Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by colesantiago 1208 days ago
With numbers peaking at 800K and with crypto existing for almost 15 years, I would have expected significantly higher numbers given crypto has had a 'head start' to find a use case.

Something like UPI payments (which is what crypto was supposed to achieve but completely failed) already has hundreds of millions of users in drastically less than 15 years, I can see why hash's POV remains unchanged and mine too.

800K is still close to 0 with almost nobody using crypto at all compared to over 500 million users using UPI payments.

1 comments

still a weird take for several reasons:

a) you are not able to separate a single program from the entire concept of crypto. but compare a payments solution to that single program which is not a payments solution at all. they asked for one popular program and I provided it. there’s nothing for me to defend about that, its probably just a dashboard for Uniswap V2 activity and doesnt include Uniswap V3. its weird that this is not the level of discussion you would be willing to have. Why is the depth of discussion so low that I have to explain the limitations a random user made dashboard from Dune Analytics that I found on Google, in a forum where people are otherwise much more analytical. lets check back in 5 years.

b) its unclear the purpose of your observation. people have made billions of dollars converted to actual dollars in their bank account by servicing just those 800,000 users that are familiar with that one program, Uniswap. People will make another billion dollars servicing the next 500,000 users. There are millions of programs deployed on blockchains. Thats… attractive? The programmer and builder perspective is very attractive. Like I said, its the financial services industry. What exactly does everyone else do here? Making ad speculation programs for democracy destabilizing adtech conglomerates? Or some much more useless side project like owning the compose button in gmail? Its really hard for me to see such reductive understanding applied to the crypto sectors when there’s so much to build that is more lucrative than so many other things to build.

c) “15 years”, Uniswap V2 launched 3 years ago. On top of those other years of technology releases to make that possible. There is a clear chronology, that took many people just being willing to see it and where the technology is going. When the tools mature, applications are developed. It is impossible to have a discussion that conflates a specific application with being representative of anything except that application.