there are many people with many use cases for distributed ledgers. we are already aware of the flowchart of your argument path
“list them”
“oh I can do that in this other convoluted way that doesnt solve any of these users goals or problems”
“I’m not the target audience for that so it doesnt count”
“ah so financial speculation, that doesnt count despite being the largest application and sector on the planet”
“marketcap doesnt matter and isnt indicative of anything in that economy, I would rather hold digital assets at a separate different standard than every other asset on the planet out of total ignorance that my same arguments apply to asset classes that I respect”
“see I proved my point for myself, there is no use case after 17 years, classic HN”
“those are strawman arguments despite all conversations following this same predictable path enough for any language model to regurgitate it verbatim”
if you made every incorporated and unincorporated organization and product line and revenue stream to be fractionalized and publicly traded it would look the same
its just a filtering problem
there are screeners to narrow everything down just like for the stock exchanges
To quote the article:
>> But also… why do you care? Why would someone using a really cool tool that makes them more productive… feel compelled to sneer and get defensive at the mere suggestion that someone else isn’t doing the same?
>> It feels like the same attitude that happened with Bitcoin, the same smug nose-wrinkling contempt. Bitcoin is the future. It’ll replace the dollar by 2020. You’re gonna be left behind. Enjoy being poor. Sure thing, Disco Stu!
Evangelists can be ignored if you want, not all promoted use cases are relevant
Its all about blockspace and the commodity that pays for the blockspace
That was true when bitcoin was 2 cents and its true when bitcoin is $109,000 and 2 cents
I mean, are you enjoying your socioeconomic status? the chronology was very clear to some and they were right. It wasn’t luck, it wasn’t a really binary proposition. you can read old threads around the net from 2012 to see exactly where we are going. you can help make that happen or passively act surprised. pretty much every theorized issue can be programmed away, thats what gives people confidence in this asset class compared to others.
I largely agree with you, but to nitpick: when bitcoin was 2 cents, blockspace was free, and miners regularly accepted zero-fee transactions into blocks. Today, you're not getting a transaction into a block without paying at least a couple hundred sats. Your statement is true today, but it wasn't like this until April-May 2012 when Satoshi Dice started filling blocks up. See Fig 3 on page 9 of <https://maltemoeser.de/paper/transaction-fees.pdf> or look through some early blocks.
if you expected applications to be deployed that would take up block space when used, and were going to build those applications yourself, then it was still rational
in 2012 people were describing smart contracts, joint custody accounts to secure assets better, and many other applications that are commonplace and have their own critique and discussion now
its like seeing an island full of resources and realizing that the bridges and ferry routes haven't been built yet. that
1) you can get to that island yourself before everyone else
2) you can also build the bridge and put up a toll booth
3) other bridges will be built
4) and other people can also come to the island early at great difficulty too
the same play is still true on other blockchains, and sometimes back again on bitcoin
I’ve done the trade many times over the past 15 years
Today, when blocks are empty, you're paying 1 sat/vB. Back then, when blocks were empty, you paid zero. That's the difference between "all about blockspace" and "only about blockspace when you care about next-block latency".
If you had said "2 dollars" instead of "2 cents", we would be in complete agreement. All I'm saying is that mandatory transaction fees were not baked in at 2 cents.
and all I’m saying is that it didn’t matter for a bullish thesis whether this is just a nitpick fyi or a nuance you really care about
the only thing that mattered was the malleability of the system to meet its goal of attracting transactions, including the future malleability of what you are pointing out. blockspace became scarce. it was predictable that anything that undermined that would be excised out of the network.
A lot of your examples are fallacious arguments that are weak or just generally wrong but your first one is
>”list them”
If you are arguing that something exists, then being asked to prove its existence is table stakes, not poor arguments
You starting with a strong argument in your list of bad arguments and then ending with shit that mocks anyone calling you out makes me believe that you are not discussing this topic in good faith
unfortunately the same thread has been had for any tangentially crypto thread on HN for the last decade and a half, so it just doesn’t feel like my prerogative to answer such a lazy and abstract question
yes, that means we are at an impasse. use the search, ask an LLM, if even that is too much initiative for a quite outdated skeptic to take even now then I can’t help you
there are hundreds of billions, maybe trillions in volume going through financial services on blockchains and it doesn’t matter if financial services isn’t a sector you care about or are the target audience for, there are people there who will pay to solve problems they have
Most of the financial services and systems are all still on very boring old databases (hell quite some cobol still touches a ton of it). Since well they don't need to get hype funding for their Series A or whatever. Databases are just pretty good and processing data efficiently. It's a tiny tiny part that actually runs on some blockchain.
there are hundreds of billions, maybe trillions in volume going through financial services on blockchains
and yes that is a tiny fraction of all financial services volume at all, or even involving crypto assets.
I was referring to the traffic onchain as that’s what’s interesting
permissionless liquidity providing in unincorporated
partnerships is still novel and unique to those platforms and highly lucrative. on assets that dont need permission to be listed anywhere.
“list them”
“oh I can do that in this other convoluted way that doesnt solve any of these users goals or problems”
“I’m not the target audience for that so it doesnt count”
“ah so financial speculation, that doesnt count despite being the largest application and sector on the planet”
“marketcap doesnt matter and isnt indicative of anything in that economy, I would rather hold digital assets at a separate different standard than every other asset on the planet out of total ignorance that my same arguments apply to asset classes that I respect”
“see I proved my point for myself, there is no use case after 17 years, classic HN”
“those are strawman arguments despite all conversations following this same predictable path enough for any language model to regurgitate it verbatim”