Cryptos also have a thriving theft ecosystem, and illegal uses dwarf the few defi experiments.

Ya... And the internet is used for pirating media, porn, wasting time browsing, gaming and the other millions of "useless" things that it's associated with. The amount of sheer time wasted on the internet is incredible, let alone all the filthy illegal things that are happening on it.

Guess we can throw the internet into the trash bin too.

Not really such a bad idea, these days

I remember the mantra well. I remember the backwards messages in rock music were blamed for brainwashing kids. They would slow a record down and play it backwards and come up with words from the noise that matched their fear message.

So does any traditional government issued currency, credit cards and banking loans and that doesn't make them useless to me.

Would I work for a crypto startup or as a crypto developer in the US if I'm not a citizen? No

Does crypto work as advertised? Yes

Social wellfare, a 401k, etc... are also "get in first get more money out if you get in late" schemes. A lot of people already cashed out their crypto to tangible assets and are set for life. A lot of other people have our pools as a risky investment and every once in a while rabalance and it puts food on the table. It's full of people with bad intentions but open your eyes, so is the world, those people are also doing pump and dumps and pyramid schemes with fiat and the stock market and putting hits on drug dealers over snail mail or dead-drops.

Source for the last point? I’m quite certain this is not the case anymore.

That doesn't cause the positive use cases to not exist.

So does the internet. It was even worse in the early days of the web.

Is there any advantage over existing systems either for the lender or the debtor?

Huge advantages for both. For example, something that's only possible on a blockchain is a flashloan. This is where you can get a loan for any amount (liquidity provided) as long as you repay the full loan amount in the same block. This primitive alone allows for much higher velocities of money since value can be moved and repayed in a single block (on the order of 10 seconds).

All of the advantages of defi boil down to increases in velocity of money. For example you can deposit funds into a contract and receive a token that represents your liquidity position. You can then use this token in other applications. So now you have this composability of money which allows people to create new financial primitives.

> This is where you can get a loan for any amount (liquidity provided) as long as you repay the full loan amount in the same block.

What is the point of that?

> So now you have this composability of money which allows people to create new financial primitives.

Are there any useful for anything beyond gambling/speculation/NFT-like FOMO-powered bubbles?

>> This is where you can get a loan for any amount (liquidity provided) as long as you repay the full loan amount in the same block.

> What is the point of that?

Leveraging arbitrage

"This primitive alone allows for much higher velocities of money since value can be moved and repayed in a single block (on the order of 10 seconds)."

what can be usefully arbitraged in that time in way that guarantees no loss?

It's actually way funnier than GOP presets to be. Flashloan must be paid back in the same transaction. Since whole thing happens in the same tx, it's atomic. So you can use smart-contract logic to determine if you are actually making a profit, and if you are not - revert!

Exploiting contract bugs.

OK but why and for what purpose?

THETA->Super Hi Def video streaming https://www.thetatoken.org/

VET-> Supply Chain Authentication for Businesses https://www.vechain.org/

Are two real world examples that are starting to see adoption. Also this articles covers it well: https://101blockchains.com/practical-blockchain-use-cases/

I am an engineer for more than 12 years. I think I have a reasonably good idea of how a blockchain works.

I have no idea how these two projects are supposed to work. Who is supposed to use this if there isn't even a concise description of the product?

Judging by their Twitter accounts both of these companies have been around since 2017. How many active users do they have?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hf-Op-1peZI for less formal overview https://www.thetatoken.org/ contains white papers if you want the technicals.

I think he's asking if anyone has found this useful in 5 years? Are there actual customers or is this just an idea?

A couple of things. First these are companies that are building up. They are not fully instituted. Second they have many partners that are helping them build out. As far as customers, yes both THETA and VET have customers....including some .gov customers.

Who is giving out 10 second loans and why would they do that?

Non custodial, trustless loans mean I can get a loan against my existing assets without ever interacting with any individual or being subject to scrutiny. A single smart contract can do the job of entire banks.

HN crowd are like the flat earthers of the cryptosphere. When people's self esteem relies on them being contrarian don't expect them to actually put in the effort to learn about something.

I understand crypto perfectly and I strongly believe that it's ultimately useless. The difference is that I have no financial incentive to tell everyone I know about crypto, whereas you certainly do.

I'll leave it up to the audience to decide which one of us is biased.

If you understood it perfectly you wouldn't believe it to be useless.

People have broad understanding of failed products all the time. Sometimes, the people closest to the product think it has more value than it does. This is hacker news, we watch startups fail all the time because they had a great idea no one actually needed and we see people run their companies into the ground trying to pivot on a tech that has no real practical application.

I ignored crypto for several years because I put too much weight on opinions from HN. I'd probably be retired by now if I'd actually paid more attention.