[houseatrielah]

You're pandering to the "I hate crypto crowd"; you could have asked this on another forum if you wanted a good-faith answer. From my POV the killer-app of crypto is a USD stablecoin. Argentina's currency is collapsing the 3rd time in like 50 years (40% inflation?). There are other financial instruments beyond the dollar that could be tokenized (US Treasuries?), but most of the world would be happy to more-or-less preserve their purchasing power. They will find some vehicle to approximate the perservation of wealth, whether it's mobile phone minutes (an early digital store of value), physical $20-bills or something else.

Non-financial use cases would rely on a blockchain's tamper-resistance: like timestamp hashes for proof that a video happened at a certain time (only useful if this video is alleged to be faked), or something like NameCoin which was a tamper-resistant DNS prototype. Some people are trying to implement digital identity with blockchains, and others are trying to build a social layer in such a way where you own your 'social/friend network' and can view it with any ux you choose.

I think basically all of the marketing-hucksters have rotated into AI (IBM is running ads for AI, not blockchains), so the hype is muted compared to 2017 or so.

[countermeasure]

HN seems like the ideal place for this question to me.

Your assumption that I'm not hoping for good-faith answers is incorrect and unfair.

[gnatman]

I have a question about the scenario you're describing in Argentina. If I'm an individual in that country and want to protect my money, a stable offshore asset sounds good. And a digital decentralized asset makes sense because then I don't have to rely on banks in my country which might be unstable. My question is, if every individual takes this strategy, does that further destabilize the economy in my country?

[houseatrielah]

People already do it by hoarding US cash or buying real estate (often US real estate is used as a vehicle to store value). Its just a more efficient mechanism. Does it make the situation worse or better? For the individual to preserve the purchasing power its better, for the government is probably somewhat worse since they can't steal all your wealth with inflation, but on the other hand it seems helpful for a government to have a citizenry that's not totally bankrupt.

[houseatrielah]

This is a very interesting podcast about stablecoins

Nic Carters' Bull Case For Stablecoins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iecFhe2THeo