This happened primarily in a matter of hours. In cash. Across borders. Without being subject to sanctions or restrictions by any country.

It may not be your use case, but it has definitely "put up".

What happened here is a wire transfer, not different from me sending money from my bank account to someone else bank account. Just with two additional transformation steps (make money into whatever crypto, make whatever crypto back into money).

I dare you to describe a method of wire transfer to Kyiv that works in that quantity and timescale and is practically usable by the recipient that quickly and cannot be blocked by your local government's policies.

There simply isn't anything close to that. People that think that this is the same as a wire via a regulated bank are ignorant of the specifics of each type of payment.

Cryptocurrency is indeed cash, and is useful the same way cash is useful.

The regulations exist for a reason. The reason crypto do not have them is because there is no quantity.

Not because it is magically immune to existing in societies

'Yes it does, I got money to refugees when it was otherwise impossible.'

"Well... you shouldn't be able to do that."

So the majority of crypto donations were from Ukrainians on Kuna exchange; hardly a prime example of global crypto's good will. Also $100M is kind of small when you consider it next to the $14B congress has promissed to Ukraine. Then consider the total $1.5T sticker price of the congressional spending bill that $14B was a part of and it all seems insignificant.

In short we can and should give more to Ukraine.

>In short we can and should give more to Ukraine.

And this is a way to give direct aid, something you ostensibly want, and yet you're stuck saying crypto doesn't count, somehow.

It seems a less epicyclic approach is to just accept that this is a valid use case rather than finding a way to out-argue it.

Without the ability to create and control chokepoints like banking institution, it may be impossible to stop people voting with their feet when it comes to international crypto transfers. Especially once people figure out what privacy preserving designs work in practice.

Given the whispers around unbanking political protesters, at some point it may become necessary to deal in crypto to have a political opinion. They can't arrest everyone.

Any anonymous chains like Monero will be blacklisted and only exist in an island where its economy is limited to certain illegal commodities, with the off ramp to wash it clean complex.

I don't want some unknown group of Crypto Bros completely outside my control running the economy of my country. At least in a democracy the people have some control.

Russian hackers demanding ransom payments in bitcoin—thereby circumventing economic sanctions—now that is a legitimately illegitimate use case for crypto.

PayPal requires identity and permission. I am barred from using it, for example.

No barriers to me donating to Ukraine via cryptocurrency.

Sounds like the real problem is having RUB.

> No barriers to me donating to Ukraine via cryptocurrency.

In this case you're not starting with RUB, so you're solving a different problem.

What they are asking for is more sanctions (which the Crypto utoptia is supposed to make impossible) to try and force the hand of a mad dictator without ushering in WW3.

Crypto is barely a footnote.

I’m not sure why you are barred but if I sent you crypto you’d probably need verification to withdraw it to fiat as well.

I think most critics of crypto come into the conversation with a "crypto is bad, and so I must find ways to reinforce this belief", and it's relatively obvious that the critic doesn't have the perquisite knowledge to craft a critique that can be responded to easily.

Specifically, a critic might say "the set A is bad". The critic is under the assumption that the set A is small, perhaps a few items, and they've seen the majority of them. But the "defender" knows that the set is hundreds of thousands of items, but still has only seen a few of them.

The critic operates under the assumption of maybe 4/5 items are bad, and the defender is operating under the assumption that 4/100,000,000 are bad.

So when a critic asks you to link to projects, there's a problem: even if the defender shows 100 projects, and the critic rejects all of them, then it doesn't change the defender's position, because 104/100,000,000 is still a small survey.

Sane "defenders" don't need to disagree with the critics on their points. They can differ primarily in seeing a much, much larger, unexplored search space.

If you assume the space has been fully searched, then its safe to stand back and critique. However, many folks conducting the search see much farther than you do, and see the entirely unexplored space as quite large. And so, it’s reasonable for the defender to not want to engage in your risky position, that assumes snake eyes for the next 100,000 dice rolls.

If you see how large the unexplored search space is, then it sounds ridiculous to declare the entire thing “done and bad”. It’s the same reason why you may choose not to engage with the flat earther. It’s hard to engage with a position so disconnected from rationality.

That said, there’s plenty of people in crypto who are equally disconnected from reality, either because they too only see a small search space, and have declared the contents “good” with little examination, or because they see the large search space and assume all dice rolls will come up as 6’s.

Those folks tend to create a cycle. Folks with no opinion see crazy crypto person, and develop into their own crazy anti crypto person. Neither party is acting rational, because both have claimed certainty with extremely little working information.

That said, there's other projects that are worth while, here's some to add to your N:

- https://strangemood.org (decentralized competitor to steam; this is what I work on)

- https://www.helium.com (incentive layer for the LoRaWAN network)

- https://tea.xyz (new homebrew)

- https://handshake.org/ ("really" decentralized DNS)

- (Compound / Aave / Solend) (decentralized loans)

> still makes no sense from a product-market fit (storage has 3 metrics to judge by: price, retrieval latency, reliability. Filecoin is order of magnitudes worse than competitiors on all metrics)

We use Filecoin and IPFS and have found solutions to these issues typically, and are happy "customers". It's also worth noting that we _can't_ use S3, or traditional cloud hosting, which therefore adds a new metric for us to judge storage on: decentralization.

Why, as a counter example, can’t a game developer/studio deploy a contract which allows people to mint a token in order to purchase the game?

This is roughly what Strangemood does.

But, Strangemood is built on Solana which has different primitives, and so operates a bit differently.

Funny. My usual assumption is that if someone makes an argument that i don't have a comeback to, its that i am wrong. Typically lack of knowledge makes it easier, not harder to respond.

Hell, its things like this that make crypto sound like a cult. I.e. that the primary failure of doubters is that they haven't been suficiently indoctrinated and if they just let our lord and saviour satoshi into their heart they would see the light.

> The critic operates under the assumption of maybe 4/5 items are bad, and the defender is operating under the assumption that 4/100,000,000 are bad.

This isn't a numbers game. To show "crypto" is a good approach, you have to show some generic ideas that are useful in multiple contexts. Nobody cares how many failed projects there are. Its the successes that matter.

Right now you basically have "currencies" if i am being generous. Everything else is stuff that doesn't make sense and would have zero adoption if not for the massive hype train.

> If you assume the space has been fully searched, then its safe to stand back and critique. However, many folks conducting the search see much farther than you do, and see the entirely unexplored space as quite large.

I don't think anyone believes this.

If your position is that the crypto space is currently useless, but its possible that someone at some point may make a breakthrough which changes things, i think most critics would agree.

The breakthroughs that are needed to make things interesting are even pretty obvious. E.g. Efficient (much beyond the current generation) general purpose zero knowledge proofs of computation, efficient fully homomorphic encryption. If these things happen, i would find the space a much more interesting one. However these are hard problems - progress is being made but we are still nowhere close. Until then its not an interesting space.

Its sort of like if someone was doing things that required fast solutions to np complete problems, and countered criticism by saying we dont know that np!=p, maybe someone will find an algorithm. They are not wrong, but they aren't compelling either.

> a bunch of examples

Seem mostly about doing things you could just as easily do without blockchain. Except maybe helium which does sound like it has a story for why it needs to use these technologies.

> It's also worth noting that we _can't_ use S3, or traditional cloud hosting, which therefore adds a new metric for us to judge storage on: decentralization.

Genuinely curious - why not? Is it just for ideological reasons or is there an actual use case preventing you?

Ownership requires decentralization.

In our case, we can't make a "Steam that's owned by game developers" if the listing information (the screenshots, the titles, the descriptions, the game files, and so on) are hosted on AWS.

Ownership means that, if the original creators were to walk away, the asset would still exist without the need for the original creator.

This is (maybe) a new business model: take something that was previously a service, turn it into an asset instead.

In a "service", the original creator operates the product. In an "asset", the original creator does not typically operate or control the product. So to turn a service into an asset, you "decentralize" the operation of the product; typically via a commodity market which drives the price down and disconnects the creator from the original product.

As a real world example, take cars. Imagine if, when you purchased a car, you paid a subscription for your car service. Then someone came along and said "hey, you should just be able to buy a car and own it". Critics argue "but then who would fix it when it breaks? who will fuel it? There's no way anyone could provide you these services better than Ford. This 'car ownership' must be a scam." And sure enough, many people come along selling you a pink slip for a car, claim there's only so many to go around, and people speculate on the pink slips. The critic then argues "see, all this 'ownership' stuff is just a scam! Everyone's just buying the pink slip to sell to the next sucker." In fact, the pink slip sellers never made the car, and disappeared with the money. The speculators and scammers are indeed speculators and scammers; but they don't change the underlying point: it's not unreasonable to try and sell the car. In order to make the car an asset, you must "decentralize the car"; by ensuring anyone can become a mechanic and anyone can sell fuel to the car.

In Strangemood's case, we make a decentralized marketplace for software licenses, that's owned primarily by the sellers (ie: decentralized Steam). If Strangemood stored files on S3, then whoever owns the the AWS account is the only operator, and so the product is a traditional service, rather than an asset.

> In Strangemood's case, we make a decentralized marketplace for software licenses, that's owned primarily by the sellers (ie: decentralized Steam). If Strangemood stored files on S3, then whoever owns the the AWS account is the only operator, and so the product is a traditional service, rather than an asset.

I'm a but confused here on the ownership - if its the purchaser or the seller who is in control. Filecoin isn't free so i assume one of these groups has to be footing the bill.

Wouldn't this goal be equally served by just hosting it in the sellers s3 bucket (or webserver, or torrent, etc)? Someone still has to pay for and be in control of the filecoin "instance" (probably not the right word), what's the difference between that person doing that vs running their own server.

Of course! Feel free to send me an email if you'd like to grab virtual coffee and talk more. I'm evan [at] strangemood [dot] org.

> I'm a but confused here on the ownership - if its the purchaser or the seller who is in control. Filecoin isn't free so i assume one of these groups has to be footing the bill.

Ah! This is what DAOs are for.

A percentage of every sale goes to a community treasury (a wallet). That wallet is collectively controlled by a token. That token is minted to sellers upon purchase, so the sellers control the treasury.

The treasury acts as a "payer of last resort". It pays for Filecoin deals basically. It also can pay maintainers of open source tooling through decentralized Quadratic funding grants (see https://wtfisqf.com/).

Rebase (the company that makes Strangemood) peer's the store's small-file metadata (titles, descriptions, etc) as an additional backup. We don't have to do this, but it costs us about $0.15 per year to do so, and it makes the network faster and safer.

Realistically, DAOs might be a janky solution. I'd love to see payment of file store be included within the protocol itself.

But there's a few quirks of Solana that made this difficult. Specifically, you can't use more than 1024 bytes in a single instruction, which limits the scope of the program. This might be fixed in the future though.

How long did it take for gold to become a store of value? I am guessing millenia.