I would happy to be proven wrong, but this is extremely rare as I can't find any legitimate actual useful use case since Bitcoin and Ethereum's existence.
I think it's hard to argue with this.
You cant use credit cards for thousands of things you never thought about, PayPal is banning even more, wire transfer isn't international and banks may still complicate things, not even talking about how long these can take internationally and how that doesn't work for realtime services.
There are dozens of things like perfect money, Payeer, Payoneer that could also be blamed because it is used for bad things. But reality is we need those to pay for things that visa doesn't want us to pay for.
Crypto is one solution to this obvious problem. It's easy to say it's all drug money and money laundering but only if you never happen to be in a position where you have to trust untrustworthy russian credit card gateways because it's nearly impossible to charge for a skin colored dildo.
Crypto is also a very powerful tool for people in countries with spiraling inflation, such as Venezuela, Turkey and Argentina. Instead of being 100% exposed to local currency or USD, now you have options on how to perform transactions even inside your own country.
Or you could use Wise.
The way covert funding of illegal or unpopular operations or bribes _actually_ works in the real world is different. It often involves stuff like gambling, getting a thousand pre-paid cards, having a bank that issues credit cards (eg Russian-owned MyWireCard which now dissolved issued huge, prepaid, free cards to EU politicians), or "ant work" such as hacking or grinding up game accounts and selling them for profit. That's the covert and difficult part - not having a blockchain. Before you could get paid for your OF leaks with Ethereum, you'd get paid with Amazon prepaid card codes. The tender being on a blockchain doesn't improve anything at all for those performing the payment or those receiving it.
Am I missing something here? This is the main use case for Monero. You can just buy it with your credit card or after buying bitcoins thru a KYC'd service. That's the point - once you got Monero, it is practically untraceable by the authorities or anyone else interested. No one can see who sent or received money without a view key. The same cannot be said for most other cryptocurrencies like BTC or ETH, since once you buy these from a KYC service, it's tied to your identity forever.
Blockchains solve the double-spend problem. Allows for scarcity in the digital realm. Ethereum is a platform for decentralized finance, anyone can borderlessly lend and borrow in seconds. Endless possibilities.
Sounds great...
You can only do _secured_ lending and borrowing, and only where the security is, itself, a highly liquid digital token.
Person A lending USDC to person B, taking ETH for security, isn't doing much for the world at large except allowing B to defer his capital gains tax.
Unsecured lending, backed only by the faith or expectations we have around future cash flows, is how the world creates opportunity for true investment and growth... and impossible in a trustless and anonymous system like crypto.
Hardly limitless possibilities
I see that 99% of use cases are "speculation to get rich on the basis of telling bigger fools to buy and HODL LOL".
People have been using heroin for years, doesn't mean it's a good thing.
The reason we want public ledgers is to keep track of financial transactions securely.
Why can't we just use a bank? At some level there needs to be security for the bank's database. Blockchains are generally considered the best way to do this. So when legacy financial databases are replaced in recent years blockchains are often considered.
Public blockchains are even better because they ensure the validity of the overall system.
e.g. startups today are able to accept funds in USDC[0] without the hassle + cost of sending/receiving a wire transfer or waiting up to 2 weeks for an ACH to clear.
Another interesting use case is tracking provenance for physical goods.
e.g. the ownership history of a bottle of whiskey[1] or wine[2]
[0] - https://help.venture.angel.co/hc/en-us/articles/682949304692...
[1] - https://whiskeyraiders.com/bourbon/justins-house-bourbon-bax...
[2] - https://www.decanter.com/premium/spotlight-on-blockchain-win...
The ability to send money instantly from any regular bank account to any other regular bank account, without any fees, that's what we should aim for.
Cryptocurrencies do this worse than the existing banking tech (e.g., the mentioned SEPA ICT).
Mostly US bureaucracy and central banks + states having their own agendas. At this point, world governments have had how many years to figure this out? It's no better than 2009 in the US.
Much of the world doesn't have SEPA ICT. And much of the world probably doesn't want to support a euro-centric system (e.g. Serbia). Also, about ~1B people in the world are unbanked.
Decoupling the geopolitical aspects from the settlement layer is a big advantage to crypto. USDC/Circle is free to censor whomever they'd like, but the Ethereum blockchain isn't going to halt at the whims of the SEC or any other regulator.
[1] [2] Blockchains offer no guarantees off-chain. Everything that happens in the real world boils down to the oracle problem. You need trusted third parties in supply chains, a cryptographic signature would essentially achieve the same thing.
The oracle problem is very real (and solvable). Even ignoring the ability to transact within the same system where provenance is maintained, I tend to think that trusted third-parties moving their supply chain operations into a public ledger which is verifiable across time is more advantageous than point-in-time cryptographic signatures.
and other people’s use cases aren't legitimate to you
We’re past the point of playing with people’s goal posts
For them its a quagmire because they cant find a reason to justify any time or mindshare on the technology, and are simply using any discussion to rationalize not doing that
Its just past the point where they're relevant or the concept needs to be defended at all, its just not new or fragile enough anymore. Even politicians can debate nuanced aspects of 1 out of 100 use cases.
And then there’s the reality that speculation is a use case, so obvious yet somehow so unacceptable to technology savants, as if the entire financial services industry doesn't exist with its own niche technology to facilitate it
And then it derails into a relative utility argument, when someone points out the irony that nearly everyone here is working for a democracy destabilizing advertising conglomerate and getting paid in lottery tickets
Here's the thing - I work with Kafka a lot. It's a complex piece of technology, people using it incur real costs, both financially and in terms of system complexity. But it's great for some use cases. And terrible for others. You could use it to replace RabbitMQ or ActiveMQ etc., but that would generally be a bad idea, a distributed log isn't a message queue.
However, it has use cases where it shines.
If you were to ask me about the use cases where Kafka is genuinely better than other technologies, I can easily provide them.
I wouldn't say "Well, you've really got to dive into the technology itself and the opportunities presented by the platform". I'd just give you actual use cases where a distributed log is superior to other technologies.
So, should be easy to do that for Web3 stuff right?
Unless you consider "A new way for grifters to run ponzi schemes" a societal shift, then there's no evidence of any alleged shift, nevermind a massive one.
But you choosing to believe that it is indeed a massive shift in society, well, that's on you, but more likely, that's _from_ you. You want to believe.