the gains you get from centralized systems. They're generally not, except for fringe cases. For the most part I want a centralized system with someone to blame/sue who can use one big database to make my transactions flow fast.

I won't deny that there's value at the fringes to decentralized, robust systems, but that value is at best 2% of what crypto defenders claim.

[015a]

> At some point if you're a rich-enough party you can just take over these networks with enough money and resources.

This is such a concern levied against cryptocurrency; why does no one levy the same concern against traditional publicly traded companies? That someone who is rich and powerful enough could simply take control of Apple, or Walmart (assuming they make >50% of their outstanding shares available for trade on the public markets, which some public companies do)?

The reality is: It is a concern. But its a vanishingly small one. To do so would be, in many cases, suicide; and it would be even more-so with cryptocurrencies. It would take an obscene amount of money and resources, converted into assets which held value under the societal context of the status quo. The status quo doesn't like changing; the assets would probably lose all their value as everyone in the 49% abandons their investment. What would this hostile takeover gain? A few billion in revenue? They'd lose far more in the attempt.

For most newer cryptocurrencies (not Bitcoin), this attack is not a matter of owning 51% of the mining power, but rather 51% of the currency itself (proof of stake). To do so, for any reasonably successful and valuable currency, would be crazy. Its just not a concern, period.

It may be worth elucidating this, but: bitcoin is on the way out. The crypto community has absolutely striated into two groups; the bitcoin traditionalists who build ten acre data centers next to volcanos to farm their digital gold, and those more forward thinking who are actually interested in solving the bigger, more tactile problems with cryptocurrency like real use cases, environmental impact, etc. So, many of the concerns surrounding bitcoin, which evolved in the '10s when it was the fastest growing player on the block, are simply no longer relevant.

[theamk]

The takeover/shutdown is a totally valid concern with traditional companies as well, and happens all the time. See "our incredible journey" blog [0] for recent examples.

However, with traditional companies, we are protected by contract law -- if we are paying a company for service, they should at least refund the money (this is not ideal, see Nest Smart home shutdown, but at least something). And banks/investment firms have even more protection for users' accounts. This is possible because the company owners are operating within the law framework, and this framework, being very old and battle-tested, handles acquisitions properly.

No such things exists for crypto. If someone takes over BTC tomorrow, they can secretly siphon as much money as they can before driving the network to ground.

[0] https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

[paulgb]

The companies making mining hardware are even more centralized. Bitmain has been estimated to control 80% (!) of the mining market[1]. That stat is a few years old now, but if you look at purchase orders for large public miners, the centralization seems even more pronounced.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-17/china-s-c...

[perl4ever]

>centralized systems

It bothers me when people talk about (de)centralization because I think it's more ambiguous than appears at first and the definition needs to be examined more closely.

Things "on the blockchain" may be physically decentralized, and may not be controlled by one entity, but aren't they usually logically more centralized?

Consider real estate, which sometimes people fantasize about moving it to a blockchain registry. It probably seems natural to many people especially if they live in a country where that's how it works now, only the national government keeps the land registry.

But in the US, there isn't a national registry that determines who owns what. It's an oddity kind of like the absence of a proper national ID card or gun registry.

If we switched to a system that utilized crypto, it would be definitely marketed as "decentralized", but it would be a profound move towards centralization in a different sense. If the code had a flaw then everybody would be screwed, whereas currently we have this inefficient system with title insurance and so on, but if something goes wrong it's a local issue.

I can't be a true believer when I feel like the language has been corrupted and there isn't terminology to express things correctly so maybe people can't even think the thoughts they need to.

[BenoitEssiambre]

Email is decentralized. The internet is decentralized. This problem was already solved much more efficiently.

[chrisco255]

How many people do you know that run their own email servers or host their own blogs? Ah, yes, Web2 led to monopolies because the only practical forms of monetization were ads and subscriptions, and now 99% of internet traffic routes through FAANG servers.

[h00dui]

I personally think some of the community DAO tokens are interesting. For ex, $FWB (friends w benefits) is this membership type community where there are members + workers in a DAO like operation that utilizes a token for governance / membership etc. There are a lot of others popping up & I think in terms of tokens there is some room for improvement but some people are making money actually working in these systems.

Sometimes these memberships are in the forms of NFT(s)/tokens for access & that is interesting. DAOs trying to pool money for causes, that are interesting. It's early, yes.

The problems you write about - specifically the Token swapping id done because there was a problem (taxes).

[chrisco255]

Tokens are a novel capital formation mechanism. Because tokens are programmable and blockchain native, they are qualitatively superior to other forms of "fractionalized ownership", such as a stock certificate, for example.

A token can be used as an authentication mechanic for a piece of software. It can be used as a voting mechanic in a DAO, for example. You might argue that voting is the purpose of stock certificates, but in practice, it's quite impractical to participate in corporate politics. You generally have to attend an annual stockholder's meeting and put you vote forward there, and even then, you only get to vote on the Board of Directors (and this is rarely used in practice).

In DAOs, it's far more similar to open source software development. People create an improvement proposal and pitch the idea in the forums and chat rooms for the project, and try to drum up enough support, and then it will go to a vote, and depending on how the DAO is set up, either you do an initial temperature check vote followed by a final implementation by the core team, or someone actually submits a PR to merge into the DAO source code and users vote on that code directly.

The transparency of the treasury mechanics is also far more superior to anything else in the corporate world. With a DAO, I know at all times, precisely how much is in the treasury, how they've spent their funds in the past, what mechanics and rules guard that treasury, etc. It's all inspectable and visible on-chain. That makes a qualitative difference in the amount of trust you can generate among a group of dispersed strangers from potentially all corners of the earth, and it allows them to proceed in a productive manner in such a way that was not possible except for largely through groups of close-knit people working within a single jurisdiction (for the most part).

Open source does work this way (which has also had a monetization problem), but pair open source ideals with open source money and open source treasury management, and you get something that is powerful in the same way that Linux is powerful for computing. Except it unlocks this type of coordination for things beyond software development. It encompasses everything, from art, entertainment, charity, politics, business, etc. It's a sea change in the ability to coordinate human beings and capital across distances and to incentivize people to participate in a more sustainable way.

But stable coins of course, also solve a problem in and of themselves, because they make dollar-denominated token mechanics possible. If you want to program a smart contract in such a way that the terms and conditions and programmed rules depend on dollars as a base pair, you need stable coins. Programmable money is powerful for all the reasons above (it can be held in a smart contract, governed by a DAO, controlled by a multisig or by DAO votes or by certain boolean conditions being met) and more. It's also borderless, it's as easy to use in Argentina as it is in Kentucky.

And slippage and liquidity are very real problems that do exist in traditional markets, such as stock markets. We've seen the traditional system mechanics breakdown, like what happened with GameStop earlier this year, when trading was halted due to liquidity issues. At any rate, powerful stuff here, it's here to stay, and it will change everything.

[theamk]

How many people start their day and think: oh man, I have such a hard problem of "creating an on-chain marketplace with a sub-1000 line smart contract", I wish there were a product to solve this for me?

If you want to show that blockchains are applicable to real world, you don't want to talk about implementation, but about UX. For example, you are a business and need money. Your choices are banks, VCs, and one of those distributed landing / borrowing platforms. For each, how many money can you expect to get? Under what (effective, averaged) interest rate? Whom do you need to conivince? Do you need to provide any documentation? Can you use your existing assets as collateral?

An answer to this question will make a much more convincing argument in the long term usefulness of DeFi.

[chrisco255]

Here's the benefits:

Uncensorable. Permissionless. Democratic. 100% Availability (Ethereum has 100% uptime for 7 years). No $GME rug pulls like what we saw earlier this year. No Great Financial Crisis due to opaque liabilities (everything is traceable, auditable, open source, solvent, collateralized). Non-custodial. Yield generation. Programmable capital management.

It provides superior capital access and coordination mechanisms for not just first world humans, who also see a benefit, but for all of internet-connected humanity. It provides access to a $2.4 trillion and rapidly growing economy.

If you are a business and you need money in crypto and you don't live in a hostile jurisdiction like North Korea, Iran, or the United States, you can raise money on-chain. You can create a token with any emissions schedule, staking mechanics, profit sharing mechanisms, on-chain royalties, or whatever you can imagine as a programmer. And even if you're not a programmer, you can lean on tools that help to do that.

[greyface-]

> No $GME rug pulls like what we saw earlier this year.

Not true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum#The_DAO_event

Just like $GME, we have a handful of well-connected actors overriding the rules that typically govern the system, in response to a valid but unusual outcome that they don't like personally.

[chrisco255]

The Ethereum DAO event wasn't a rug pull. It was a bug.

There was a fork, which is a wonderful feature of blockchains. The original fork with the DAO hack still in place still exists: https://ethereumclassic.org/

Use that if you like. But clearly the community as a whole decided to repair the damage and move on. A fork like that would be too costly to pull off today. In addition, the maturity and growth of audit firms such as OpenZeppelin, have led to more secure DAOs, etc.

But by all means, use ETC if purism matters to you. Crypto is a free, open source movement.

[greyface-]

$GME wasn't a rug pull. It was a market maker making a market.

There was a suspension of buys, which is a wonderful feature of retail brokerages. The security is still purchasable today, so no one was permanently harmed.

Clearly, the industry as a whole decided to repair the damage done by retail investors and move on. A naked short like that would be too costly to pull off today. In addition, many investors have learned from the experience.

But by all means, reject the comparison.

[theamk]

All of those are true only if you stay on-chain, once you touch the real world things get much messier. Coinbase had outages. The number of coins in your account is safe, but their buying power is fluctuating much more than any old-school securities. Instead of "opaque liabilities" you have bugs in the contract. And the currencies are only solvent as long as there are buyers and media interest.

Also, I couldn't help to notice that you have ignored my questions -- how will the non-blockchain businesses use it? If a bakery needs some money to get a new bread machine because old one broke, do you really expect them to create a new token and adverize it all over the internet?

[kall]

Quick answer to a possibly rhetorical question: You cannot get money from these lenders as a business, unless you have already created a crypto token as part of it.

[Negitivefrags]

All of these are just castles in the sky if you don’t have a connection back to the real world.

You might argue stablecoins are that connection but in that case you have to deal with both the fact that you could then do all these things in the traditional way more efficiently and that the stable coin situation itself is looking dodgy as hell.

[johnsimer]

Are all stablecoins looking dodgy? Sure, centralized ones, particularly tether you could argue so.

But what about decentralized stablecoins such as Dai?

[phillipcarter]

> DAOs will reinvent all sorts of organizations and will make internet native communities self-funded and self-sustainable.

Just like ConstitutionDAO, right? https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/24/22800995/constitutiondao...

[chrisco255]

Okay, laugh at that all you want. I see a community of people that raised $41M in a permissionless, open source way. Ethereum gas fees have been higher than ever recently, which does make micro-payments impractical on layer 1, but the ETH community is currently migrating to layer 2s, such as Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync, and StarkNet, which will make micro-payments feasible again. This is an early, early attempt at collective bidding. The next iteration on something similar will get better and better.

The PEOPLE token also shot up 2000% over the past few days, so anyone that held their tokens has more than made up for gas costs as the remaining community members will likely spin up a new DAO for a different purpose.

Other similar DAOs, like Pleasr, have been successful at bidding for works of art, such as the unreleased Wu-Tang Album (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pleasrdao+wutang&t=brave&ia=web) and the Edward Snowden Stay Free NFT (https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/16/22388548/edward-snowden-n...).

Stay tuned, my friend. You might miss the whole revolution if you blink.