Re:Crypto Market Crash Leaving Bankrupt Startups in Its Wake
by LAMike on Sunday December 09, 2018 @12:47PM
(#18642145)
> practical usefulness of being able to share data across the USA
Replace "data" with "money", and "USA" with "anywhere in the world"... do you see any value in that?
Re:Crypto Market Crash Leaving Bankrupt Startups in Its Wake
by beefield on Sunday December 09, 2018 @01:09PM
(#18642258)
Funny. I have been able to send money cross-border relatively cheaply and relatively fast for quite some time. So yes, obviously I see value in that. But actually it has never been any kind of issue that would have even crossed my mind that it would need some fancy new solutions to enable me to do that. Would you be willing to share some more details on which kind of money transactions this is an actual unsolved problem? Where from/to are you trying to transfer the money and what are you buying/selling with that money?
Re:Crypto Market Crash Leaving Bankrupt Startups in Its Wake
by anjc on Monday December 10, 2018 @06:38AM
(#18647119)
This is the most obvious use-case. Try to send any amount of money outside of business hours from an account in one country to any account in another. You can't do it! You can't even send funds from an account in one bank, to an account in the SAME bank, if it's across a border.
I had this problem one time over a long-weekend, and the only solution I had was to use Western Union. Because I didn't warn my bank that I wanted to use my own money, they disabled my account until they were open again (3 days).
> relatively fast
Maybe 5 days is relatively fast to you, but it's not to me. 1 horsepower was relatively fast to people before cars were common also.
Re:Crypto Market Crash Leaving Bankrupt Startups in Its Wake
by simias on Sunday December 09, 2018 @02:03PM
(#18642572)
There's a big problem though, we already have many ways to do that. They have flaws but they are mature and generally pretty easy to use. Cryptocurrencies are not breaking new ground, they're trying to offer an alternative. That's a very different proposition. It's not enough for cryptocurrencies to work, they have to work better than "fiat". So far I'm unimpressed.
Instead of playing on our heartstrings to convince us that cryptocurrencies are useful, how about actually making something useful? We've been told for years that it was about to pay off, that "it's still building time". You've had billions poured in ICOs and pre-mined coins and you have nothing to show for it besides glorified pyramid schemes and currencies that are useless as currencies.
Comparing cryptocurrencies to the early internet is frankly absurd. Maybe people didn't imagine how huge is was going to become but the practical usefulness of being able to share data across the USA (and then the world) is obvious. Besides the Internet grew fast and was useful almost from day 1, even though it involved a complex and expensive hardware infrastructure. By the 90's the Internet wasn't mainstream but it was definitely very useful. Sci-fi writers had expected something like the Internet long before ARPA, it's just immediately obvious that being able to connect to the entire world in real time would be greatly valuable.
Furthermore what prevented a more mainstream adoption were mainly hardware limitations. Internet on dial-up wasn't fun at all. Remember having to wait for a full minute to have a progressive JPEG load up? I do. It was clunky but there was nothing else like it. Once technology improved and got faster and cheaper adoption exploded. What's slowing down progress in CryptoCurrency? The infrastructure is there, yet hardly anybody wants to use it. And unlike the Internet, there are plenty of alternatives for the vast majority of the services offered through a blockchain.
>I would bet that we see something truly unique come out of the blockchain space that we never before knew we needed.
That's faith, not reason.