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Comment by m_ke | Hacker News Reader

I know plenty of people, including friends who got filthy rich on crypto, but I still haven't seen a single interesting use case of crypto that's not mindless speculation.

You have an easy way to win the argument, a simple proof by example will be enough to prove me wrong. So please list the amazing scientific breakthroughs or concrete examples of web3 tools that my mother could use.

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well for one, i am also a skeptic. i just like to be proven wrong by foundational cracks and there are plenty of extremely smart people in the space. i'm certainly not arguing with you around blockchains being a useful tool today. however, i have an imagination and can foresee some usecases where the blockchain would truly change some of the way we do things. will it free us from our so called "shackles?" that a lot of the hypers like to say? probably not. or maybe? who knows. i'll tell you one thing -- there are many successful people investing in the space and generally, success follows success, so i'm optimistic from that viewpoint alone.

my main argument with your arguments is that close mindedness and flippancy doesn't get us anywhere.

> however, i have an imagination and can foresee some usecases where the blockchain would truly change some of the way we do things.

OK, what are they?

My brother is really big into crypto, and convinced my dad to get $1k in ETH. Over thanksgiving, they were hanging out talking about crypto, and my dad said he wanted to mess around with swapping tokens around and layer 2's but didn't want to touch his principal. So he opened AAVE, deposited his ETH, and got a loan in about 5 minutes flat. I thought that was pretty cool? I've never taken a loan for anything but student loans but I imagine it would be infinitely more difficult and time consuming to get a small personal loan like that from a bank.

I definitely agree that a TON of the crypto space is super scammy, and think it's an absolute shame, I don't blame anyone for being scared off.

It's not very convincing if you don't have any experience with actually getting loans. A quick google showed me plenty of fast loan providers.

It's not? I feel it would be disingenuous to imply that traditional 'fast' loan providers can match the speed/ease of getting a loan in 5 minutes, sitting on your couch, on thanksgiving day, with the funds instantly being available and requiring no documentation, forms, or manual approval. I mean if I'm wrong feel free to show me, I might just be ignorant.

Affirm? https://www.affirm.com/

Arweave, for one, uses blockchain for a novel approach to data storage.

It's not novel. It's IPFS with all the problems of IPFS made a magnitude worse by financial incentives.

Looking at this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Arweave/comments/gu5elw/arweave_per...

The advantage it has over IPFS is guaranteed permanence and the incentivization is core to that functionality.

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