Perhaps we don’t change our minds because we haven’t seen a convincing counter-argument to the thesis that blockchains are fundamentally about getting rich quick through buying in early (or pre-mining) and then finding greater fools.

The most successful actual applications thus far, as far as I can tell, have been silk road and paying ransoms.

I know people that send money home and they don’t use cryptocoins. These remittances communities are savvy and price sensitive, if there was a superior product it would be spreading like wildfire.

Polymarket is a real use case.

Why do you need a blockchain for that? Gambling and Insurance existed both long before blockchains.

Polymarket is centralized, but one benefit of it is that you can sign up and fund your account anonymously (though you do require an email). Users are not restricted by state or national laws.

On a true decentralized gambling app, email would not be needed, just wallet. It would also be difficult to regulate (the team behind it could be anonymous).

And I'm not saying this is great or anything, but it shows how you can build something with a blockchain that you could not otherwise.

It’s only as anonymous as the paper trail behind the funding coins, right?

Yea, but you can break the paper trail behind the funding coins if you want to. Would use something like Tornado or Monero.

Because of the blackmarket nature of the betting, which is illegal in many countries.

That's because many of us already have changed our minds. Many of us were big fans of Bitcoin ten years ago and really excited about the prospect of trustless digital cash. We thought it would work. But now that a decade has passed, we've changed our minds.

I'm not a hater. I am just applying some critical thinking and design thinking to try to figure out where the value is in all of this to the customer. I am happy to say I'm wrong, and happy to backflip.

Please see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27258671

some links to complement the comment:

https://curve.fi/ - for exchanging different tokenized stable coins (such as USDC > EURO). Already has over $300M in daily volume exchange.

https://yearn.finance/ - a platform where anyone can code and deploy an investment strategy, provided it is voted on by people who hold the platform's governance tokens. Already has over $3B in assets locked in. Good idea to look at their governance platform as well: https://snapshot.org/#/yearn

https://aave.com/ - a platform to borrow or lend your tokenized assets. Already has over $9B in assets invested

> https://curve.fi/ - for exchanging different tokenized stable coins (such as USDC > EURO). Already has over $300M in daily volume exchange.

I'm confused. How do you get EURO currency in your hand with this? i.e. either physical paper or in my bank account?

1. Transfer to your bank account via an exchange (KYC applies)

2. Turn it into cold hard cash or a bank transfer via P2P (no KYC )

3. Withdraw cash directly from a Bitcoin ATM (KYC may apply depending on the exchange issuing the card)

4. Transfer to a crypto debit card and buy from stores directly (KYC may apply depending on the exchange issuing the debit card)

5. Pay directly with your crypto at relevant stores (projects like AMP - https://amptoken.org/ - US only for now)

1. But I still need a bank in the currency on the other end. So this might eliminate some forex fees, but that's it?

2. Again, still need a bank account on the end.

3. How pervasive are these? Can I find one on the street while traveling Munich for example? How do I get a card?

4/5. No one wants to use crypto because they get FOMO on price fluctuations. Until then it's basically useless.

Until crypto becomes pervasive as a medium of exchange it's as useless as a bar of gold.

> All I see on HN are people who’ve somehow dismissed an entire new tech sector without even being curious about it.

If I found a new animal species that walked and talked but lived using photosynthesis, I'd be asking all sorts of questions. "Does it breathe? Does it need water? Why does it need sun to live?"

So here we are now asking a bunch of questions and seeking clarifications.

> At the very least, if you are on HN, I expect you to be curious about the technology and make up your mind after satiating that curiosity.

"No true scotsman"...People are being critical because they ARE curious about crypto. How do you expect people to "make up their mind" when "Most of the DeFi core projects were launched in 2019-2020". That's exactly the issue.

Here is one of many comments I have written https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25641940

But again, to those reading this thread, HN is not a place where you will find a lot of people who patiently defend crypto and blockchain. It garners a lot of downvotes.

I will read it without bias. Thank you.

>> But again, to those reading this thread, HN is not a place where you will find a lot of people who patiently defend crypto and blockchain. It garners a lot of downvotes.

Blockchain is a wonderful piece of technology. IMHO I do not think anyone really has personal beef with the technology. I think majority really want to understand, and if they're asking and posing questions it is because do not understand. There might be some that have their skin in it going south but I doubt that's the situation of many.

People really want to understand its use case as money.

That's because on HN we know that 99% of the blockchain hype is about people discovering asymmetric cryptography and pretending that the blockchain is the only way to use it.

The only real difference that blockchain solutions bring is decentralisation. I have to yet hear one single argument about why decentralisation is good. So far I have only heard the typical libertarianesque arguments about states, banks and inflation. As as I'm concerned, decentralisation is unnecessary and so are blockchain.

Organized criminal activity is a powerful centralizing force that is always ignored in these discussions.

If HN was around in 1997, I bet half the comments would be about "internet is just scams and porn. Where's the use case apart from checking the weather?"

Wait, let's keep using this analogy. If the World Wide Web was invented in 1991 and by 2002 no one had created useful websites besides marketing for scams, drug marketplaces and sites to pay ransoms to, and the energy consumption of the World Wide Web was the country of Argentina... Wouldn't the critics have a pretty good point?

Please see some of these sites I shared earlier:

https://curve.fi/ - for exchanging different tokenized stable coins (such as USDC > EURO). Already has over $300M in daily volume exchange.

https://yearn.finance/ - a platform where anyone can code and deploy an investment strategy, provided it is voted on by people who hold the platform's governance tokens. Already has over $3B in assets locked in. Good idea to look at their governance platform as well: https://snapshot.org/#/yearn

https://aave.com/ - a platform to borrow or lend your tokenized assets. Already has over $9B in assets invested

Please see this with an open mind. And please see this from the perspective of someone not from privilege, from a third world country, or from someone facing an oppressive regime.

Money is freedom. And making that freely accessible to anyone from anywhere is important.

Yeah, and imagine further that people were bidding up the price of IP addresses in a speculative frenzy instead of actually using them.

People did bid up the price of domain names at least in a speculative frenzy instead of actually using them

New TLDs are a money grab as well. You're hoping that big companies like google buy your domains just to make sure nobody else has them.

Nonono, you're confounding the internet as it is now with the internet as it was 24 years ago. It's just the other way round.