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The Way the Senate Melted Down over Crypto Is Revealing

24 points| dolphenstein | 4 years ago |nytimes.com

19 comments

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Waterluvian|4 years ago

> The technology is evolving to be much more than a digital currency, and Silicon Valley sees it as the digital infrastructure atop which the next internet will be built.

What does this even mean? NFTs? Endless “coins”? I thought it was pretty much conclusively demonstrated that crypto is pretty much useless for anything other than speculation.

Anyone have a single concrete example of crypto being used in a clearly useful, reliable, durable way?

dgm885|4 years ago

Here’s a fundamental value…it’s not controlled by the fed. It is deflationary. It is property that is easily moved. If you move into transactional platforms (ETH/ADA) these and other will facilitate programmable transactions that won’t require intermediaries. It’s still early, who knows how digital money with lower gas fees will evolve.

z3ugma|4 years ago

How about things like decentralized finance?

Stablecoins like USDC that are pegged 1:1 with the USD enable “wire transfers” with tiny fees compared to what banks charge.

I can picture this for other parts of banking that are so dated - escrow, checking accounts, collecting debit payments (lots of Internet companies won’t host sex workers because of puritanical terms from credit card processors for example)

1MachineElf|4 years ago

DNS alternatives like namecoin or ethereum.

bawolff|4 years ago

Have you ever seen the movie nerve? (Tl;dr [spoilers]: fictional online video game coercing people into doing dares based on upvotes from the internet hive mind which can't be shutdown due to handwavey "distributed" reasons. The protagonists eventually get all their friends together to launch a 51% attack to shut it down)

I think that sort of thing is the vision that these groups have when they talk about "the next" internet being built on "blockchain". Of course there are insurmountable technical problems between here and there...

deskglass|4 years ago

Automatic market making for prediction markets, eg Auger.

epsylon|4 years ago

The killer app of cryptocurrency is tax evasion

heckingoodtimes|4 years ago

AMP token to collateralize payments. Flexa is the first and most well-known implementation of it and has made very significant partnerships.

jobigoud|4 years ago

User ownership of virtual land in a persistent game-world that multiple studios can work with without having to explicitely interoperate or know about each other.