Yet, I have found it useful to try and separate the fundamental innovations from the current set of assets being manipulated.
Here is a partial list of fundamental crypto innovations:
- non-custodial wallets in general to protect people from predatory institutions or governments
- smart contracts that always do what they say they'll do
- inherent global jurisdiction of blockchains, ie. borderless
- vastly reduced transaction costs to stand up and operate new, networked financial instruments and other kinds of digital asset systems (property registries, etc.)
The fact that these innovations are currently majority operated on dog money, Bitcoin, ETH, etc. is a temporary characteristic of this early stage of crypto's growth.
In the future, these same innovations will operate on everything in the economy.
For example, Tesla stock (backed by custodially-held physical shares, not synthetics) has been available on Solana for some time.
You can do that now by hiding money in your mattress. In both cases, it's not on you to protect your money, and a lot of people who are tech savvy have been failing to do so. Regular folks are going to get robbed often.
> smart contracts that always do what they say they'll do
Except when they don't, because they have a bug, and all the money is stolen.
> inherent global jurisdiction of blockchains, ie. borderless
This is only true if you are able to spend the money as cryptocurrency. Once you try converting that into fiat, you start hitting those borders really quickly.
> vastly reduced transaction costs
Except that the transaction costs are higher, on average, and especially so if you consider the fees for converting from fiat, and back to fiat.
> Tesla stock (backed by custodially-held physical shares, not synthetics) has been available on Solana for some time
Sure, but a financial institute is holding those shares. You could cut the middle-man here (the cryptocurrency) and just use the financial institution.
> a decentralized credit platform
> a decentralized exchange liquidity pool
> an open source, decentralized, non-custodial liquidity protocol
> a smart wallet with an intuitive interface built on top of popular DeFi projects
> an algorithmic money market protocol
This is a circular argument for the utility of dApps. There's nothing here for someone who isn't already interested in cryptocurrency.