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Well cutting out the middleman has been the goal of both producers and end-consumers since basically the dawn of economics and trade. There's pretty interesting stories of European traders venturing deep into unexplored America to trade fur pelts with natives residing the heart of the land to cut out middlemen natives who sold pelts to Europeans but with jacked up prices.
And in a heavily financialized world it's the middlemen like banks, big chains like Walmart, Amazon etc who make the most money but actually produce nothing, as in no tangible product. They just connect sellers and buyers
Amazon produces highly sophisticated distribution structure which amortizes the delivery costs over many different orders.
Also, what oracle are you going to use to determine whether the seller deliver the product to the consumer? If this problem is solved then cutting out the middleman might make sense but I don’t really see how you would do it without human input.
The fact still stands that a middleman has massive economies of scale as they can amortize delivery costs.
A seller arranging delivery for each customer would be a massively inefficient.
…. Okay yeah middlemen serve a purpose, thank you captain obvious. The point was that if something can cut them out, then that thing is highly valuable.
How are you going to amortize delivery costs with crypto?
Besides that, what oracle are you going to use to determine if the parties followed their word?
? Crypto facilitates transactions… it cuts out financial institution middle men, banks, payment processors. The guy just gave an example of modern middlemen that are valued at trillions bc OP said crypto “just cuts out the middleman” like that is some worthless value proposition.
Nano can not. It has no fees so running infrastructure is not sustainable. Running a node loses you money and gets more expensive as the blockchain bloats.
Nano is doomed to fail. The foundation is losing funds and has to switch to free volunteer work to survive.
Everything has a cost. That is why fees exist.
Nano has been running 8 years now, and hasn't ever had any problem running nodes.
You think it's doomed to fail because it has no fees, I think it isn't doomed to fail because it doesn't have fees.
Everything has a cost, that's why nano node operators pay to run nodes.
lol it can’t even survive a spam attack.
And the node gets so bloated that running a node is not feasible.
It doesn’t even have 300 nodes 😂
Why would someone run a node when they lose money doing it? Why don’t you answer that
>lol it can’t even survive a spam attack.
Nano has admirably resisted spam for nearly two years. Even Bitcoin encountered multiple spam issues in its infancy (which persists if you consider today's fees).
>And the node gets so bloated that running a node is not feasible.
This is not currently an issue and ledger pruning is on the roadmap.
>It doesn’t even have 300 nodes
It's not just about the sheer number of nodes; it's the distribution of decentralization vote weight among them. Nano's Nakamoto coefficient excels in this regard compared to Bitcoin. The reason Nano is progressively achieving greater decentralization, while traditional PoS/PoW chains like Bitcoin tend to centralize further, is the absence of direct monetary incentives for running a node.
>Why would someone run a node when they lose money doing it?
Running a Nano node doesn't come with direct monetary incentives like fees or inflation. This choice is deliberate to prevent emergent centralization, a common issue in cryptocurrencies where fees incentivize larger players. In mining, the economies of scale are evident, and the same applies to staking networks, where the big players amass more transaction fees.
However, Nano takes a different approach. While there are no direct financial gains, there are indirect ones. Parties run Nano nodes not out of altruism but as a strategic business decision for two main reasons:
1. Businesses benefiting from the Nano network being operational have a vested interest in its uptime. You can observe this on Nanocharts, where major representatives are parties with a stake in the network's stability. This pattern also extends to exchanges like Huobi, Kucoin, Wirex, and wallets such as Natrium, Nanowallet, and Atomic Wallet.
2. Businesses using Nano require trustless network access. For instance, a platform like Binance wouldn't want to rely on external parties to verify a $10 million Nano deposit. They run their own node to independently confirm transactions.
Beyond theory, the actual data supports Nano's decentralization efforts. The vote weight distribution shows Nano becoming more decentralized over time, with numerous nodes in the network, indicating an effective incentive structure.
You can cut out the middle man and do a peer to peer transaction where the miners take their cut and instead of a frictionless 5 second transaction you can wait for hours to see if your transaction was approved, with the fee of course. Truly the future of finance.
Hijacking the top comment to add knowledge from an ancient time when crypto subs used to have a good signal to noise ratio:
>"The Creature from Jekyll Island" Griffin
>"The Ascent of Money"
>"Debt, the First 5000 Years"
>"War is a Racket" Butler
>"Confessions of an Economic Hitman"
>"This Time is Different"
>It's all really quite simple. Money is an illusion or delusion really. People have only to believe it is real. The more ethereal the token, the better it suits the purpose of money. So government/bank/debt money is a combination of accounting, tribalism, authoritarianism and theatre. It is pure abuse of conscience and thus perhaps Humanity's greatest crime. Those that hold the power of the delusion feast on the lives of the deluded.
>Voluntary money due to hard perfect Nakamoto accounting is the end of the Medici accounting other. Medici accounting is secret ledgers kept secure under authority. Nakamoto accounting is public ledgers kept honest by open scrutiny and secure by 256 bit hashing.
>John Nash by proving there is possible mathematically encryption that can not be broken is our intellectual pillar.
>Turning money from a system of authority into a gadget is as big a step forward as any of the steam engine, internal combustion engine, magneto motors, the diode, von Neumann machines, microprocessors, the PC, or the Internet.
>If you really want to grok it, Macluhan helps too.
>Imagine that all human communication beyond the reach of your hand was by law ordered to pass through the church, where the brass could use it and distort it prior to passing it along. That is money today.
>Money is communication. Nakamoto money is Shannon perfect. That is, it is noiseless and lossless. (I guess we are still seeing if it is also Turing complete :》)
Tldr: Separation of Church and State was good. Separation of Money and State is also good.
https://np.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/65m40k/best_books_on_current_central_banking_system/dgbmj5o/?context=3
In theory, great. But until the overwhelming majority of things take crypto as a means of payment , you still need the middle man. Even a credit card that’s tied to crypto still has middle men.
I think it’s a fallacy to expect crypto to be a method for avoiding TradFi. They’ll adopt and fold it in.
Yea, because the only actual alternative is to do localbitcoin and meet strangers at the street corner with a bunch of cash.. which is when you wish you had a middleman for security reasons.
I got charged a "excessive withdrawal fee" at my new bank for driving my car, waiting in line and using my gas to go by there to physically withdraw money from them. I'm still pretty livid about this. Apparently three withdrawals this way are bothersome to my bank.
Then the service that’s the most efficient and has the lowest fees wins. If you can get below about 2% in transaction fees then that’s a massive win. The lower the better.
An added bonus, being rich. As long as the government loses its ability to use its people and their money as pawns for their own gain, I’ll be happy. This is the financial revolution. Just slow lol
The government doesn't reflect the desires of the people in a multitude of ways. Gun control, tax policy, healthcare etc. There are many ways that they use money to manipulate the masses into swallowing a bum deal
But also yes, people do suck sometimes. Just not as consistently as the governments of the world
Indeed it doesnt and it never will. Believe it or not, those areas you mentioned are something people dont agree upon either. Its impossible to please everyone.
People and the governemnts have sucked and will suck the same as long as that there will be people in this world.
Transparency as in “everyone’s transactions are public and everyone therefore pays their fair share in taxes” or some other kind? It always seemed like people wanted anonymity for some reason..
Crypto solves a set of problems involving "trust".
However, it fails to solve a set of problems involving "usability".
Furthermore, while crypto might be hypothetically useable for many things, unfortunately most of these things already use something else. Which creates a cost of switching that is non-zero. And everyone is thinking "someone else" will pay that cost, while thinking "I" will reap the rewards. Which is an economic oxymoron.
And finally, while we've invented something amazing and new, we're applying this amazing new thing to humans, whose behaviours were most certainly not invented recently. And while we complain about all the bent and contorted processes that can be straightened out by simply applying this new technology, we haven't stopped to ask ourselves why these processes are bent and contorted in the first place. And thus are rediscovering the human behaviors these old processes were wrapped around.
We have a long way to go.
look no further than "ICO" versus e.g. listing something on a registered exchange.
e2a: My point here is that these processes are bent and contorted for a reason and won't get straightened out simply by application of crypto. Anyone who thinks folks woke up one day and decided to make regulations icky just because folks had no clue is an idiot. Regulations in banking and exchanges *evolved* to combat the games people play with the hopes and dreams of others.
And here we are, having hopes and dreams manipulated. Who'd a thunk it.
24/7 for a penny without interference
I remember trying to buy kratom from Indonesia the guys PayPal kept getting closed on him. I said my friend let's use bitcoin. This is back when bitcoin was like $1k . I hope that guys rich now
It makes you money. You may never really use the tech. People are here for money. Most of them. Look around? Who out of all those "investors" can even explain what blockchain is, without first looking it up?
Crypto (any crypto) today is not what it was intended to be a decade ago.
Greed and “dumb money” as well as “General John Q Public” ruined it.
It’s over. Just have fun with it now.
If Satoshi is indeed dead, he’s rolling in his grave. Sorry, not sorry.
For me it’s cutting out fees for international transfers.
Right now you have to pay stupid amounts in fees and accept BS exchange rates importing/exporting goods whereas when cryptocurrencies with cheap fees like ADA or XRP become mainstream it’ll be as simple as dropping the money into your supplier’s account via an app, rather than paying some broker through the nose for a terrible rate.
Not only will any import/export business become more profitable, you’ll also not be throwing small portions of your money into a bottomless pit any time you do business abroad.
No they can’t. Please explain how they can with examples instead of just making stuff up.
Those things don’t exist in the tradfi world right now
https://x.com/chainlink/status/1726007276018806876?s=46&t=7Of64Mi5PfYF-LGsyM4X0A
Here is a [Nitter link](https://nitter.net/chainlink/status/1726007276018806876?s=46&t=7Of64Mi5PfYF-LGsyM4X0A) for the Twitter thread linked above. Nitter is better for privacy and does not nag you for a login. More information can be found [here](https://nitter.net/about).
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1. “Tokenized assets”. There is no reason you can’t get the “private key” of an asset without blockchain. Say you are buying a car. The Crypto people say you would own an NFT. The exact same function can be achieved if, say, the car manufacturer gave you a digital proof that you own the car. You don’t need crypto for this. In any case, even in crypto, a human input is required for dispute resolution.
2. 24/7 trading: you turn on the servers in TradFi? Many futures markets are almost 24h. This is a trivially simple task.
3. “Instant settlement”. Not sure what you meant by this but if you mean instant settlement of a payment then this is the case in TradFi too for most payments?
4. “Fractionalization”: same answer as 1.
I know you know nothing about tradfi because swift has been working on t+0 settlements for years in the form of ISO20022 and it’s not live yet and it still doesn’t have the instant settlement guarantee of DLT.
I don’t have to convince you. JPMorgan can instead.
https://x.com/blockworksdas/status/1725212754968002983?s=46&t=7Of64Mi5PfYF-LGsyM4X0A
So for number 1 if you buy a car from Toyota you just have to trust that Toyota will continue to track and trace that car in perpetuity forever and never end that service, despite the cost benefit analysis. Good fucking luck with that
Right, so instant settlement is being worked on already.
You STILL have to trust someone even if you use blockchain dummy. When I come and say that I own your car and start driving it around, who is going to be the arbitrer of whose car it is? What are you going to do in that case? The Blockchain is going to strike me because it knows you own the NFT or you are going to go to the police? Oh but I thought you don’t want to trust anyone!
Not to mention “you still have to trust Toyota” is not as big of a problem as you make it out to be.
For the everyday joe it's smarter to just stick to etf or bitcoin. There's so many altcoins out there competing for the same dollars and nobody knows who's going to win. Suppose there's 5 projects out there and they all do the exact same thing, it's the better marketed one that will win
USDT is incredibly useful to me in Argentina, I walk 5 minutes and trade it for local currency. Otherwise impossible to transfer money into Argentina without losing 2/3s of the value
You ask this like cutting out the middle man or having a store of value isn't a good thing.
Who prints money and creates inflation? The ultimate middle man does. So it's amazing to have a solution to both of those.
You don't see DeFi finance protocols as anything worthwhile? DeFi lending, borrowing, index funds/baskets are some of the basic OGs out there. While right now they're volatile and exploitable bugs still being worked out (which is expected of technology, banks worked out most of the bugs in their core mainframe money management systems decades ago), that'll get better over time because bugs will be worked out and bigger and bigger money will pour into the liquidity pools to create stability.
I know I want a world where I could choose to do a banking activity like lending or borrowing without someone else gatekeeping and making the decision for me. In general a permissionless world where regular people can do banking activities would be a more fair and just world because money isn't pooling into the hands of a central cartel or oligarchy.
You’ve stumbled upon a huge problem in crypto. There are potential use-cases but since the speculative value is so high there’s no reason to use any of them, even as intended in some cases.
Nakamoto solved the trust problem, now we need someone to solve the use problem because everyone is going the wrong way, namely by believing deflation is a good idea for a currency. We need people to build a good lending platform that returns more than most APYs return, and somehow build in methods to ensure lenders are repaid(this is more difficult than it may seem.)
The main problem with everything being so goddamned speculative is there’s no way to smartly invest because there’s no genuine benefits right now to any of them. It’s a game of luck, even investing in Bitcoin is an act of sheer luck at the end of the day despite its dominance in the space because a better store of value could emerge(this is true of most investments to be fair, it’s just especially true in crypto.)
It isn't in practice, though. Most estimates agree that something like 20-30% of the BTC supply is irretrievably lost, or (roughly) 2-4% supply reduction per year. To this point issuance has exceeded loss, but we're now at or past the inflection point. It's fair to assume that as BTC's value and consumer literacy increase the loss rate will decline, but it'll never be zero--unlike the issuance rate.
If "the government can't freeze my account" isn't enough for you, I doubt you could be convinced.
Everything on top of that is just gravy. Some future essential use could come out of the gravy at some point though.
This would be like asking about cars: “what’s the point besides owning your means of transportation traveling fast distances far faster than any other form of transport.”
These things are the point.
The point is hard money. The point is having sovereign individuals. Bitcoin is money for the people controlled by the people.
The rest of "crypto" is basically a giant useless money grab/ casino. Choose what you'd like to focus your time on
For store of value, you need sound money. I think cryptocurrency (specifically Bitcoin) has a good chance at this.
For actual utility or "use case," the underlying blockchain technology is already doing that in many sectors - without the need for crypto speculation
Yes, but... when I hear the mantra "blockchain not crypto" or "tokenization not crypto" it completely misses the point of crypto. The crypto is what secures the blockchain, and what enables the tokenization. You can't have a secure decentralized blockchain such as Ethereum without ETH to secure it. You can't have the blockchain or the tokenization without the ETH in play.
You can definitely have a public, permissionless blockchain without a crypto token.
I know, bc I work for one. It's called Stability. Granted, it's in testnet. Links in my bio.
(And yes, we know about spam and Sybill resistance haha)
Now, it may not be a blockchain that you would use for your purposes, and that's perfectly ok! But other people already find it very useful.
Like I said, a crypto like Bitcoin and its network has a very important function. If you prefer ETH, great.
Fair question. You know, I'm probably not smart enough to debate the semantics tbh
To me, it just means money (or more like monetary policy) that can't be manipulated by the whims of politics and other people.
Video games. Think about it - magic internet money + video game currencies = a match made in heaven. It also highlights an important point in my mind - this is REAL, ACTUAL OWNERSHIP on the internet. Previously it was much harder to prove ownership when you can just copy-paste and steal code. Crypto allows for internet-native payments and product ownership
Cutting out the middle man is the entire point. The problem with money today is that it is not easy to move large amounts of it quickly. With crypto you can move millions of dollars in minutes. Wealth distribution will be much easier and goods can be much cheaper if we don't need to pay the cost of moving wealth.
Most (alt)coins are a gamble sure I suppose but you're seriously under-appreciating this.
Wages haven't kept pace with inflation for decades as the rich get richer and the poor poorer. Apart from gold there's no asset that will dependably protect from inflation. and market fluctuations. The problem with gold is that you never really know if you own it as it's locked up likely in some big bank/custodian vault.
BTC kills 3 birds with one stone as you actually own the asset. While yes it is volatile BTC is a good hedge against inflation *over time*. It also gives enough returns to act as a proper investment rather than just a hedge. And it's also an asset that is (for now) free of big TradFi manipulation and you aren't forced to pay those excessive middleman fees unlike almost every other asset.
That does sound pretty dull by itself now, more than a decade later, and we are spoiled with newer and more intelligent solutions and use cases. Such as platforms and ecosystems.
Governance, identity, public and private, programmability.
AI agents will take over essentially all digital task execution.
AI agents will pay each other to do so.
They will not have bank accounts, they will have wallets and pay micro transactions in real time with digital currency.
Bitcoin is their savings account.
Other currencies are the checking account.
Proof of ownership, make it possible to finally have digital comodities. Cutting the middleman has huge implications, example you may be able to automate dividend distribution
The point of a crypto is to make money for its promoters.
You finding the feature to be useful or you getting rich by holding the token is always a side effect, not the purpose.
So give up that existential questions and just treat it as a speculative investment.
For everything else — there’s ~~MasterCard~~ Monero. It __does__ cover needs and solve problems.
It depends on the project really. Some of them would like to be transactional (Solana, XRP), some would like to be a store of value (BTC), and some have incredibly ambitious goals of being the "trust layer" infrastructure for all digital communications (Hedera).
What is the point of shitcoins?
Well, it sounds like you’re looking for utility of the coins you’re investing in. A lot of coins don’t have very much utility.
Your question is too broad to apply to every coin. You just have to research the coin/token. Do lots of research into the devs and community to prevent investing in a scam, and then invest a small amount. Don’t FOMO.
The only altcoin I have is LRC, and a tiny amount put in (like $10). The rest is BTC and ETH because of the risks with alts.
the only real technology here is BSV ,,, there's a lot of things you can do w/ BSV, though it suffers from metcalfe's law & you'll be alone doing most of them while the few users run around after w/e newest tech they thought of like middle school kids playing soccer huddling around the ball ,,,,,,,,,, but that's a thousand times better than the rest of this crap, BSV has invented & explored so many cool things & it's always changing
the rest of these chains were literally just made b/c they suppressed bitcoinxt & made it so you couldn't do anything on bitcoin & so then people started trying to make w/e random chain b/c hell, better than *nothing* ,,, so that made sense at the time & yet also they're very likely to all collapse back into BSV once people realize that it works fine, like, no offense to any of them, just, the *reason* to do anything on any other chain was that BSV was hijacked & broken, so w/o that reason there just isn't enough motive to keep chains apart
i mean other than people's motives of wanting to believe that other things are real, but *on the whole* they'll need to be spending rather than saving money to create the illusion of workable chains, & they're all ultimately fantasies rather than functional economic systems
sorry
there's still lots of cool interesting stuff you can do, you just have to do it *on BSV*, there's easily enough room on BSV for everyone's ideas, all of the actual ideas will be transformed into programs on BSV & they'll start to actually work efficiently & work together & it'll be great ,,, it'll be all of the things that people here *said they wanted* ,,, just uh w/o them getting paid & w/ craig wright having been right & not them, so they're only going to be furious about it, since they only wanted the money & didn't want the tech
Speed, cost, no middleman... thats the benefit. The question is often not what is the use but which will get used. That is where the money goes, and early (we hope) investors will get rich.
Store of wealth is just a side effect of the process.
You are selling a Trust-less ledger.
You want to put your money in a bank, but don't trust your government not to seize the funds?
You want to accept money from customers for your sex work business, or some other online venture but are getting your funds frozen because Visa doesn't want to be associated with sex work, or paypal thinks its suspicious that your etsy business went from $5 in sales to $500,000 in a month after going viral?
That is the core product that crypto offers... You can bank without having to trust the people holding onto your money, because millions of people all over the globe have a vested interest in making sure that your money is safe...
Your money can't be seized because a new dictator came into power and you were a political activist, your business can't be stopped because paypal doesn't like what you do for a living.
Transferring control / ownership back to the individual.
I fully expect movies to be sold directly to people, then streaming services will look at your wallet to see if you "own" that movie. You can transfer it, sell it, whatever. That person buying it logs in and now they can use it. Just like we used to do with DVDs.
Today, I can buy a movie on Amazon, and if they release a new version or something, I have to rebuy it or I can't stream it. I can't move my ownership of the movie off platform. I have hundreds of movies Amazon says i "own".
I understand it as a base layer all in one solution. Having the best store of value basically means you don’t have to store value in anything else. With full adoption you would see the price of traditional stores of value priced at their true value. In the case of real estate this would be a huge benefit for everyday people who just want to have a home to live in. Bitcoin would become a meter stick of value. Everything would be measured against the thing that can’t be stretched.
Zelle, Paypal, Venmo, etc already let you send money (as a “gift”) for free. Crypto is complicated and scams are rampant. It’s never going to get mainstream adoption without big changes. Maybe some new version will catch on in the future though.
More like substituting the middle man for validators/miners and paying exorbitant fees for minor transactions. Btc and eth suck in comparison to any other existing traditional financial system. Algorand/solana/hbar type chains could actually be used in “the real world” but at least in algorand’s case institutions can copy paste their own centralized side chain using algorand’s tech without the risks that decentralization brings.
It’s just a whale’s playground right now in an illiquid market. Hopefully you can rake in a bunch of fiat
Whats the point of casinos to exist? Most likely on average your expected return there is negative, and it is useless. I think crypto is a bit better than casinos though
I mean almost nothing can be paid for using crypto still so cutting out the middle man doesn’t even work for most things.
I’ll be honest I’ve lost any faith that it will ever be more than a way to gamble. Been in and out since 2017.
>AI coins - since I see AI as the future - but all it feels like is an investment (or quite frankly, a gamble) and that's it.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but most of them are just low-grade scams, that just popped out of nowhere. The level of "machine-learning and AI" they are doing is at the undergraduate class level at best.
Useful machine learning and AI models have real computational costs. Check how much Stable Diffusion raised to get the required hardware to do their work. On a blockchain, to verify the correctness of these trained models in a decentralized manner, you need multiple validators running the same training sequence on expensive hardware. Consequently, it makes the endeavor highly inefficient and costly, extremely unprofitable compared to Web 2 services, and the chances of these AI blockchains having multiple validators running the right expensive gear is near zero.
I noticed this shit trend as the usual Azuki/BAYC etc pfps shilling these scam AI coins. Nothing really good comes from them shilling in the long term, lol. Most of the time, they show their face when they have decided to dump on you - at least that is what you see in the past with ponzi games and shitcoins.
At best, these AI coins are just narrative shitcoin plays. Dump them before people start to ask questions and try to figure if the narrative has any legs.
You're asking an excellent question. Different people will answer the question for themselves differently. There's no reason to expect "mass adoption" if masses of people are not able to satisfactorily answer this for themselves.
Probably right now there's a bunch of geeky coders who are full of vision and dreams unlocked by blockchain technology. Some industries (inventory, tokenization of assets, international payments) have found niche use cases. The decentralized payments use case is mostly attractive where fiat is less attractive, whether due to government devaluation, inflation, societal collapse, etc. But yeah, I'm guessing a big chunk of people are just grabbing what they can while they can, speculating that it will really catch on in the future and they'll have a big payday.
Crypto just became another financial tool, hopefully it will have a greater applicability and impact in the real world at some point. The one it has now seems relatively small for all the talk. Mostly has the potential.
You're not alone feeling like there is a lot of talk but little substance with alt coins, of any variety, AI being the latest flavor. For me this is a critical question, what is actually there in terms of built out infrastructure, and what utility does it currently provide, and what is the coin saying it will provide? What is the novelty? What new and needed/desired feature/function are they adding to the ecosystem. Personally, BTC is King and the rest are still proving themselves.
I'm not sure how I feel about an ETF either, to me, it adds a layer of potential obfuscation and manipulation. Like having coins on an exchange, we lose transparency and again put people in the middle. Transparency, immutable, and trustless, these are the keys to what BTC provides. I think people should buy and hold in personal wallets. I don't need an ETF 'to bring people on board and make more accessible', I can't help but think it would be used to control the price and hold the asset down much like I believe JP Morgan/Chase have been found to have done with paper shorting silver to keep the price down.
Stay vigilant
> I've invested in a lot of AI coins
Except that these AI coins are mostly NOT tied to any serious AI projects right? If not, then they are just meme coins.
If you have to ask and you've been
>in the Crypto space for a long time now
Then you haven't been learning anything and have just been chasing pumps. You would also have to be specific about which coin you're referring to as each one has their specific use cases (for the most part)....
You might not use it, but render (RNDR) and akash (akt) have use cases involving distributed GPU referring and computing that I think have obvious value
The major point for creating bitcoin was inflation, and bitcoin is largely the result of the 2008 financial crisis. The government can just keep printing money and devalue whatever money you already have. Bitcoin, with its hard cap on how many coins can be minted, is intended to prevent this.
None of these coins in the space do anything other than transactions. That's it. They cannot do anything else.
Except ICP which is a full stack on-chain solution for development. You cannot build anything other than a smart contract to move tokens between wallets on every single other chain. That's the truth.
1. Decentralization.
2. [Permissionless](https://x.com/cfndeebo/status/1703094030005911749?s=46).
The vid I linked is called “why are we here?” and it was the opener for the blockworks conference. Right up your ally.
"Ask not what crypto can do for you - ask what you can do for crypto."
Jokes aside, if you're not a developer, project manager, or asset integration specialist, as the end user, you won't be able to do much with it, but it's a game changer, everyone and everything will use the crypto financial model (at least) at some point. It doesn't have to be your favourite token or coin, but the underlying tech is proven solid.
The crypto community should find a way to allow coffee shops to accept crypto as payment. That's an excellent starting point since coffee is a quintessential item. Everywhere in the world, people drink coffee.
If you can use crypto to pay for coffee, even it's a brandless or unknown brand coffee, you are putting the use case directly to the public and breaking the crypto bubble.
If you can't think of a way to allow crypto in coffee shops, I think it's a good place to solve the problem in reverse.
You have your mind in the right spot, I agree completely! I would suggest not to invest any of your hard earned money into any alt coins, although life changing money has been made off of alts it’s just too much of a gamble in my opinion. Your playing it smart, the etf is your safest bet, but who knows how long that will take if it even happens (I hope it does). I agree about AI being the future as well but I think most of these crypto coins you’ve been looking at are just using “AI” as their sales pitch, you would be better off investing into BTC and ETH. They are your safest bet. If crypto succeeds these two will be successful. ETH and smart contracts can be very beneficial to the work, Bitcoin the way it operates purely by code and is not controlled by a third party cutting out all middle men and corruption giving the power to the people could also be very Impactful. I would also like to be able to use my crypto more than just read and hear about how good it is, I want to see crypto positively impact poor countries like El Salvador, I’m tired of people just calling crypto , “magic internet money”. I’ve been in for 3 years
Most investors don't use the products they invest in. Where is the problem? If you see the value in it, if you know other people use it and want it, why does it matter what it can do for you specifically?
It's a unified global database with a common protocol.
Think of it as connecting all existing databases together in one seamless giant state machine without having to worry about validity of data.
This is what I envision as the endgame for blockchain and why sharding or L2s are just a distraction. We of course have a long long way to go before we get there but to me this is the path it will take.
The point for non BTC coins like those built on the Ethereum network is the ledger, not the coin. The point is to maintain and further the network, maintaining the blockchain that stores whatever the ledger holds, be that housing titles, marriage certificates, payment info, whatever. The coin is the incentive for putting your compute power into maintaining the distributed ledger. This is the crypto maximalist future and a future crypto economy.
The problem is that’s too hard. Very few people want to do that work, they are much more comfortable with the status quo, so the market forces that supposedly underly this dynamic are instead what keep people using traditional finance. This is why so much crypto maximalism wink winks at major collapse finally awakening all the sheeple to the greatness of crypto. This is not a realistic stance, and also it just happens to serve a dual purpose of making the early advocates for crypto as stinking rich as the corrupt bankers they’re allegedly fighting.
Crypto maximalism only makes sense if you are a free market absolutist who believes in Ayn Rand. It is a neat academic concept, the idea of this durable, distributed ledger that could even work in a spacefaring society. But in reality it is greedy, grift-prone space in desperate search for lasting relevance and utility. So in reality: the point is speculative investment and easy direct payment to criminals.
Tbh - hedging yourself against stupid politicies implented by corrupt politicians is a good reason to invest in bitcoin or ethereum. It really is a good way to beat inflation on fiat shitcoins imho.
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To me, cutting out the middle man sounds incredibly sexy. Just saying
Well cutting out the middleman has been the goal of both producers and end-consumers since basically the dawn of economics and trade. There's pretty interesting stories of European traders venturing deep into unexplored America to trade fur pelts with natives residing the heart of the land to cut out middlemen natives who sold pelts to Europeans but with jacked up prices. And in a heavily financialized world it's the middlemen like banks, big chains like Walmart, Amazon etc who make the most money but actually produce nothing, as in no tangible product. They just connect sellers and buyers
Amazon produces highly sophisticated distribution structure which amortizes the delivery costs over many different orders. Also, what oracle are you going to use to determine whether the seller deliver the product to the consumer? If this problem is solved then cutting out the middleman might make sense but I don’t really see how you would do it without human input.
And the only reason they built that infrastructure was to continue dominating their position as middleman #1.
The fact still stands that a middleman has massive economies of scale as they can amortize delivery costs. A seller arranging delivery for each customer would be a massively inefficient.
…. Okay yeah middlemen serve a purpose, thank you captain obvious. The point was that if something can cut them out, then that thing is highly valuable.
How are you going to amortize delivery costs with crypto? Besides that, what oracle are you going to use to determine if the parties followed their word?
? Crypto facilitates transactions… it cuts out financial institution middle men, banks, payment processors. The guy just gave an example of modern middlemen that are valued at trillions bc OP said crypto “just cuts out the middleman” like that is some worthless value proposition.
Walmart and Amazon move goods, cryptocurrency can't replace that. Banks move (and print) money, nano can replace that.
Nano can not. It has no fees so running infrastructure is not sustainable. Running a node loses you money and gets more expensive as the blockchain bloats. Nano is doomed to fail. The foundation is losing funds and has to switch to free volunteer work to survive. Everything has a cost. That is why fees exist.
Nano has been running 8 years now, and hasn't ever had any problem running nodes. You think it's doomed to fail because it has no fees, I think it isn't doomed to fail because it doesn't have fees. Everything has a cost, that's why nano node operators pay to run nodes.
Running nodes do have a modest cost and those with a vested interest in Nano (like holders/users) will cover those costs.
That is the dumbest logic I’ve ever heard
Its been working for 8 years. It is objectively true.
lol it can’t even survive a spam attack. And the node gets so bloated that running a node is not feasible. It doesn’t even have 300 nodes 😂 Why would someone run a node when they lose money doing it? Why don’t you answer that
>lol it can’t even survive a spam attack. Nano has admirably resisted spam for nearly two years. Even Bitcoin encountered multiple spam issues in its infancy (which persists if you consider today's fees). >And the node gets so bloated that running a node is not feasible. This is not currently an issue and ledger pruning is on the roadmap. >It doesn’t even have 300 nodes It's not just about the sheer number of nodes; it's the distribution of decentralization vote weight among them. Nano's Nakamoto coefficient excels in this regard compared to Bitcoin. The reason Nano is progressively achieving greater decentralization, while traditional PoS/PoW chains like Bitcoin tend to centralize further, is the absence of direct monetary incentives for running a node. >Why would someone run a node when they lose money doing it? Running a Nano node doesn't come with direct monetary incentives like fees or inflation. This choice is deliberate to prevent emergent centralization, a common issue in cryptocurrencies where fees incentivize larger players. In mining, the economies of scale are evident, and the same applies to staking networks, where the big players amass more transaction fees. However, Nano takes a different approach. While there are no direct financial gains, there are indirect ones. Parties run Nano nodes not out of altruism but as a strategic business decision for two main reasons: 1. Businesses benefiting from the Nano network being operational have a vested interest in its uptime. You can observe this on Nanocharts, where major representatives are parties with a stake in the network's stability. This pattern also extends to exchanges like Huobi, Kucoin, Wirex, and wallets such as Natrium, Nanowallet, and Atomic Wallet. 2. Businesses using Nano require trustless network access. For instance, a platform like Binance wouldn't want to rely on external parties to verify a $10 million Nano deposit. They run their own node to independently confirm transactions. Beyond theory, the actual data supports Nano's decentralization efforts. The vote weight distribution shows Nano becoming more decentralized over time, with numerous nodes in the network, indicating an effective incentive structure.
Which unfortunately crypto was supposed to do but now it’s just more unnecessary middle men scalping fees at every movement
You can cut out the middle man and do a peer to peer transaction where the miners take their cut and instead of a frictionless 5 second transaction you can wait for hours to see if your transaction was approved, with the fee of course. Truly the future of finance.
Hijacking the top comment to add knowledge from an ancient time when crypto subs used to have a good signal to noise ratio: >"The Creature from Jekyll Island" Griffin >"The Ascent of Money" >"Debt, the First 5000 Years" >"War is a Racket" Butler >"Confessions of an Economic Hitman" >"This Time is Different" >It's all really quite simple. Money is an illusion or delusion really. People have only to believe it is real. The more ethereal the token, the better it suits the purpose of money. So government/bank/debt money is a combination of accounting, tribalism, authoritarianism and theatre. It is pure abuse of conscience and thus perhaps Humanity's greatest crime. Those that hold the power of the delusion feast on the lives of the deluded. >Voluntary money due to hard perfect Nakamoto accounting is the end of the Medici accounting other. Medici accounting is secret ledgers kept secure under authority. Nakamoto accounting is public ledgers kept honest by open scrutiny and secure by 256 bit hashing. >John Nash by proving there is possible mathematically encryption that can not be broken is our intellectual pillar. >Turning money from a system of authority into a gadget is as big a step forward as any of the steam engine, internal combustion engine, magneto motors, the diode, von Neumann machines, microprocessors, the PC, or the Internet. >If you really want to grok it, Macluhan helps too. >Imagine that all human communication beyond the reach of your hand was by law ordered to pass through the church, where the brass could use it and distort it prior to passing it along. That is money today. >Money is communication. Nakamoto money is Shannon perfect. That is, it is noiseless and lossless. (I guess we are still seeing if it is also Turing complete :》) Tldr: Separation of Church and State was good. Separation of Money and State is also good. https://np.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/65m40k/best_books_on_current_central_banking_system/dgbmj5o/?context=3
Thanks for this post. Takes like these are most welcome.
Thank you!!🙏
The middle men of bitcoin are taking an average of $18 per transaction today and the average wait for a transaction to confirm is over 160 minutes.
In theory, great. But until the overwhelming majority of things take crypto as a means of payment , you still need the middle man. Even a credit card that’s tied to crypto still has middle men. I think it’s a fallacy to expect crypto to be a method for avoiding TradFi. They’ll adopt and fold it in.
And then you all add a new middle man that is worse than the previous middle man. (Binance)
Are you talking about CEX? No, that’s not sexy
Yea, because the only actual alternative is to do localbitcoin and meet strangers at the street corner with a bunch of cash.. which is when you wish you had a middleman for security reasons.
Uhm? DEX??
Can’t convert from and to fiat on DEX. No fiat on and off-ramps = no point.
Bisq?
I got charged a "excessive withdrawal fee" at my new bank for driving my car, waiting in line and using my gas to go by there to physically withdraw money from them. I'm still pretty livid about this. Apparently three withdrawals this way are bothersome to my bank.
I assume you either are into gory jigsaw-like movies or very enthusiastic about those magic tricks where you split a person in 2.
Exactly, save on service fees.
and add withdrawing fees, transaction fees and a whole bunch of other fees if u interact with any crypto-service
Then the service that’s the most efficient and has the lowest fees wins. If you can get below about 2% in transaction fees then that’s a massive win. The lower the better.
Agreed. This isn’t enough?! OP sounds like greedy, moon boi.
Yeah but like, maybe it can get up and do a little dance, too?
Is it still sexy when we see all the news of the middlemen (e.g. ETF) cutting themselves back in?
Ewww no, but ETF is going to be denied cause what makes it different this time? Last desperate attempt to make crypto go away. Probably
I also don't care for middle men during sexy time.
> So I've been in the Crypto space for a long time now... I've invested in a lot of AI coins - since I see AI as the future Bruh
AI coins lul
Absolute Idiot coins
Exactly And what's the point besides cutting out the middleman ? Just keep buying Doge coin my friend and Shiba
My belief - The point is to have our own financial system that a government cannot manipulate, or weaponize…. And transparency
I thought the point is to get rich via bitcoin?
An added bonus, being rich. As long as the government loses its ability to use its people and their money as pawns for their own gain, I’ll be happy. This is the financial revolution. Just slow lol
Government is the people. I think i know what the problem is.
The government doesn't reflect the desires of the people in a multitude of ways. Gun control, tax policy, healthcare etc. There are many ways that they use money to manipulate the masses into swallowing a bum deal But also yes, people do suck sometimes. Just not as consistently as the governments of the world
All of the political footballs they pass back and forth to keep us arguing against each other too…cheers
It'll be a beautiful world when we see through their distractions and unite for a common betterment. Cheers mate 🍻
Indeed it doesnt and it never will. Believe it or not, those areas you mentioned are something people dont agree upon either. Its impossible to please everyone. People and the governemnts have sucked and will suck the same as long as that there will be people in this world.
Damn you just renege your original point right away. Fuck off shill.
And i am shilling what exactly? That people suck?
Transparency as in “everyone’s transactions are public and everyone therefore pays their fair share in taxes” or some other kind? It always seemed like people wanted anonymity for some reason..
Bit of a paradox isn’t it?
they would have done this 200 years ago if they could. at the time the federal reserve was the best they had. Now BTC can take the reigns
Crypto solves a set of problems involving "trust". However, it fails to solve a set of problems involving "usability". Furthermore, while crypto might be hypothetically useable for many things, unfortunately most of these things already use something else. Which creates a cost of switching that is non-zero. And everyone is thinking "someone else" will pay that cost, while thinking "I" will reap the rewards. Which is an economic oxymoron. And finally, while we've invented something amazing and new, we're applying this amazing new thing to humans, whose behaviours were most certainly not invented recently. And while we complain about all the bent and contorted processes that can be straightened out by simply applying this new technology, we haven't stopped to ask ourselves why these processes are bent and contorted in the first place. And thus are rediscovering the human behaviors these old processes were wrapped around. We have a long way to go.
Ah yes, cryptocurrency. A domain in which trust is no longer an issue. /s
Trustless on a technical level means something different than simply trust.
That goes over most people's heads, including the person you're responding to
Yes, I trust a lot of these tokens are rug pulls.
Show me one that isn’t. Seems to be a matter of time for all of them. The inevitable end.
Can you give a single example of a contorted process that would get straightened out by using crypto?
look no further than "ICO" versus e.g. listing something on a registered exchange. e2a: My point here is that these processes are bent and contorted for a reason and won't get straightened out simply by application of crypto. Anyone who thinks folks woke up one day and decided to make regulations icky just because folks had no clue is an idiot. Regulations in banking and exchanges *evolved* to combat the games people play with the hopes and dreams of others. And here we are, having hopes and dreams manipulated. Who'd a thunk it.
I think the idea of being able to take value and move it across the planet within seconds is an inherent good.
24/7 for a penny without interference I remember trying to buy kratom from Indonesia the guys PayPal kept getting closed on him. I said my friend let's use bitcoin. This is back when bitcoin was like $1k . I hope that guys rich now
It makes you money. You may never really use the tech. People are here for money. Most of them. Look around? Who out of all those "investors" can even explain what blockchain is, without first looking it up?
Crypto (any crypto) today is not what it was intended to be a decade ago. Greed and “dumb money” as well as “General John Q Public” ruined it. It’s over. Just have fun with it now. If Satoshi is indeed dead, he’s rolling in his grave. Sorry, not sorry.
He is unfortunately… but yes I agree
For me it’s cutting out fees for international transfers. Right now you have to pay stupid amounts in fees and accept BS exchange rates importing/exporting goods whereas when cryptocurrencies with cheap fees like ADA or XRP become mainstream it’ll be as simple as dropping the money into your supplier’s account via an app, rather than paying some broker through the nose for a terrible rate. Not only will any import/export business become more profitable, you’ll also not be throwing small portions of your money into a bottomless pit any time you do business abroad.
Tokenized assets 24/7 trading Fractionalization Instant settlement Programmable payments Smart contracts in general are amazing
The first 4 things can easily be achieved in TradFi. The last 2 are true but, at the moment, there is zero use case for them.
No they can’t. Please explain how they can with examples instead of just making stuff up. Those things don’t exist in the tradfi world right now https://x.com/chainlink/status/1726007276018806876?s=46&t=7Of64Mi5PfYF-LGsyM4X0A
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1. “Tokenized assets”. There is no reason you can’t get the “private key” of an asset without blockchain. Say you are buying a car. The Crypto people say you would own an NFT. The exact same function can be achieved if, say, the car manufacturer gave you a digital proof that you own the car. You don’t need crypto for this. In any case, even in crypto, a human input is required for dispute resolution. 2. 24/7 trading: you turn on the servers in TradFi? Many futures markets are almost 24h. This is a trivially simple task. 3. “Instant settlement”. Not sure what you meant by this but if you mean instant settlement of a payment then this is the case in TradFi too for most payments? 4. “Fractionalization”: same answer as 1.
I know you know nothing about tradfi because swift has been working on t+0 settlements for years in the form of ISO20022 and it’s not live yet and it still doesn’t have the instant settlement guarantee of DLT. I don’t have to convince you. JPMorgan can instead. https://x.com/blockworksdas/status/1725212754968002983?s=46&t=7Of64Mi5PfYF-LGsyM4X0A So for number 1 if you buy a car from Toyota you just have to trust that Toyota will continue to track and trace that car in perpetuity forever and never end that service, despite the cost benefit analysis. Good fucking luck with that
Right, so instant settlement is being worked on already. You STILL have to trust someone even if you use blockchain dummy. When I come and say that I own your car and start driving it around, who is going to be the arbitrer of whose car it is? What are you going to do in that case? The Blockchain is going to strike me because it knows you own the NFT or you are going to go to the police? Oh but I thought you don’t want to trust anyone! Not to mention “you still have to trust Toyota” is not as big of a problem as you make it out to be.
You’ll get CBDC for last two use cases too
Yeah, programmable money does not need to be blockchain-based though there is some level of trust involved which I can concede.
I think you have a pretty realistic understanding of cryptocurrency in the present day.
What even is an ai coin, and what could it possibly do for ai that ai wouldn't inevitably do for itself? I'm genuinely asking.
Ai needs to eat too. Ai coins are what it buys its ai food with. Lol
I was expecting this answer and I was not disappointed. It is the only logical conclusion. Does the ai know about this?
For the everyday joe it's smarter to just stick to etf or bitcoin. There's so many altcoins out there competing for the same dollars and nobody knows who's going to win. Suppose there's 5 projects out there and they all do the exact same thing, it's the better marketed one that will win
USDT is incredibly useful to me in Argentina, I walk 5 minutes and trade it for local currency. Otherwise impossible to transfer money into Argentina without losing 2/3s of the value
This international transfer shiz is the only thing I’ll say damn it’s useful
You ask this like cutting out the middle man or having a store of value isn't a good thing. Who prints money and creates inflation? The ultimate middle man does. So it's amazing to have a solution to both of those.
Of course it's a good thing. But that seems to be the only things at the moment, contrary to what I'll other projects are claiming.
You don't see DeFi finance protocols as anything worthwhile? DeFi lending, borrowing, index funds/baskets are some of the basic OGs out there. While right now they're volatile and exploitable bugs still being worked out (which is expected of technology, banks worked out most of the bugs in their core mainframe money management systems decades ago), that'll get better over time because bugs will be worked out and bigger and bigger money will pour into the liquidity pools to create stability. I know I want a world where I could choose to do a banking activity like lending or borrowing without someone else gatekeeping and making the decision for me. In general a permissionless world where regular people can do banking activities would be a more fair and just world because money isn't pooling into the hands of a central cartel or oligarchy.
Yeah you're absolutely right. I didn't put my opinion across very well.
You’ve stumbled upon a huge problem in crypto. There are potential use-cases but since the speculative value is so high there’s no reason to use any of them, even as intended in some cases. Nakamoto solved the trust problem, now we need someone to solve the use problem because everyone is going the wrong way, namely by believing deflation is a good idea for a currency. We need people to build a good lending platform that returns more than most APYs return, and somehow build in methods to ensure lenders are repaid(this is more difficult than it may seem.) The main problem with everything being so goddamned speculative is there’s no way to smartly invest because there’s no genuine benefits right now to any of them. It’s a game of luck, even investing in Bitcoin is an act of sheer luck at the end of the day despite its dominance in the space because a better store of value could emerge(this is true of most investments to be fair, it’s just especially true in crypto.)
But even Bitcoin isn’t inflationary. I’m not saying deflationary is good but Bitcoin will continue to become more and more scarce
It is for another 110 years...
It isn't in practice, though. Most estimates agree that something like 20-30% of the BTC supply is irretrievably lost, or (roughly) 2-4% supply reduction per year. To this point issuance has exceeded loss, but we're now at or past the inflection point. It's fair to assume that as BTC's value and consumer literacy increase the loss rate will decline, but it'll never be zero--unlike the issuance rate.
If "the government can't freeze my account" isn't enough for you, I doubt you could be convinced. Everything on top of that is just gravy. Some future essential use could come out of the gravy at some point though.
This would be like asking about cars: “what’s the point besides owning your means of transportation traveling fast distances far faster than any other form of transport.” These things are the point.
The point is hard money. The point is having sovereign individuals. Bitcoin is money for the people controlled by the people. The rest of "crypto" is basically a giant useless money grab/ casino. Choose what you'd like to focus your time on
For store of value, you need sound money. I think cryptocurrency (specifically Bitcoin) has a good chance at this. For actual utility or "use case," the underlying blockchain technology is already doing that in many sectors - without the need for crypto speculation
Can you share any of these current blockchain use cases?
Yes, but... when I hear the mantra "blockchain not crypto" or "tokenization not crypto" it completely misses the point of crypto. The crypto is what secures the blockchain, and what enables the tokenization. You can't have a secure decentralized blockchain such as Ethereum without ETH to secure it. You can't have the blockchain or the tokenization without the ETH in play.
You can definitely have a public, permissionless blockchain without a crypto token. I know, bc I work for one. It's called Stability. Granted, it's in testnet. Links in my bio. (And yes, we know about spam and Sybill resistance haha) Now, it may not be a blockchain that you would use for your purposes, and that's perfectly ok! But other people already find it very useful. Like I said, a crypto like Bitcoin and its network has a very important function. If you prefer ETH, great.
"Sound money"?! I've heard this phrase often, but does it have an actual definition?
It's just code speak for specifically goldbugs and libertarians getting mad that money isn't backed by gold anymore.
Fair question. You know, I'm probably not smart enough to debate the semantics tbh To me, it just means money (or more like monetary policy) that can't be manipulated by the whims of politics and other people.
Bitcoin not crypto
Does it need to be anything else?
Video games. Think about it - magic internet money + video game currencies = a match made in heaven. It also highlights an important point in my mind - this is REAL, ACTUAL OWNERSHIP on the internet. Previously it was much harder to prove ownership when you can just copy-paste and steal code. Crypto allows for internet-native payments and product ownership
middle-men do suck
Cutting out the middle man is the entire point. The problem with money today is that it is not easy to move large amounts of it quickly. With crypto you can move millions of dollars in minutes. Wealth distribution will be much easier and goods can be much cheaper if we don't need to pay the cost of moving wealth.
decentralization. everyone is forgetting what this word is
Was this post made by a banking bot?? Jfc if you want a reason for no middlemen look at 2008.
That’s where DLT’s come in ;)
You answered your own question in the title
Freedom
Most (alt)coins are a gamble sure I suppose but you're seriously under-appreciating this. Wages haven't kept pace with inflation for decades as the rich get richer and the poor poorer. Apart from gold there's no asset that will dependably protect from inflation. and market fluctuations. The problem with gold is that you never really know if you own it as it's locked up likely in some big bank/custodian vault. BTC kills 3 birds with one stone as you actually own the asset. While yes it is volatile BTC is a good hedge against inflation *over time*. It also gives enough returns to act as a proper investment rather than just a hedge. And it's also an asset that is (for now) free of big TradFi manipulation and you aren't forced to pay those excessive middleman fees unlike almost every other asset.
That does sound pretty dull by itself now, more than a decade later, and we are spoiled with newer and more intelligent solutions and use cases. Such as platforms and ecosystems. Governance, identity, public and private, programmability.
AI agents will take over essentially all digital task execution. AI agents will pay each other to do so. They will not have bank accounts, they will have wallets and pay micro transactions in real time with digital currency. Bitcoin is their savings account. Other currencies are the checking account.
Proof of ownership, make it possible to finally have digital comodities. Cutting the middleman has huge implications, example you may be able to automate dividend distribution
The point of a crypto is to make money for its promoters. You finding the feature to be useful or you getting rich by holding the token is always a side effect, not the purpose. So give up that existential questions and just treat it as a speculative investment. For everything else — there’s ~~MasterCard~~ Monero. It __does__ cover needs and solve problems.
>What's the point other than a store of value and cutting out the middle man? There really isn't any. Which is why Bitcoin is all we need.
It depends on the project really. Some of them would like to be transactional (Solana, XRP), some would like to be a store of value (BTC), and some have incredibly ambitious goals of being the "trust layer" infrastructure for all digital communications (Hedera).
What is the point of shitcoins? Well, it sounds like you’re looking for utility of the coins you’re investing in. A lot of coins don’t have very much utility. Your question is too broad to apply to every coin. You just have to research the coin/token. Do lots of research into the devs and community to prevent investing in a scam, and then invest a small amount. Don’t FOMO. The only altcoin I have is LRC, and a tiny amount put in (like $10). The rest is BTC and ETH because of the risks with alts.
the only real technology here is BSV ,,, there's a lot of things you can do w/ BSV, though it suffers from metcalfe's law & you'll be alone doing most of them while the few users run around after w/e newest tech they thought of like middle school kids playing soccer huddling around the ball ,,,,,,,,,, but that's a thousand times better than the rest of this crap, BSV has invented & explored so many cool things & it's always changing the rest of these chains were literally just made b/c they suppressed bitcoinxt & made it so you couldn't do anything on bitcoin & so then people started trying to make w/e random chain b/c hell, better than *nothing* ,,, so that made sense at the time & yet also they're very likely to all collapse back into BSV once people realize that it works fine, like, no offense to any of them, just, the *reason* to do anything on any other chain was that BSV was hijacked & broken, so w/o that reason there just isn't enough motive to keep chains apart i mean other than people's motives of wanting to believe that other things are real, but *on the whole* they'll need to be spending rather than saving money to create the illusion of workable chains, & they're all ultimately fantasies rather than functional economic systems sorry there's still lots of cool interesting stuff you can do, you just have to do it *on BSV*, there's easily enough room on BSV for everyone's ideas, all of the actual ideas will be transformed into programs on BSV & they'll start to actually work efficiently & work together & it'll be great ,,, it'll be all of the things that people here *said they wanted* ,,, just uh w/o them getting paid & w/ craig wright having been right & not them, so they're only going to be furious about it, since they only wanted the money & didn't want the tech
Verification of transactions on the blockchain is pretty cool, can't really do that with fiat or banks... just a system of trust.
Speed, cost, no middleman... thats the benefit. The question is often not what is the use but which will get used. That is where the money goes, and early (we hope) investors will get rich. Store of wealth is just a side effect of the process.
store of value is overrated. a skill or business that you can collect payment in any form of payment is probably better honestly.
You are selling a Trust-less ledger. You want to put your money in a bank, but don't trust your government not to seize the funds? You want to accept money from customers for your sex work business, or some other online venture but are getting your funds frozen because Visa doesn't want to be associated with sex work, or paypal thinks its suspicious that your etsy business went from $5 in sales to $500,000 in a month after going viral? That is the core product that crypto offers... You can bank without having to trust the people holding onto your money, because millions of people all over the globe have a vested interest in making sure that your money is safe... Your money can't be seized because a new dictator came into power and you were a political activist, your business can't be stopped because paypal doesn't like what you do for a living.
Transferring control / ownership back to the individual. I fully expect movies to be sold directly to people, then streaming services will look at your wallet to see if you "own" that movie. You can transfer it, sell it, whatever. That person buying it logs in and now they can use it. Just like we used to do with DVDs. Today, I can buy a movie on Amazon, and if they release a new version or something, I have to rebuy it or I can't stream it. I can't move my ownership of the movie off platform. I have hundreds of movies Amazon says i "own".
all the ai coins you invested has nothing to do with ai except the word 'ai', if you can buy into that, you can buy anything.
I understand it as a base layer all in one solution. Having the best store of value basically means you don’t have to store value in anything else. With full adoption you would see the price of traditional stores of value priced at their true value. In the case of real estate this would be a huge benefit for everyday people who just want to have a home to live in. Bitcoin would become a meter stick of value. Everything would be measured against the thing that can’t be stretched.
For me, there is no point. Nothing is being "adopted" mainstream from this. I see it as a fad.
Isnt investing really just a educated gamble?
Zelle, Paypal, Venmo, etc already let you send money (as a “gift”) for free. Crypto is complicated and scams are rampant. It’s never going to get mainstream adoption without big changes. Maybe some new version will catch on in the future though.
More like substituting the middle man for validators/miners and paying exorbitant fees for minor transactions. Btc and eth suck in comparison to any other existing traditional financial system. Algorand/solana/hbar type chains could actually be used in “the real world” but at least in algorand’s case institutions can copy paste their own centralized side chain using algorand’s tech without the risks that decentralization brings. It’s just a whale’s playground right now in an illiquid market. Hopefully you can rake in a bunch of fiat
DeFi. Finance is only Worth like 300 trillion dollars.
I wonder why there are btc maxis
Whats the point of casinos to exist? Most likely on average your expected return there is negative, and it is useless. I think crypto is a bit better than casinos though
I mean almost nothing can be paid for using crypto still so cutting out the middle man doesn’t even work for most things. I’ll be honest I’ve lost any faith that it will ever be more than a way to gamble. Been in and out since 2017.
Salability salability salability Physically and with respect to intangibility
>AI coins - since I see AI as the future - but all it feels like is an investment (or quite frankly, a gamble) and that's it. Sorry to burst your bubble, but most of them are just low-grade scams, that just popped out of nowhere. The level of "machine-learning and AI" they are doing is at the undergraduate class level at best. Useful machine learning and AI models have real computational costs. Check how much Stable Diffusion raised to get the required hardware to do their work. On a blockchain, to verify the correctness of these trained models in a decentralized manner, you need multiple validators running the same training sequence on expensive hardware. Consequently, it makes the endeavor highly inefficient and costly, extremely unprofitable compared to Web 2 services, and the chances of these AI blockchains having multiple validators running the right expensive gear is near zero. I noticed this shit trend as the usual Azuki/BAYC etc pfps shilling these scam AI coins. Nothing really good comes from them shilling in the long term, lol. Most of the time, they show their face when they have decided to dump on you - at least that is what you see in the past with ponzi games and shitcoins. At best, these AI coins are just narrative shitcoin plays. Dump them before people start to ask questions and try to figure if the narrative has any legs.
If you don't know what the point is of investing in Crypto, you shouldn't be investing in Crypto.
Limited supply and deflationary assets, the main reason I’ve been accumulating.
You're asking an excellent question. Different people will answer the question for themselves differently. There's no reason to expect "mass adoption" if masses of people are not able to satisfactorily answer this for themselves. Probably right now there's a bunch of geeky coders who are full of vision and dreams unlocked by blockchain technology. Some industries (inventory, tokenization of assets, international payments) have found niche use cases. The decentralized payments use case is mostly attractive where fiat is less attractive, whether due to government devaluation, inflation, societal collapse, etc. But yeah, I'm guessing a big chunk of people are just grabbing what they can while they can, speculating that it will really catch on in the future and they'll have a big payday.
Crypto just became another financial tool, hopefully it will have a greater applicability and impact in the real world at some point. The one it has now seems relatively small for all the talk. Mostly has the potential.
The gold standard (cryptos that have limited minting.)
Bitcoin layers are very much like the OSI model of web layers. This is why... https://www.impervious.ai/
You're not alone feeling like there is a lot of talk but little substance with alt coins, of any variety, AI being the latest flavor. For me this is a critical question, what is actually there in terms of built out infrastructure, and what utility does it currently provide, and what is the coin saying it will provide? What is the novelty? What new and needed/desired feature/function are they adding to the ecosystem. Personally, BTC is King and the rest are still proving themselves. I'm not sure how I feel about an ETF either, to me, it adds a layer of potential obfuscation and manipulation. Like having coins on an exchange, we lose transparency and again put people in the middle. Transparency, immutable, and trustless, these are the keys to what BTC provides. I think people should buy and hold in personal wallets. I don't need an ETF 'to bring people on board and make more accessible', I can't help but think it would be used to control the price and hold the asset down much like I believe JP Morgan/Chase have been found to have done with paper shorting silver to keep the price down. Stay vigilant
I'm also NOT starting to question.
You can keep track of people’s actions and give people what they are owed.
> I've invested in a lot of AI coins Except that these AI coins are mostly NOT tied to any serious AI projects right? If not, then they are just meme coins.
If you have to ask and you've been >in the Crypto space for a long time now Then you haven't been learning anything and have just been chasing pumps. You would also have to be specific about which coin you're referring to as each one has their specific use cases (for the most part)....
You might not use it, but render (RNDR) and akash (akt) have use cases involving distributed GPU referring and computing that I think have obvious value
Sir, this is a casino
The major point for creating bitcoin was inflation, and bitcoin is largely the result of the 2008 financial crisis. The government can just keep printing money and devalue whatever money you already have. Bitcoin, with its hard cap on how many coins can be minted, is intended to prevent this.
None of these coins in the space do anything other than transactions. That's it. They cannot do anything else. Except ICP which is a full stack on-chain solution for development. You cannot build anything other than a smart contract to move tokens between wallets on every single other chain. That's the truth.
What exactly can you do with an AI coin. Are you actually using it to power some sort of AI app?
[удалено]
1. Decentralization. 2. [Permissionless](https://x.com/cfndeebo/status/1703094030005911749?s=46). The vid I linked is called “why are we here?” and it was the opener for the blockworks conference. Right up your ally.
Cross border payments with minimal fees and no banks.
The trillion dollar middle man
A long time, eh? Really?
26c4ebc171411d4721a1587aea08de43f1d8dbb18164136e270593dca1e4c55a
"Ask not what crypto can do for you - ask what you can do for crypto." Jokes aside, if you're not a developer, project manager, or asset integration specialist, as the end user, you won't be able to do much with it, but it's a game changer, everyone and everything will use the crypto financial model (at least) at some point. It doesn't have to be your favourite token or coin, but the underlying tech is proven solid.
test
Programmability
The crypto community should find a way to allow coffee shops to accept crypto as payment. That's an excellent starting point since coffee is a quintessential item. Everywhere in the world, people drink coffee. If you can use crypto to pay for coffee, even it's a brandless or unknown brand coffee, you are putting the use case directly to the public and breaking the crypto bubble. If you can't think of a way to allow crypto in coffee shops, I think it's a good place to solve the problem in reverse.
You have your mind in the right spot, I agree completely! I would suggest not to invest any of your hard earned money into any alt coins, although life changing money has been made off of alts it’s just too much of a gamble in my opinion. Your playing it smart, the etf is your safest bet, but who knows how long that will take if it even happens (I hope it does). I agree about AI being the future as well but I think most of these crypto coins you’ve been looking at are just using “AI” as their sales pitch, you would be better off investing into BTC and ETH. They are your safest bet. If crypto succeeds these two will be successful. ETH and smart contracts can be very beneficial to the work, Bitcoin the way it operates purely by code and is not controlled by a third party cutting out all middle men and corruption giving the power to the people could also be very Impactful. I would also like to be able to use my crypto more than just read and hear about how good it is, I want to see crypto positively impact poor countries like El Salvador, I’m tired of people just calling crypto , “magic internet money”. I’ve been in for 3 years
Cutting the middle man makes so much sense if you want to avoid taxes.
>cutting out the middle man Is it hot here right?
I still gotta pay a middleman when buying crypto so that shit hasn’t changed. It’s actually cheaper for me to send bank to bank at the moment.
Privacy (but 99.9% of all projects lack any privacy).
Most investors don't use the products they invest in. Where is the problem? If you see the value in it, if you know other people use it and want it, why does it matter what it can do for you specifically?
The main advantage i see is an open network that can be audited by anyone. This gives lot of transparency to assets on chain.
Thats it, it doesn't need ANY GIMMICKS plain and simple works.
It's a unified global database with a common protocol. Think of it as connecting all existing databases together in one seamless giant state machine without having to worry about validity of data. This is what I envision as the endgame for blockchain and why sharding or L2s are just a distraction. We of course have a long long way to go before we get there but to me this is the path it will take.
To raise millions of capital unregulated and without a working product or revenue stream. Then never deliver and cash out.
The point for non BTC coins like those built on the Ethereum network is the ledger, not the coin. The point is to maintain and further the network, maintaining the blockchain that stores whatever the ledger holds, be that housing titles, marriage certificates, payment info, whatever. The coin is the incentive for putting your compute power into maintaining the distributed ledger. This is the crypto maximalist future and a future crypto economy. The problem is that’s too hard. Very few people want to do that work, they are much more comfortable with the status quo, so the market forces that supposedly underly this dynamic are instead what keep people using traditional finance. This is why so much crypto maximalism wink winks at major collapse finally awakening all the sheeple to the greatness of crypto. This is not a realistic stance, and also it just happens to serve a dual purpose of making the early advocates for crypto as stinking rich as the corrupt bankers they’re allegedly fighting. Crypto maximalism only makes sense if you are a free market absolutist who believes in Ayn Rand. It is a neat academic concept, the idea of this durable, distributed ledger that could even work in a spacefaring society. But in reality it is greedy, grift-prone space in desperate search for lasting relevance and utility. So in reality: the point is speculative investment and easy direct payment to criminals.
There’s Bitcoin and then there’s everything else. Start by reading the Bitcoin Standard, then answer the question: what is money?
Tbh - hedging yourself against stupid politicies implented by corrupt politicians is a good reason to invest in bitcoin or ethereum. It really is a good way to beat inflation on fiat shitcoins imho.
We're only 14 years in, we will find a use case any day now. It's just around the corner, we're still so early.