I like it for the criminal options it facilitates. I don’t personally agree with being unable to import affordable medicine (non-domestic brand generics which weren’t produced in an FDA-approved facility) from India/Turkey/etc and I use bitcoin to facilitate buying the medicines I need from pharmacies which don’t require doctors prescriptions. It saves me a boatload of money and helps me greatly in managing my health. Or to get around the current widespread pharmaceutical shortages which continue since Hurricane Maria destroyed a lot of pharmaceutical production infrastructure in Puerto Rico (e.g. bacteriostatic water).
I also am largely okay with people using it for personal quantities of controlled substances, even though I do not use it for that personally. Sometimes these are for legitimate medicinal purposes as well (for example, schedule 2 TRT and HRT drugs)
What is more likely is that you would wake up in a world where Bitcoin may not exist, but is completely dominated by crypto nonetheless. Within a generation or two, I predict that all asset ownership will be crypto-backed. Property. Automobiles. Artwork. Securities. And of course, currency. Fiat itself will become a cryptocurrency once more millennials are in charge.
I reserve judgement as to whether or not this will be a net benefit for society. I suspect not, but our present ignorance is far too great to make such a prediction - I just think it's gonna happen whether we want it to or not, so get used to the idea of crypto-everything.
Crypto in the form of CBDCs will very likely be a loss. One head honcho at the Bank of International Settlements was quite clear that they want to fully control how people spend money. And at that point it’s not really your money anymore anyways …
I mean, it is not that hard to imagine, right? A car title becomes an NFT. Whoever owns the NFT owns the car. Same with a house. Or a horse. I'm not a crypto expert, but that is a relatively trivial use case for NFTs.
As for how this scales? I have no idea. I'm just speculating that it's gonna happen somehow. I mean, hell, look at this post - a nation adopted Bitcoin. You think that's the last time a government will experiment with crypto? China is already developing their own fiat cryptocurrency. You think it's just gonna stop?
I don't necessarily want this to happen, nor am I advocating for it. It's just a prediction, so I'm now sure how to answer your questions.
Well, no crypto expert ever predicted this. The idea of NFT's has pretty much been discounted by everyone in the crypto community for a decade, until they randomly became a fad in 2021. So I wouldn't say it's very easy to imagine.
Smart contracts backing more real world assets has a slightly higher chance of becoming a thing, but even with those the value isn't super clear. The whole idea of tracking ownership is that it's backed by authority to enforce it, and the whole idea of cryptocurrency is that it works without authority.
If you think NFT you think about that vague thing that has no bearing on the real world. Bitcoin is the magic technology that manages to be scarce and be manifest in the real world despite being fully digital and networked. Ethereum managed to one-up Bitcoin with the smart contracts of which the DAI stablecoin which anchors itself to the real world currency without relying on authority.
NFT's basically are the exact opposite of the sort of thing cryptocurrency offers as value to the real world.
Ok, lets go with your example. Car title. Or a house title.
Just where exactly the title itself is stored? I would assume it's a at least moderately long plaintext file, describing property and conditions. Maybe some authenticity attributes, like digital signatures of multiple parties. Where do you think is this artifact located? Inside the NFT?
Plaintext doesn't take up all that much space relatively-speaking; it'd be entirely feasible to store all the data on an automotive title (for example) directly on-chain.
Also, there's no reason why the property and conditions have to be stored together; they could readily exist as separate artifacts sharing some ID or reference.
First - that's a big if. Only super bare and short, zero formatting plaintext, will fit inside NFT (as they exist today). I highly doubt people would want to work with such data, degrading their UX dramatically.
Second - do you realise that title contains private information which will be forever exposed on-chain?
Third - ok, even you admit that not everything will fit on-chain. Then who will store the rest of the data? Centralised entity? Which will have its internal security, bookkeeping, staff and so on?
Why do we need NFTs then, if all the work will be done by a centralised entity anyway?
Fourth - in the hypothetical case when we have titles and NFTs linked to them, there are several interesting questions - what happens when owner of the NFT forgets his private keys? What happen if the owner dies? What happens when the court judges declare that the ownership is incorrect? How are marriages handled, where today multiple people can own the same property?
The rats flee a burning building and move into the next rat's nest. Its nice to know what the current grift is. Although, it would be refreshing to see dumb money and hype thrown in a new direction.
Seriously, though: having globally accessible, indelible and irrefutable shared ledgers containing balances which cannot be forged, whose operation cannot be stopped by any malicious, busy-body bureaucrat? This is a God-send. It is already the gold-standard for international payments for me, a small computer consultant.
Think of all the poor slobs in Russia who've been steam-rolled by these sanctions, and can no longer sell their software or get paid for their little Apps. Whatever you might think about Russia -- "group punishment" is not cool; these are people like you and me who cannot now feed their families. To them, Bitcoin (and other even more capable cryptocurrencies now in development) is the difference between life and death.
So, it might be worthwhile to ... reflect, if we find ourself agreeing with the obese head banker at BIS or weird Klaus Schwab, when they say they want to control all aspects of personal commerce. They can pound sand -- I'm going to continue to work to move cryptocurrency technology forward.
It's clearly better when instead of bankster elites we would be controlled by some shady scammers sitting in the non-extradition offshore. Truly a revolution in finance.
There are (and always will be) people who see no good in the Internet. I played a small part in its growth in the early 90s and even I have pangs of regret over what it has become. AND there was a lot of grift and lawlessness in the early Internet -- that is what paid the bills at first.
However, at the time I was able to articulate all the ways moving X, Y and Z to the Internet would make things better -- for hours on end -- and I would 'win' those arguments. OTOH, all my crypto crazed associates have trouble doing that same thing today. For years, the argument ended up being "I got in early and now my 'investment' is worth X amount." It has been an end justifies the means proposition.
In the end, the Internet was judged by its exponential growth and adoption. There was a mad rush of, arguably, useful activity going on... for years. Everything I wished for and pushed for back in the day has come true -- monkey paw curse and all. Bitcoin's use has actually gone down afaict, the market value of it is the only metric people care about.
> However, at the time I was able to articulate all the ways moving X, Y and Z to the Internet would make things better -- for hours on end -- and I would 'win' those arguments. OTOH, all my crypto crazed associates have trouble doing that same thing today.
I find that most crypto-crazed enthusiasts don't have the foggiest idea about how it works, beyond some broad vague ideas. People who can articulate its benefits exist, but they tend to get drowned out. Many of them are building companies instead of bothering to prosthelytize or argue on forums.
> In the end, the Internet was judged by its exponential growth and adoption. There was a mad rush of, arguably, useful activity going on... for years. Everything I wished for and pushed for back in the day has come true -- monkey paw curse and all. Bitcoin's use has actually gone down afaict, the market value of it is the only metric people care about.
Very very well put. Bitcoin’s use as measured by total transactions has gone down. However, the total amount of cryptocurrency transactions across all chains is still growing exponentially.
Rationally, I understand what you're saying, speaking as someone who was intrigued by Bitcoin in 2012 and possibly made a little money off it while I was interested in it.
Humanistically, I gotta say, perceptions matter. I left crypto because it just started "tasting gross", regardless of the technological interest I had. Clearly, I wasn't in a minority with that.
I hear you, but these excellent YouTube recommendations and Google App stories tuned so precisely to my interests wouldn't even be remotely as good unless I permitted myself to be data-surveilled. I can't tell you how much I've learned via these (whether informational or entertaining). (Note: I pay for YouTube, because it is an excellent service.)
I also am largely okay with people using it for personal quantities of controlled substances, even though I do not use it for that personally. Sometimes these are for legitimate medicinal purposes as well (for example, schedule 2 TRT and HRT drugs)