[yeezyszn]

Sure - and these are all great examples of what you can do with crypto. Where I see parent pushing back is that all of these things were already possible before. You could buy jpg's with credit cards, you could buy gold with the dollar.

Before the spreadsheet it was extremely difficult to do arithmetic at scale. After the spreadsheet it was much, much quicker.

What's the killer feature that cannot be replicated easily without crypto?

[ericd]

My understanding of these things is limited, but I think the most interesting thing about them is that open APIs seem to be the default way to interact with them, not something tacked on after the fact, and you don't have to beg for an API key for each one, contact a salesperson, or whatever. If these things proliferate, it seems like one could compose mashups of services to build online things relatively quickly.

Also, for bitcoin in particular, the lightning network makes it possible to pay a fraction of a cent for something, which is not possible with a credit card, and it potentially offers a uniform location/country-agnostic way to pay for things online. Stripe has made that much less of a problem than it used to be, but I'm not sure it's quite 100% global coverage yet, and afaik they have no solution for micropayments.

[yeezyszn]

appreciate the response - your second point especially rings true for me and has set off some thoughts of my own:

I would say my 'theory of crypto' is that they're rediscovering the financial system. The financial system can do everything crypto can and more. The fact it does not is due almost entirely to regulation.

This implies crypto will be most useful in environments where you can skirt regulation the longest. I imagine cross-border payment systems(esp to emerging market countries) are the most promising examples of where this would be useful, and i know there are some groups working on this already.

This also implies that in the developed world, crypto has capped upside. The point at which it's big enough to matter is the point at which its regulated. It will rapidly converge to 'Trad Fi' without the institutional support the financial world already has.

Just some thoughts bouncing around my head that your comment spurred...

[ericd]

Yeah, they seem to be rediscovering lots of the reasons for regs :-) The whole DAO fiasco and the resulting fork was especially interesting to read about.

I think that it's much more of an internet-native payment system than anything we've seen before, so I have some hope that it won't just be useful for skirting regulation. It feels like a much better match. But we'll see.

My biggest issue is that Bitcoin (and all proof of work) is still a bit of an environmental disaster. Hopefully the carbon generation doesn't scale with transaction volume.

[CryptoPunk]

What crypto has unveiled is the total and utter moral and intellectual bankruptcy of financial regulations.

Take token sales. Before the SEC entered the scene in 2017, tens of thousands, and possibly millions of people were able to participate in early stage investment. The result is that those projects that conducted their initial round of venture capital fundraising before 2017, via permissionless token sales, have a much more distributed ownership structure than those that conducted their initial round in accordance with SEC rules:

https://i.ibb.co/qCjJWJb/FAK6ao-HVc-AAg-V-i.jpg

Amongst the projects listed in the graph, Ethereum, Cardano, Cosmos, PolkaDot, Tron, EOS and Tezos all had their initial token sale before the SEC's involvement in 2017, and consequently have majority public/community ownership of their tokens. Some of these projects, like Ethereum, gave ordinary people 1,000X+ returns on their investment.

A study on this brief experiment in permissionless, unregulated venture capital financing concurs, unveiling that token sales massively expanded financial inclusivity:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11408-020-00366-0

"The average ICO has almost 4700 contributors. The median contributor invests a relatively small amount. The ICO market appears to have successfully given access to the financing of innovation to a new class of investors, which is a long-standing public policy issue"

The rest of the platforms in the graphic, like Flow, Solana and Avalanche, conducted their initial token sale after SEC involvement, and the majority of their tokens are consequently owned by insiders, constituted by a tiny cadre of VC firms, who got to monopolize the initial token sale and thus enjoy 1,000X+ gains.

This amounts to an obscene exacerbation of wealth inequality in the crypto space, due to SEC enforcement of securities regulations.

Now the old token sale could be shut down by the SEC. New methods of token distribution and project bootstapping cannot be, or at least cannot so easily, and they are resurrecting the financial renaissance that existed between early 2016 and late 2017.