[telomero22]

Here are just some of the use cases

1. 100x cheaper, faster cross-border transfers

2. Immutable, digital, accessible, secure ownership of music, video, real-estate, cars, gaming assets, health data

3. Instant access to nearly all possible financial products (loans, lending, startup investments etc.) without a middle man

There are many, many more use cases. Crypto drastically increases accountability, transparency, accessibility, trustworthiness for every kind of use case.

It seems like you are creating a lot of straw men to not see that, for example an impossible standard such as saying not all of crypto is 100% decentralized, so it's centralized, which just makes no sense and is a very strong logical fallacy.

[yashg]

1. Nope. Still need to convert it to real money for buying something. Gas fees > transfer fees.

2. Nope. It doesn't grant any ownership. It's a just a pointer to a file on third party server. Ownership is enforced by a central authority. Code is not law.

3. Nope. Without an underlying economic activity it's all a ponzi scheme. There is no finance in DeFi. Just scammers running pump and dump schemes and rugpulling starry eyed idiots who think centuries old financial principals are useless and want to make a quick buck without doing anything.

Trust me when I say this, I did a lot of research and reading in earnest. I really hoped there was something of substance in it. I really wanted to embrace web3 and its promise of an open distributed web. I am a programmer. I am always open to learning about and adopting new technologies. I tried hard. I started by reading the original Bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi. I looked at the web3.js framework. I read as many whitepapers as I could. I looked at many of the projects. Things just don't add up.

[Tenoke]

>3. Nope. Without an underlying economic activity it's all a ponzi scheme. There is no finance in DeFi. Just scammers running pump and dump schemes and rugpulling starry eyed idiots who think centuries old financial principals are useless and want to make a quick buck without doing anything.

There's plenty of projcts ran by people who are clearly not trying to scam anyone. Time will tell whether they will actually be successful but you are clearly biased again and not even attempting to be objective.

[harel]

There is a lack of balance here. Yashg is not wrong in his assertions, and nor are you, that time will tell if the non-scammers are successful or not. I was laughing at the concept of bitcoin when it was mere cents to the coin and some pizza was bought. I'm not laughing now, but I'm also well aware that if you need to explain why something is NOT a Ponzi scheme, it's a Ponzi scheme. I've done a fair bit of work in the NFT space, and saw myself how riddled with fraud it is - not the operation itself, but the punters trying to scam the platform for a free token. I also saw how brittle the concept really is. In many cases, the smart contract is simply saying address X owns the number 4. That later gets translated to some URL which is not guaranteed to be there in 10 years time. Storing the actual asset on the chain would have been preferable but is not practical. So where does that leave us? How does one's ownership of the number 4 translates to them owning a deed to a building or a picture of a monkey, in the sense that you could explain it to your grandma? I'm on the fence here. I want this to work, but I also understand how it works and know that it's not a simple task.

[genge]

If it helps you understand, there's blockchains being built with close to none tokenomic concept to it. Meaning, there's no value on investing on their token but on using the platform. In some cases it's posible, in others it's not since you need to leverage costs/incentives in some way (but they still manage for it to remain low price through inflation, etc).

[harel]

There are too many blockchains being developed. Which one are you referring to? (also help me understand what part?)

[everfree]

> Nope. Still need to convert it to real money for buying something. Gas fees > transfer fees.

Sure, if you choose an expensive (congested) blockchain to make the transaction. Otherwise the fees are about comparable or in some cases even less (below 1% for a round-trip from "real money" to crypto and back).

> Without an underlying economic activity it's all a ponzi scheme.

What do you mean by "underlying economic activity", and what kind of such activity does for example a bank or fintech possess that distributed ledger tech does not?

[shafyy]

Couldn't have said it better myself!

[smt88]

1. Transfers of what? The recipient has to convert to fiat to do anything useful.

Cheaper and faster don't seem to be happening either, at the moment.

2. You can never digitally own a physical object. Your ownership is centralized in the real-world legal system.

You say "secure" as though people are going around stealing houses from each other by snatching their deeds. Ownership of all of those things is already secure enough.

3. In the US at least, none of this is true. Users still have to go through KYC and there is almost always a middleman involved. Crypto has escaped neither institutionalization nor regulations in developed countries.

[nullc]

I agree that the whole NFT whatever crap is 99.99% bull, but XKCD386 compels me:

> You say "secure" as though people are going around stealing houses from each other by snatching their deeds.

https://whyy.org/articles/philadelphia-man-charged-with-stea...

(not that blockchain woo would add much or any value to this problem, but title fraud is an actual thing)

[Arkhaine_kupo]

1) would be just as expensive if taxed properly, so not cheaper just illegal

2) immutable is a pretty shitty property for some of those assets, also its a pretty negative turn of society to go and try and make fungible products like music listening into private non fungible ownable assets

3) The middle man is usually there for a number of reasons. Same way exchanges showed up almost immidietly after crypto, you would also have crypto banks to handle loans etc. Add the financial constraints the goverment needs, for lawful contracts to be enforceable and now you just have a more expensive, volatile and environmentally destructive banking system.

Like it seems most of the ideas of things "crypto works for" is just what banks used to do before regulation was added. And the regulation is there for a reason, for every extra fee you pay to do cross border money transfer, some money is not being laundered. For every notary you pay to get a deed in a house or doctor to check your health data, some will or some medical anomaly gets corrected. For every fee you pay in a loan someone elses gets secured and has no extortionate shark loan fees.

With crypto right now you lose all that protection in exchange for a slow, expensive gas fees, environmentally destructive proofs of work and absolutely no legal protection if you get scammed in the end. Its an extremely silly proposition and I am not surprised it is being peddled by the likes of Jordan Belfort because he seems to like to do old medieval scams on new targets.

[everfree]

> immutable is a pretty shitty property for some of those assets

Because smart contract chains allow for turing complete code, mutability can be programmed in to particular tokens at the smart contract level.

> regulation is there for a reason, for every extra fee you pay to do cross border money transfer, some money is not being laundered.

It shouldn't be my personal financial responsibility to pay for a corporation to double check my own assertion that I am not breaking any law.

> With crypto right now you lose all that protection in exchange for a slow, expensive gas fees, environmentally destructive proofs of work and absolutely no legal protection if you get scammed in the end.

I'm breaking this down.

> slow

Taking Ethereum as an example, payments generally go through within 15 seconds, compared to several hours for a same-day wire transfer or several days for an ACH payment.

> expensive gas fees

Gas fees are expensive because too many people are using it. Ethereum processes over a million transactions daily, not including Layer 2 and side chains which have increased that capacity and lowered gas fees in practice.

> environmentally destructive proofs of work

Proof of Stake reduces energy consumption by over 99%, and most blockchains currently use it.

> absolutely no legal protection if you get scammed in the end

The standard way to send money abroad, international wire transfer, also gives you next to no legal protection if you get scammed.

[Arkhaine_kupo]

> mutability can be programmed in to particular tokens at the smart contract level.

Yeah but contingencies not predicted in the original contract cannot be added, hence they are immutable from the original design. Something legally not really enforceable as laws change making previously written contracts or clauses void.

> It shouldn't be my personal financial responsibility to pay for a corporation to double check my own assertion that I am not breaking any law.

Someone has to double check the financial and legal frameworks are being abided by in transactions of money, specially cross country. If you do not want to pay it directly in your transfer, then whatever alternative you propose would mean either tax payers or other bank users end up paying more than their fair share if they do not do as many transactions as you.

> Taking Ethereum as an example, payments generally go through within 15 seconds, compared to several hours for a same-day wire transfer or several days for an ACH payment.

This is a false equivalence. The transaction in ethereum takes however long you wanna pay a gas fee for, the 15 second thing is an average not a median, and certainly not a general use case for smaller transactions.

Secondly, the money in an ACH payment goes through in miliseconds, the 2 day wait is a legal escrow for legal purposes not technological ones. One that crypto should also abide if it had any real use.

> Gas fees are expensive because too many people are using it.

Gas fees are expensive because you can pay to jump the queue, and considering the number of fraudulent transactions, scams etc people are incentivized to over pay to make their quick buck after a rug pull.

> Proof of Stake reduces energy consumption by over 99%,

It also reduces security, increses centralisation and increases fees. Certainly a cure-all for a problem created by crypto in the first place.

> The standard way to send money abroad, international wire transfer, also gives you next to no legal protection if you get scammed.

The 2 day to send allows plenty of time to report a transaction, for the goverment to intervene if flags are raised etc. It certainly offers tons of legal protection.

What it doesn't protect is against Nigerian Prince scams but thats not a failure of the wire transfer, and it certainly is even worse thanks to crypto...

[everfree]

> Yeah but contingencies not predicted in the original contract cannot be added, hence they are immutable from the original design. Something legally not really enforceable as laws change making previously written contracts or clauses void.

This could be a feature or a bug, depending on use case.

> Someone has to double check the financial and legal frameworks are being abided by in transactions of money, specially cross country.

Not really. I think money transfer, especially in the United States, is way over-regulated. But our opinions don't really matter, because crypto is a cat out of the bag.

Maybe you would want to make it illegal to make a peer to peer crypto transaction without a middleman checking it for legality first. I believe that's impossible without outlawing crypto altogether, which is a political nonstarter (though they might be successful at outlawing proof of work only).

> The transaction in ethereum takes however long you wanna pay a gas fee for, the 15 second thing is an average not a median, and certainly not a general use case for smaller transactions.

Since the EIP-1559 fee market change in August 2021 introducing flexible block sizes, the 15 second transaction time is very much a median. Not sure what you mean by "not a general use case for smaller transactions."

> Gas fees are expensive because you can pay to jump the queue, and considering the number of fraudulent transactions, scams etc people are incentivized to over pay to make their quick buck after a rug pull.

No more overpaying in the general case since EIP-1559, since block sizes are flexible now. Blocks can double in size, so as long as the network demand doesn't double within a 15-second period, you can include a fee at the market rate and your transaction will be processed in a timely manner.

Ethereum fees are an open auction market where anyone can bid. If scams can afford to outprice legitimate transactions, then that says something about society, not about the network. The network is impartial, providing service to whoever bids high enough.

> It also reduces security, increses centralisation and increases fees. Certainly a cure-all for a problem created by crypto in the first place.

Proof of Stake increases security, decreases centralization, and reduces fees. It would take a long comment to describe why this is the case with sources, so tell me if you want me to write it up.

Here's the short answer though:

https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/06/pos2020.html

> The 2 day to send allows plenty of time to report a transaction, for the goverment to intervene if flags are raised etc. It certainly offers tons of legal protection.

From my understanding, international wire transfers can only typically be cancelled within the first 30 minutes or so, if you're lucky. The payment method offers exactly zero legal protection - it's as if you've handed the recipient cash and they walked away with it. If you send money to the wrong account, or if the recipient does not provide you with the services you purchased, your only recourse is to hire an international lawyer and sue the recipient in whatever country they are in. You can look on your wire transfer form and see disclaimers to this effect.

[xeyownt]

Wow, what a brain wash. Are you Matt Damon?