[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!