And exactly which utility tokens have real usage today, as opposed to vague promises about tomorrow?

As far as I can tell, the primary real-world use case for cryptocurrencies today appears to be money laundering.

DAI actually works as a stablecoin today.

It's pegged to the USD using crypto collateral.

Yes! You can actually do this on the blockchain right now: buy DAI on a decentralized exchange (or mint your own DAI by opening a Collateralized Dept Position), then lend it out for interest. (Last time I've checked, the paying interest rates were very attractive). The tech is still very experimental, but has been functioning well for almost a year, despite this year's deep crypto market crash.

I also think those who think crypto is only useful for speculation or crime are very much stuck with the 2013 opinion of it.

And why do you think those interest rates are "very attractive"? Are you by any chance picking up pennies in front of a steamroller?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taleb_distribution

Aha! That's an interesting question. "Pennies in front of the steamroller" is an oversimplification. Only DAI seems to be paying a high rate right now, other tokens not so much. It may be just because of supply and demand, there is quite a lot of demand for borrowing DAI. Why there might be demand for borrowing DAI may be too complex to explain to the hackernews crowd, so I'll leave it at that...

First of all, if it’s too complex to explain to all of us, it’s probably not a good idea. Second of all the steam roller referenced is the entire implosion of the crypto space. You’re getting fractions of a penny in interest which you could easily achieve in the real market with much much lower risk.

It's not that it's too complex because it's hard to understand, it's just that the explanation is long, and it will get downvoted anyway, so no use of explaining anything further. Save my fingers from typing. HN is a waste of time.

What does one do with any of these “utility coins”?

I haven’t heard of nearly half of them and can’t think of a legitimate use for the ones I have heard of.

Cross border payments is one use case that I have heard a lot and makes sense.

The value would need to become a lot more stable. I doubt people are getting a better result with crypto than a standard forex broker right now. Only use case I can see would be when your cross border transfer is going to be on the wrong side of the law at either end.

Pretty sure anichhangani is referring to consumer cross-border payments, which right now are not cheap or fast. Wire transfer fees are a joke and banks often take stupidly high commissions on currency conversion for non-institutional customers. There are some smaller services that have popped up in the market for this recently, but one of the original cryptocurrency use cases was basically "nearly free value transfers from anyone to anyone anywhere". The exchange fees have mostly destroyed this use case, but there's no reason spot conversions to/from a cryptocoin with a wallet transfer within a few seconds couldn't be possible.

The existing mainstream banking system can easily handle instant payments to anywhere already, they're called wire transfers. Within certain regions like the EU, it can be even faster.

The only reason international payments can be somewhat expensive is because of all the regulation involved into balancing a global currency system and making sure you're not funding the wrong people.

Not sure where you are, but here in the US wire transfers are slow and also expensive. Last time I had to do one internationally, it took several hours to clear and cost me something like $30.

NACHA (the U.S. body that governs ACH transactions) just started supporting international ACH transactions over the summer I believe. An ACH transaction typically costs the consumer between $0-5 (depending on how quickly they want it sent) compared to a wire transfer that could be $50 or more.

Yes, because of the regulations. If you have any history of transfers then you're usually approved within minutes vs occasional usage. You can also improve the speed by using an abstraction service like Paypal which offloads some work while charging more for the risk.

Besides speed, another interesting property of cryptocurrency based transfers is that they can be programmable. For example simple escrow or multi-sign off transfers or time-delays, all easy to do without lawyers or additional fees.

That's a trivial detail. Whatever you use for trust (the escrow or signature service) can already handle the scheduling. No need to bake that into the money itself.

The reason we have lawyers is because the law is not just black and white. As many examples have shown, pure robotic management is not conducive to how people actually do business and the messy nature of human behavior.

Jumping through stupid hoops to turn your cryptocurrency into usable money is the least desirable workflow for moving money across borders.

This problem has already been solved without cryptocurrencies, check out TransferWise or myriad other solutions. The reality is cross-border payments with cryptocurrencies are always going to be more expensive because you have to convert fiat to and from your crypto medium on both sides with a 1 to 3% fee where transfer wise charges as low as 0.85% total. Sometimes less. Not to mention volatility risk over the course of the transfer oh my.