This is sadly a non-answer to the question posed.
I am asked this question all the time by people I know, and the best I can come up with is illegal activities, super niche tech applications (e.g., DNS name reg), and libertarian fantasies.
You have an audience here at HN who is more than willing to advocate for cryptocurrencies if they/we can be shown a compelling use case.
“Yes” is not an obvious compelling use case.
Please elaborate.
That's the answer to your question.
I’m sure this answer will send them running to buy.
/s
All joking aside, for a conversation you say you have weekly, this is a really lame answer due to the abstractness of it.
My guess is the reason you don’t give concrete answers is because either tech already exists for that use case or non-crypto tech could be easily developed if it doesn’t already exist.
Please, please, prove me wrong. I want to be a crypto fan, but vague answers like the ones you provided above are the reason a lot of people think crypto is smoke and mirrors and/or snake oil salesmen.
>...any kind of marketplace or platform but with community governance and no rents, decentralized exchanges, global-by-default payments, highly interoperable and efficient financial infrastructure...
As seen in various forms here: https://ethereum.org/en/dapps/
I can only guess that you are not familiar with the technical jargon.
Your pleading strikes me as potentially disingenuous, but I will speak earnestly in spite of that.
You will or (will not) be a "crypto fan" after you've absorbed enough technical literature to make your own judgement about what is happening. If you have the time, I recommend starting with the Bitcoin and Ethereum whitepapers.
I am familiar with the jargon.
The list that was provided was of abstract ideas without stating a specific market — any market.
The ethereum apps you linked to might be interesting from a technological standpoint, but they don’t really add value — they just are [banking function] or [payment function] with cryptocurrency.
The most generous example that I can come up with is that crypto makes it possible to displace PayPal and similar payment processing middlemen, but I’m not sure most people (outside of a few legal outliers) actually want those middlemen replaced. So even then, the issue isn’t that crypto is so great, it’s just that the fiat currency system is slightly inefficient while being incredibly fixable.
I guess I just don’t see the demand in the marketplace for what crypto is providing the supply for (other than as a tool for speculation... it’s really good at that).
I will offer some criticisms:
Aave - Earning interest on a speculative asset with counter party risk seems a bit silly. Most of the risk is bundled in the asset itself. If you invested $1,000 in a token as a small percentage of your retirement portfolio you're probably hoping the return is 20x. In this incredibly logical scenario 2% is meaningless.
Uniswap - It's cool if you trade tokens because it skips the extra step of sending the asset to a centralized exchange, trading it, and withdrawing it. The centralized scenario might actually be cheaper. Either way it's only impressive if trading tokens is impressive. And at this point it's not.
2. Yes.
3. It'll be a significant issue for decentralized exchanges and liquidity pools, but far from existential. The seasonal Tether FUD is generally overstated. (I have done a detailed analysis of this, but it exceeds the scope of this conversation.)