[zer01]

> I can't see anything useful from crypto other than laundering the proceeds of criminal activities.

I think it's a pretty arrogant stance to say that just because you don't see the value in a thing that value doesn't exist. I don't see the value in Tiktok/Facebook/Snapchat, but others clearly do. Maybe it just wasn't built for me.

My general thesis on the crypto industry is that it's a fertile space, and provides new tools to people who want to build things. Is the next Google going to shake out of it with 100% certainty? Of course not, no-one knows the future.

On the flipside though, fertile spaces with new tools are exactly the conditions that gave rise to orgs like Facebook/Google/Netflix/etc, which changed the world in a number of ways.

If we're in the 90's and I'm pointing to this newfangled "HTTP 1.0 Protocol" RFC and trying to describe to you web browsers, Netflix, etc, I'm pretty sure most people will look at that as a pipe dream that will never see reality in their lifetimes. It also took many many websites and iterations to get to the Netflix we have today (Netflix being a proxy for "streaming services" for video content).

Same deal with putting credit cards on the internet for faster payments and describing Amazon or Ebay. Does e-commerce have obvious credit card fraud and criminal activity on it? Absolutely, if anything it's grown as a parasite in lockstep with the success of e-commerce.

Does this mean e-commerce is a bad idea in general? My position is no, new technology just presents new challenges with the benefits they also bring.

Social media is the humanity hurdle du jour in a lot of ways, but does that mean we should get rid of it wholesale?

[oneoff786]

> I think it's a pretty arrogant stance to say that just because you don't see the value in a thing that value doesn't exist. I don't see the value in Tiktok/Facebook/Snapchat, but others clearly do. Maybe it just wasn't built for me

No, you just don’t appreciate the value of those social media services. If you don’t see it then you’re blind. They let people connect and share stuff they enjoy seeing. It’s fine if you don’t like it, but the use case is obvious.

What is the use case for crypto. Do you have a vision for it?

[zer01]

Right, people in the crypto space also feel like "If you don’t see it then you’re blind", which was the point I was trying to make.

> What is the use case for crypto. Do you have a vision for it?

Short term, the crypto space is building neat things like multi-sig contracts, decentralized finance products (with unique characteristics like flash loans), DAOs to govern things in a decentralized way via on-chain voting, and spurring innovation into real cryptographic research, including things like privacy-preserving crypto and multi-party computation. People are thinking very deeply about things like trust relationships and engineering systems to be trust-less.

Medium term, I see protocols like Compound eating the profits of the large banks and either forcing them to innovate (which would be great) or replacing them entirely. Why does my savings account yield 0.01% when they lend out my very same dollars at 5% in the form of car loans/mortgages? I'm not discounting FDIC insurance or the federal reserve, but things have tipped too far into the banker's favor IMO. Same deal with the traditional markets, there's a lot of fees and friction unless you're a big boy that locks a lot of retail out of the game. Private capital markets are in for a wake up as well - VCs hold a crazy amount of power and potential upside exposure because they're just the only ones who can get in on deals early (think early Google investors) - if that was more access-able we might be able to break the VC hegemony which loves throwing good money after bad and propping up terrible companies.

Long term, I see it as a series of tools and protocols that can establish a more "global-native" economy. Our world is getting more global, not less. A core foundation of immutable software feels like a more reasonable base layer to build on than trusting politicians and a gordian knot of deals. Someone from North Korea can build a smart contract and I don't need to trust them that it does what they say it does, because I can verify it for myself. Also economically, having a store of value that is also impossible to counterfeit is hugely useful, so people can't paint lead yellow and call it gold - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-gold-kingold-jewelr....

[oneoff786]

> Medium term, I see protocols like Compound eating the profits of the large banks and either forcing them to innovate (which would be great) or replacing them entirely. Why does my savings account yield 0.01% when they lend out my very same dollars at 5% in the form of car loans/mortgages?

If the car loan defaults, you don’t lose your money. That’s the primary reason.

> Same deal with the traditional markets, there's a lot of fees and friction unless you're a big boy that locks a lot of retail out of the game.

Crypto fees are often terrible. The ones that aren’t tend to rely on a few centralized party for trust.

> Private capital markets are in for a wake up as well - VCs hold a crazy amount of power and potential upside exposure because they're just the only ones who can get in on deals early

That’s… not true and risky startup investing is a snake pit for ordinary investors

> Someone from North Korea can build a smart contract and I don't need to trust them that it does what they say it does, because I can verify it for myself.

And go to jail because you’re violating international sanctions?

[gamblor956]

Multi-signature contracts already exist in the real world. Just so you know, multi-signature contracts have been a requirement of real world contracts for several centuries.

Decentralized finance products also already exist. They're called microloans. Someone got a (memorial) Nobel prize for this in 2006.

Multi-party computation. Have you heard of SETI@home? It came out in 1999. It was followed by Folding@home in 2000.

So basically, all of the "innovations" of "crypto space" are just things that have already been done in the real world, but now are being done online less efficiently. I guess that's what counts for progress if you never bothered to learn history.

[zer01]

I understand that contract law and notaries are a thing, but people’s signatures are easily forged and a huge amount of the legal system is currently dedicated to resolving conflicts with this. On the flip side building a smart contract to divvy up control of an administrative function or control of funds in a bank account between a threshold of people is a completely different thing that and doesn’t involve scribbles on paper whose only recourse for forging them is the legal system and lengthy litigation. For one, what happens when you want to do business with someone internationally? Can you rely on the courts to back you up at that point? Low level international fraud is rarely prosecuted because it requires things like extradition. If I want to share control of a thing with a business partner in even somewhere like the UK the only recourse I have is the courts. OR I can use a multisig contract and balance the power in such a way where we either both consent to a change (and cryptographically attest to that consent) or it simply doesn’t happen.

Decentralized finance products like uniswap and compound are not the same as micro loans, and micro loans have massive issues with trust, fraud, and solvency. Being able to swap or lend assets in a completely trustless way is something new, and enables new and novel technology like flash loans to exist (which make for more efficient markets). Plus I can go read the actual holdings of these protocols and build whatever machinery I want to respond to changes. Both protocols have a governance process with a timelock so no changes are made without the market having time to react, which overcomes a lot of the risk of malicious proposals (if I somehow pass a proposal that says “pay me all the money in the contract” then everyone will pull their money from the platform before it executes).

As for MPC I’m taking more about cryptographic MPC than something like SETI. A HUGE problem with managing cryptographic keys, be they root dns keys (13 of which control essentially the entire internet) or keys for SSL certificates is that they must exist somewhere in memory to be used. If they’re in memory they can be stolen and no one can actually tell if they’ve been stolen or not until it’s too late. Right now we have ok solutions to some of this through HSMs but then how do you also do backups properly? The MPC research I’m talking about specifically offsets these risks by never having the key exist in one place, and instead it being similar to a multisig where participants come together to create this material. An added benefit depending on how you set this up is that it only requires 1 party to be honest for the whole system to remain sound. ZCash did their entire setup for their protocol this way (https://z.cash/technology/paramgen/). Coinbase also just rolled out support for doing this at scale so that they can have users participate in these crypto protocols without having to manage their own keys (https://cointelegraph.com/news/coinbase-unveils-web3-mobile-...).

So yeah I can see how if you’re a person who has done 0 research into this things sound similar on the surface, but you’d probably also be in the camp of “we already have the post office, what’s the point of email” back in the 90s.

[gamblor956]

It's truly bizarre that your argument against all of the existing things that crypto replicates poorly is "fraud", while ignoring the massive, crippling, life-destroying fraud that regularly occurs in the crypto space.

And your argument for crypto basically boils down to needing a blockchain because you don't trust your counterparty. In the real world, there's a simple solution for parties who don't trust each other: do business with someone that you do trust.