[igorkraw]

And believers always pull of this subtle shift in frame: you bring in trust-less peer to peer decentralised networks, and of course there's no other solution, because it's a setting invented by the same people who came up with cryptocurrency. The rest of the world relaxes the trust-less assumption and talks about Web of Trust, about decentralised roots of trust, federation etc.

And this is a rhetorical technique: When we talk about economics, we talk about business or human problems. But the trustless-online-decentralised-ledger problem is a technical one. So the GP was saying "there is no business problem that crypto solves that hasn't been solved in a better way already. And then the crypto-bros come in and say "nuh-uh! If you for whatever reason want to run digital assets on physical infrastructure that needs to be maintained off chain without trusting anyone (say, the person the network depends on for maintaining the power infrastructure) then this is the only solution!".

YES! Well done. This is even useful, in a horrible hellscape where dog eats dog, everyone carries their own portable nuclear reactor and uses unstoppable point to point laser communication to run the internet and we forego all of the efficiency gains offered by using social consensus and democratic decision making to build webs of trust and centralised infrastructure with checks and balances (for example, by having the root certificates expire and be re-legitimised by some social ceremony repeatedly...say in an election). But in the real world, at some point everyone wants to build a society, put some basic trust down and improve living standards. And while people like Putin and the Kims and warlords still alive can fuck this up

1. They generally only survive because they are leeching of the more functional parts of society which uses trust (not unlike crypto with its Ponzi structure)

2. Crypto won't save you from them because they'll physically take away your electricity and/or torture you to get your keys

So what problems that aren't technical toy problems but real business and coordination problems in realistic settings (remember, if you have a state you trust to protect your private property rights, you can probably also use that to run the root certificate and organise the ledger) does crypto solve again?

[mattdesl]

Consider a simple answer: my ENS domain is one of the few digital assets I own (and have “digital ownership” over) that is not inextricably linked to a single corporately-owned user account (that ultimately has full control over the asset).

Perhaps you do not see a value in that, or do not feel the risks outweigh this benefit, which is fine. We are acting on a different set of interests.

[igorkraw]

What is is it good for compared to a traditional domain? If it's censorship resistance,if you break the laws of your country using it, how will you hide from the police trying to force you to take down the content?

[mattdesl]

The whole point of the distributed ledger is that no single entity can “take away” ownership of, say, an ERC721 (NFT, which domains also are) without access to my keys. Websites can de-list this but anybody can still see it clearly indexed in the blockchain state as the system is distributed.

I am not doing this to be censorship resistant from police (who can force me to give up my keys).

The point is that, rather than an asset owned by X company or Y bank, it is owned by me (in a decentralized system). eg: A tech company being acquired or shuttered will have no bearing on my ownership of and ability to transfer this asset.

[igorkraw]

So again, what can you do with it? What's the usage except "I have it and you can't"?

Because, if you use it to point to an IP, who's giving you that IP?

An asset has value, just because you call it an asset doesn't make it one.

[mattdesl]

you point an ENS name to an address (a public key hash). in a system built on private/public keys, it can be useful as an alias. the “IP”, or address in this case, is my own, because it is directly generated from a 24 word seed phrase.

this naming system has value for myself and the millions of other users interacting within the network.

[igorkraw]

But unless you have a completely independent physical layer, that network and alias is only reachable via an IP you rent or buy from the normal Systems. So what's the added value once you have that IP pointing somewhere? Like, if everything you can do with the ENS depends on an IP, which can do the same things as an IP, what's the use case? You are already dependent on the system, without an avenue out, what's the advantage of using an ENS vs something in the system?