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Comment by aero- | Hacker News Reader

Still waiting for someone to name one singular measurable impact of a crypto project.

It's a solution that's been searching for a problem for over 10 years.

Decentralized, distributed, blah blah, stop drinking the koolaid.

Is a network controlled primarily by 4 mining companies decentralized?

Do you need a distributed network to sell NFTS that are only useable within the world of a specific video game company? (game nfts)

Name a project that can't be accomplished traditionally with the cloud and some code?

Name a reason why you should leave your FDIC insured government backed bank for a 3rd party wallet and incur transaction fees, gas fees, fraud, hacks ect that are equivalent to wire transfer fees cbx fees ect.

The crypto community has been spewing advantages that don't exist and solutions for problems that do. not. exist.

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I was looking at a project called Helium or HNT. The basic idea is that "miners" are running something like a mix between a WiFi endpoint and a personal cell tower. People can use HNT tokens to get network access and the miners earn the tokens by providing the access.

I thought it seemed like a pretty neat idea and was encouraged by the fact that this crypto project actually did something useful. As I looked into it though I could only find people talking about how to mine the token, or details about the price, and nobody was talking about using the network. I wanted to try the network myself, or see if I could get a device on the network and what the service was like.

It's a little naive of me, but at first I was imagining something like cell service being provided by this system. I was wondering what it would take to get my laptop on it and imagining having a network connection wherever for a low price.

When I looked into it though I didn't find anyone using the network. The limitations on the network were severe, if I recall correctly their pricing calculator shows you the price of network usage in terms of cost per packet, where a packet can send something like 16 bits of information. Their envisioned use case was a collar for pets to wear that could ping the network once a day, but to my knowledge no such collars had actually been created or sold...

Disappointed to find something that looked kind of useful at first glance actually resolve to something that looks kind of useless.

FDIC covers all 6 billion people on earth now? You can store an unlimited amount of money in your head by memorizing 12 words. Like it or not, that has value to a lot of people around the world for a lot of different reasons.

> Still waiting for someone to name one singular measurable impact of a crypto project. It's a solution that's been searching for a problem for over 10 years.

Protection against a devaluing currency, privacy and access.

> Name a reason why you should leave your FDIC insured government backed bank for a 3rd party wallet and incur transaction fees, gas fees, fraud, hacks ect that are equivalent to wire transfer fees cbx fees ect.

For so many people the answer is simply: higher interest rates.

DeFi: Removing middlemen (and their fees) as well as discrimination based on arbitrary criteria from all kinds of financial services. Also, these services can easily run 24/7.

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