This is my biggest “problem” with crypto. I actually think it’s neat in theory, but it’s the disconnect between what they say and what they do that makes my brain itch.

It’s like when a function’s documentation says “returns a tuple with three elements” but looking at the source it only returns a tuple with two elements.

My tech survival skills help me avoid things where what people say is different than what they’re doing. And saying that crypto is about storing value and transactions and smart contracts and then designing it specifically to award speculators is dissonance.

I’ve seen lots of architects and programmers try to back into design decisions with flimsy reasons to just not bother with it.

I’ve been waiting it to shake out as it will be really cool to have digital currency and smart contracts.

Here's a perhaps unique problem that cryptocurrency solves - trustless, decentralised proof of ownership (digital or physical) through NFTs.

This is a less talking about area of cryptocurrencies but in my opinion quite an important one. For the first time we can create digital scarcity without relying on a trusted party. NFTs have no digital analogue.

There’s lots of cool problems that crypto solves, but only once speculation goes away.

I think the incentives of new users greatly increasing wealth of early users is too alluring to overcome. Until that gets solved, I think it’s hard to actually meet some of these use cases because they get crowded out by various approaches who only care about attracting investors and speculators.

Fiat currency is fundamentally more speculative IMO because the value is more based on government trust that something not man-made.

Maybe in theory but not in practice. Just look at the past 10 years, btc &co are 100% driven by hype and speculation and still have 0 real world usage besides being a (semi)rich people toy and a good way to launder money / buy illegal shit online.

Bitcoin is a _terrible_ way to launder money. Not only are the onramps/offramps not anonymous - but it has so much attention that entire federal task forces are setup for $30k buy-and-busts

You'd use bitcoin for money laundering if you want to stand out and get caught. There's still nothing better than the tried-and-tested old cash, casino junket, money exchange and/or import/export businesses to launder money.

There's a reason why the most recent crop of darkweb drug markets have switched almost entirely to Monero

> still have 0 real world usage

you need to do a little bit a research, it seems...

Enlighten me then, I couldn't find anything by myself after weeding out the speculation/pump and dump/exit scam shills.

What real world problem is bitcoin solving right now and which isn't completely negligible next to the infrastructure cost of btc ?

PS: I'm not talking about the theoretical benefits the bitcoin aficionados are parroting all day long for the last 10 years and are still nowhere to be seen

Here is a BBC article on Bitcoin use in Venezuela: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47553048

Isn't it weird that Venezuela is the one example people go to over and over to demonstrate btc's ability to enable the people to resist oppressive governments? Why only here?

That's not really what "speculative" means in this context. Fiat currency isn't speculative because companies hold it for the purpose of using it. No matter what dollars are based on, Tesla has to hold some in order to pay the bills. "Speculative" means that Tesla has no current plans to actually use their Bitcoin holdings; the only purpose of buying them was to bet that they'll go up.

> the only purpose of buying them was to bet that they'll go up.

Which seems a good bet, when the government is increasing the fiat money supply by 40% per year [1].

[1] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4392716-in-october-money-su...

Evidence from March strongly suggests that Bitcoin isn't actually uncorrelated with other financial assets. So if Tesla's concerned about a large decrease in the value of a dollar, there's not much reason to believe bitcoin will protect them from this, at least not any more than a $1.5B pile of steel would.

You could use that same argument for anything you can buy with dollars, including the metal used to mint them.

Yes? The point is that there is nothing strange about Tesla putting some of their cash reserves into assets that retain their value better ("speculating" as the GP put it).

but as repeated every time this comes up, the government trust is enough, because I can pay my taxes with it, which you can't do with my trust.

When you say speculative, for whom do you mean?

Do you mean that it would be easier for some rich person to make more money by speculating in dollars and euros than it would be to speculate in bitcoins?

Look at polkadot. You can exchange any arbitrary data across parachains. How is that not the internet but better?

> Polkadot is a heterogeneous multi-chain interchange and translation architecture which enables customised side-chains to connect with public blockchains.

> Polkadot provides unprecedented economic scalability by enabling a common set of validators to secure multiple blockchains.

keyword bingo !

What problems does it solve ? Who's problems does it solve ?

It is solving the problem of scalability. For reference bitcoin can only handle like 5 transactions per second and ethereum like 20 transactions per second. In order to get global adoption of cryptocurrency we are going to need to scale to handle more transactions.

That being said, ETH 2.0 and bitcoin lightning will solve those problems without the need of polkadot.

Dr. Gavin Wood and alot of the other Eth founders left eth cause sharding isn't going to work.

How about optimistic and ZK rollups?

I have a hard time getting excited for a product solving a problem Visa&co solved decades ago.

Decentralization, Scalability, Security

Rate Visa&Co vs ethereum 2.0 based on this.

The whole point is trustlessness

The current system is secure and already scaled. Decentralization doesn't really bring anything to the table other than mental stimulation for nerds

I know - Some of this stuff gets very technical. It provides all the infrastructure for a blockchain. Think wordpress for blockchain developers. The programming language, Substrate, is written on Rust and is turing complete (Obviously). You can exchange information without the need of a third party (Polkadot is decentralized). All the problems of the current 'censoring' and datamining would be impossible in the network do to the possibility of anonymity.

Also, regardless of your feelings of how 'Useful' something is, the crypto market is worth 1.2T. There's millions to be made in DeFI and it's changing the world and propelling previously unknown people into some of the richest people on the planet. Kinda like the original internet, whether you want it or not its coming. Get on board or get out of the way.

> Some of this stuff gets very technical

It isn't about being technical. It is about explaining why rather than what. If I started talking about cuckoo hashing before explaining that I was providing an associative container, it'd read weird. Similarly, one can fully understand the technical jargon and still come away from that material with "but why".

> Get on board or get out of the way

See, this is the stuff that makes every else get aggravated by cryptocurrency startup culture.

I have no idea. What does it even mean and why would I want to do it?