Cryptocurrency is a perfect example of how computing experts can also have little to no understanding of finance and economics :). HN has been bearish on cryptocurrency for years, meanwhile the industry is continuously expanding into the territory of trillions of dollars.

You missed option C, that thousands of smart but loud technology professionals speaking outside their area of expertise are wrong, thousands more are right, and it's not as obvious as you're making it out to be.

HN's take on crypto will be one of the most comical examples in a few years. Decentralized finance alone is already a 100 billion plus dollar industry and growing at 5-10x a year.

The difference is that Dropbox was a prediction about a business model, while the anti-blockchain comments are assessments of a technology.

A lot of the bullish claims about crypto are based on badly misunderstanding the underlying technology. HN is not predicting anything in that case, just debunking misinformation.

> Decentralized finance alone is already a 100 billion plus dollar industry and growing at 5-10x a year.

You're changing the topic. This thread was about decentralized, blockchain-based apps, not about decentralized finance.

Which dApps? How many users are there? And why can't that dApp be built on traditional stacks?

> building real value

Haven't seen any of this yet. I've seen speculation on coins, and then there are many layers of financial products built on top.

The application space is essentially non-existent as a use-case.

This site shows the top DeFi protocols and their locked value in their smart contracts. It's hardly exhaustive but just visiting and researching the top 10 or 15 will be instructive for you.

Axie Infinity the game has hundreds of thousands of users and growing like crazy. Tens of millions at least own some cryptocurrency. Ethereum has more than 1 million active wallet addresses and it's growing on an exponential curve.

https://www.benzinga.com/markets/cryptocurrency/21/07/218240...

You probably haven't seen it because you are following HN and mainstream news and expect to be informed on it through their filter.

The main success stories I would point out are Uniswap, Sushi, Aave, Compound, Maker, Synthetix, Liquity, OpenSea, Rarible, Sandbox, Decentraland, Aavegotchi, Audius, Matcha, Zapper, and more than I can list to be honest. It's a bit like trying to explain all the interesting use cases of the internet to an early dot com skeptic.

The Hn filter is brutal. It might be costing people the opportunity of their lifetime.

I'm nearly certain that there are quite a lot of drivers out there who would be willing to forgo this if it meant taking home the huge share of their revenue that's currently going to Uber.

The bigger issue is it's not clear drivers going on the blockchain is even legal. Uber and Lyft provide some minimal vetting and certification. Prior to them, drivers directly owned their own taxi businesses, but needed medallions, which also involved regulatory compliance. Uber and Lyft could get away with operating in legal gray areas because of huge legal departments funded by VCs and stock holders. Can individual drivers do that or will cities just hammer them?

> Can individual drivers do that or will cities just hammer them?

This is a good question. Personally, I think it's a risk that many drivers would be willing to take and that enforcing this sort of law on a per driver basis would prove extremely difficult.

I wholeheartedly disagree. It's not even easy to get a female driver in certain places because they're afraid of riders. And most women would never use a service where the drivers aren't identified, background-checked, and banned upon their first incidence of assault.

But if you're right, where is decentralized Uber? Or decentralized Twitter? Or literally decentralized anything?

All we have right now is tokens.