This is a far better question to put to crypto.
The article isn’t attempting to address that question though.
My bet is “yes”, at maybe 80% confidence. I would say it’s fairly difficult to see though, because speculative projects grow very quickly and dwarf “normal” projects, setting unrealistic comparisons.
Both crypto skeptics and crypto promoters tend to be blinded by candlestick graphs.
The total number of active wallets is still fairly small (a few million), and so a “non-speculative” project doesn’t “seem” like a major project when folks attempt to compare its market cap against speculative projects.
For example, Dark Forest is fairly popular, but isn’t explicitly a speculative project. And so few folks outside of crypto have heard of it.
Crypto suffers from the problem that the speculative parts are mainstream (or at least, are very well known about), but non-speculative use cases are not.
I think this problem is mostly solved by the bubble popping. Crypto-skeptics can pat themselves on the back for predicting the obvious, but may end up being wrong long term because they missed the relatively “small” non-speculative projects.
Like, HTTP isn't a product; but a web browser uses HTTP as a feature, and so do web servers. But they aren't the whole product either.
And the categorical error is that traditional finance sees its protocols as products, but they're actually on the road to commodified features. It's easy to "print new money" now, so that's not the part of the value chain that matters.
I used to say to proponents of blockchain as an enabling tech, "show me a product that relies on blockchain tech but sells itself on its amazing problem-solving features, not on the word blockchain and not on the alleged value of its attached tokens"
I don't know that I've really seen such a thing yet. I stopped asking a couple of years ago I think. The few times I got a response I'd follow a link and go to a page singing the praises of a token and using the word blockchain liberally.
But neither is anything particularly new at the consumer end, the only difference between Koala and any other company is that they're reliant on defi lending for their funding.
And the only thing blockchainy I can find about Figure is their crypto mortgage, which is an(other) collateralised loan scheme, and it's not in action yet. I notice it was supposed to launch in April with a 100% crypto-to-loan amount. I wonder if they've had to rethink it in light of the recent crash?
If their other products are somehow blockchain (and they might be, I can see they have some sort of proprietary blockchain going on) then firstly, yes, we’ll done to them for not crowing about it and putting the product first! But secondly, again I’m not really seeing a novelty here.
And I wonder what happens to companies like Koala in the current situation, a lot of DeFi lending platforms seem to have either collapsed or be on the brink.
But I guess “crowd-funded finance”
Why would I want to hitch my wagon to that star? What will happen if the speculation dies down and the ledger isn't so widely distributed anymore?
They will initially but just as we saw the the early internet, a crash can wipe out the speculation pretty efficiently and what remains might actually be useful.
Bitcoin has now been around for, what, 13 years? And aside from a very brief explosion of hype around NFTs that most people were fairly quickly able to recognize as nothing but more "greater fool" scams, most people not directly financially invested in blockchain projects either don't know or care blockchain exists, or see it as a bad thing.
Some stocks crashed, some specific sites went away, but the people involved just reorganized and made even more successful businesses.
If 50%+ of Internet users decided to disconnect that could cause some real problems.
The poster I was responding to thought that would make room for more pragmatic applications but I'm not so sure.
I'm not convinced that crypto is like the dot-com bubble. With the early web, its use cases were fairly clear and immediate. With crypto, the use cases remain unclear and speculative even after 13 years of hype and fanfare.
What is a non-speculative project? How can you deter speculation? By maintaining a high supply inflation for a long time?
Darknet markets. Lots of drugs and lots of illegal materials are bought and sold using crypto, like stolen cards and child porn.
So, “if you are child porn enthusiast, you are maybe using cryptocurrency” might be a valid usecase.
However I don’t know how prevalent crypto is in any of these. I haven’t read any studies on it, and they might be hard to do.
I don’t think any of the big drug cartels actually use cryptocurrency, for example, but I might be wrong.
What's surprising about crypto however, is that this "second wave" of usages should already start to appear by now, and yet we don't see any sign of them.
Just because something isn't AWS doesn't mean that it's useless. I think that's part of the point the OP was making: people keep moving the goal post and because of that, their argument is not falsifiable.
The basic premises of crypto are to be decentralized and permissionless systems that support peer-to-peer forms of exchange and ownership, and they largely succeed in their defined goals. The goal of these protocols is to provide new tools, not to replace every corner of fiat and financial systems.
They... they don't succeed. Like, at all. Except for a tiny bit in their own digital bubbles where everything is defined in crypto. And even there it's highly questionable.
This says nothing about their USD spot trading price, or the practicality of securing large amounts of wealth with a 24-word private key, or the expectation that these technologies should somehow replace all corners of the world's financial transactions.
Both are probably pretty small numbers.
Identity plays are tricky commercially but there do seem to be some interesting shoots of growth around it.
Many—but not all—DID methods make use of distributed ledger technology (DLT) or some other form of decentralized network.[1]
> SSI has no human mediated account recovery and so is a toy.
I don't completely disagree, but it's not the take I was expecting.
Change your name? Old name still there. Change your phone number? Still there. All old email addresses? Still there.
I'm curious to know if there's something I misunderstood in this space
For example, a zero-knowledge DID can generate a proof to an age-restricted application that you are over 18, without necessarily revealing your birthdate or any other information about yourself.
The only reason anyone cares about blockchain is because of the ability to speculate. Remove that and it's a tiny niche tech - which certainly has use cases but nothing you can build a Facebook or Google around.
it be nice to prove identity via a public key, but the private key can't be trusted as the authority. They get compromised too often
* 60 million monthly active users
https://basicattentiontoken.org/growth/
* 10 million users opted into rewards
Brave pays users for their attention while blocking ads and tracking. Brave is not unknown on HN. There are a lot of posts about it that make the front page.
The question being put to crypto isn't "can you come up with something that it can do"; it's "can you come up with something that will see mainstream use that eclipses the toxic speculation that's perceived to characterize every crypto application".
I don't claim to have a dispositive argument here, but I also don't think crypto advocates do either.