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by zacksiri 906 days ago
I feel like crypto in general was designed by speculation, and not real use-case.

If you read the original bitcoin whitepaper we have veered into a completely different direction.

I was fortunate enough to build and operate a payment system, during covid 2019 - 2022. It was able to do everything required to process payment maintain an accurate ledger. Our little team of 6 built it in 9 months.

It was centralized yes, and that made things a lot simpler than crypto so comparing it to crypto is a bit unfair admittedly. But you know the difference is it was designed based on real use-case. It could process billions of $ in transactions. Could scale up / down etc...

More importantly we had real people using the thing. People who had no idea how payment systems worked. People were sending money to their mothers for her birthday. Sending money to pay for school fees, hospital bills, etc...

What the crypto community including Vitalik Buterin has failed to realize is the nodes on the network (nodes accepting any given currency) is everything. The regulators have done a very good job of keeping crypto's contained within just 'speculation'. I feel the window of opportunity for it to spread has been shut (for now), mostly by the crypto community themselves with all the fraud and lack of any improvements in UX this long into the game.

While the crypto developers will happily hack away and fabricate use cases based on speculation, and refuse to reduce friction / fees and improve UX. Crypto in it's current form is dead, something new will arise with all the learnings of the current-generation crypto. As much as I believe in the mission of crypto. I'm confident that this proposal like all the other proposals refuse to acknowledge the problem with ethereum and any other crypto, which is I still can't buy bread with it. This proposal is another evidence to show that they're simply focused on the wrong set of problems.

Edit: Update team size mentioned above from 4 - 6 for accuracy.

3 comments

The company I work for uses USDC for quite a lot of B2B transactions and settlements. On the tech side it's miles easier to use and build tooling for than things like wire transfers through our bank. Seriously, I've gone back and forth with our big bank for months trying to get some simple API integrations and they're pathetic. For USDC payments, we quickly built a fantastic initiator/approval system and live monitoring on incoming and outgoing payments. I wish all payments were on crypto rails, it would make a lot of jobs easier.
> I wish all payments were on crypto rails, it would make a lot of jobs easier.

Not having any way of reverting transactions definitely makes the jobs of all sorts of shady characters much simpler, that's for sure.

Centre (the consortium behind USDC, including Coinbase and Circle) does have a mechanism to freeze shady accounts and accounts used to steal funds. Which has been used to freeze the TornadoCash funds when they were ordered to.
> As much as I believe in the mission of crypto.

What is the mission of crypto and what is the most impactful application to date?

If the latter is underwhelming, perhaps that should make one question whether the mission is worthy.

> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.

Depends on how you read this, but to me, this is a replacement for fiat, I should be able to pay my butcher / baker, that hasn't happened yet. If i walk to a merchant near my house they will all reject crypto in any form.

For one no cryptocurrency is really designed to be used for actual payments. They all are deflationary by design so the future value of cyber bucks will be higher than today's value. If you spend cyber bucks today you're losing out on those future gains. It's irrational then to ever spend cyber bucks.

Unless cyber bucks are accepted to pay taxes in your jurisdiction (they're not) they need to be converted to a currency that is accepted. Thanks to the deflationary nature of cyber bucks, their conversion rates fluctuate wildly and constantly. The conversion rate can even change while waiting for a transaction to complete.

To boot every transaction is caveat emptor, there's no protections against fraud or even simple errors. Access to a wallet's private keys (even if they're not your keys) confers access to the wallet and all of its cyber bucks.

If the goal of cryptocurrency is to replace fiat currency transactions it's like the worst possible design for the task.

Seriously, check out Monero.
Valid critique. Thanks.

Out of curiosity, in what country do you live?

Thailand