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Comment by scott_w | Hacker News Reader

The entire thesis of this article is nonsense. He sets up a strawman to knock down.

When people say “there are no use cases for crypto,” they’re actually saying “there are no use cases that aren’t solved better elsewhere.” This is the question he needs to answer and he doesn’t do so.

Looking at the money example, he says he’ll sell his laptop for Etherium. That’s fine but if nobody is willing to buy it with Etherium, he can’t sell his laptop and Etherium is de facto not being used for money.

Because he always skips this crucial last part, he never proves his argument.

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The statement always takes the form: there are no use cases that aren’t better solved by (some centralized company). The goal of crypto is to avoid that last part, and solve some of these problems without the need to place trust and lock value into a single entity.

Uniswap as the author mentioned is a good example, in that it provides an exchange that allows users to trade tokens without reliance on a central company like Coinbase. This allows users to hold and exchange USD pegged assets like USDC and DAI in a non custodial fashion, and also take part in defining, improving, and even forking the Uniswap protocol if they want to, as it is not privately owned.

> The statement always takes the form: there are no use cases that aren’t better solved by (some centralized company).

2 things:

1. No it doesn’t.

2. Nobody cares.

“Centralised” isn’t a problem. If it causes problems you need to demonstrate that and then show how blockchain solves that problem and how existing solutions can’t. I’ve seen no examples of that (Uniswap isn’t an example).

> No it doesn’t.

This statement verbatim is regularly repeated on HN - users pointing to Stripe, PayPal, Venmo, Apple, whatever as being better solutions than the proposed crypto/web3 ideas.

> “Centralised” isn’t a problem.

Not for you, maybe.

Some users will be happy to manage the additional complexity and risks of handling non-custodial assets on Ethereum L2s in order to achieve lower fees and take-rates, privacy preservation, censorship resistance, and programmable composability.

A very simple example is a domain name. Outside of blockchain networks, we have no mechanism for non-custodial ownership and peer-to-peer transfer of a domain name asset - like you would exchange cash where two parties simply swap the bills directly without the need for a third-party to oversee the exchange and potentially extract rent.

> A very simple example is a domain name. Outside of blockchain networks, we have no mechanism for non-custodial ownership and peer-to-peer transfer of a domain name asset - like you would exchange cash where two parties simply swap the bills directly without the need for a third-party to oversee the exchange and potentially extract rent.

Prove it’s a problem

User Alice and Bob want to swap domain names they own, but using an escrow to facilitate the trade safely and mitigate counterparty risk - and they want to do this instantly, without sharing private data online, and without paying a % commission to a rent extracting corporate third party entity.

Blockchain enables this use case, for a small fixed fee that is directed to users upholding the protocol - which may include Alice and Bob themselves as token holders and block producers.

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