[gonehome]

It’s not we’ll defined in the post, but there are some easy examples.

Rainbow wallet is just working on a wallet with nicer UX: https://rainbow.me/

OpenSea, Coinbase, FTX - basic exchanges supporting the market.

Trezor and Ledger make nice hardware wallets.

If you’re specifically asking about companies that have their own token for something, I think urbit’s use of NFTs as IDs for their network is a cool use that makes sense.

The automated money markets are also pretty interesting and not scams.

On the NFT art side, BAYC has been making cool stuff and owning one of them is basically an entry ticket. The community membership aspects of this are more interesting to me, the art and it’s associated status is just what enables that.

I know less about city coins but I like the idea of a way to incentivize a group to do what’s best for the city - could be a way out of NIMBYism. It’s interesting at least.

Cryptocurrency has utility in its current state, but it’s a frontier. I think the Bitcoin for open minded skeptics post does a decent job discussing it.

[sireat]

Let's assume those are mostly legitimate (BAYC being cool is highly questionable but ok)

Even then all of those are services and goods for the crypto ecosystem.

So much of crypto space is turtles all the way down.

Besides evading capital controls, there is not much real world adoption for crypto still.

You start living in the crypto world and then yes you start thinking DeFi is cool and useful. I am yet to see how DeFi can help someone who is not already invested in crypto.

PS Mined first BTC in 2011 but got out of the whole greenhouse in 2017.

[ryan_lane]

Even if you're in crypto, it's good to note that DeFi is collateralized lending, for which the intended purpose is to avoid paying capital gains for the borrower, or making unrealistic returns for the lender because they're helping people avoid taxes.

I'm not saying this is unique to crypto (stock collateralized loans help the rich avoid paying taxes in the same way), but it's not interesting or unique.

[gonehome]

I'd read that bitcoin for the open minded skeptic article I linked, I think it makes a good argument about that core use case.

A decentralized global store of value has a lot of utility - more so in countries with bad financial systems and limited access to dollars. I think global currency/value store is the killer application of blockchains, and it makes sense a lot of the focus is on tooling/products around this. Provable membership/ownership via tokens is an interesting spin off.

Evading capital controls I think isn't a great use of it actually given the public nature of transactions (unless you're willing to flee the country I guess, which can be good for getting wealth out of countries with authoritarian governments).

The ability to publish and update decentralized state is a new ability and useful. There are obvious tradeoffs around speed and complexity and a lot of things should not make that tradeoff, but the use cases here are real - at least I'd bet on that, it's not "all a scam".