A question I've asked before: are there any applications which don't involve speculation?
I can put stablecoins (crypto dollars) in a lending protocol like Aave and earn ~10% APY. Compare that to my savings account, which pays out 0.25% APY.
Or how about the stablecoins themselves? MakerDAO creates the Dai stablecoin, backed by crypto-native assets like ETH & BTC.
I have a number of friends in Argentina who are surviving hyper-inflation by keeping their wealth in stablecoins.
People who can make more than 10% trading?
Lending protocols aren't doing anything different than what banks do: allocating inactive capital to those who can make use of that capital and are willing to pay for it.
Interest rates are high because of A: market volatility, professional traders can easily make more than 10%, and B: information asymmetry, large capital pools haven't allocated to these pools.
Lookup what a ponzi scheme is.
I dunno. I mean:
* artificial intelligence -> genuine image search and speech recognition
* self-driving -> Waymo, Tesla
These other hyped technologies have produced real results that I interact with. I'm not really convinced the blockchain has... except decentralized finance. Maybe that's fine.
On the positive side I think there's something like creating wealth through the power of imagination.
I mean 20 years ago there were no crypto currencies. Now on paper they are worth $2trn ($260 a head for the world's population). And lots of people can feel wealthy because they have $100k in bitcoin of whatever. And it can retain actual value in the sense that you can swap it for US$ as long as everyone doesn't sell at the same time. And where has the value come from - basically human imagination thinking the 0s and 1s are worth something. Which may be more sustainable than it sounds. Where does the value of fiat currency come from or the value of a painting in excess of the cost of making a copy of it?
I foresee a future where everyone is a crypto millionaire through the power of imagination. (Which would imply a 10000x form here?!)
From the taxman knocking at your door. They have prisons you know and some really well armed goons.
They also control the education system and pretty much everything else and are capable of stealing your children from you and send them to die in some far away shore.
They create all kinds of myths and bullshit and we take them for granted... like national identities and currencies.
Pretty powerful system.
Actually wrong.
- David Chaum, 1982, eCash
- Adam Back, 1997, HashCash
- Wei Dai, 1998, b-money
- Nick Szabo, 1998, BitGold
Don't even need to pay any fees: https://opentimestamps.org/