> Bitcoin has died 450 times. If you invested $100 each time, you'd have $96,489,717 today.
I think this would be more interesting if the same sequence of $100 infusions were also applied to various popular stocks, comparing those hypothetical returns. If we're going to have survivorship bias, we might as well at least compare multiple survivors.
Yes. It allows criminals to move significant amounts of money without much effort, intervention or tracking. The current ransomware issue is a direct consequence of the attackers being able to utilize a relatively safe and cheap payment channel. Without it, the endeavor makes no economic sense.
It also helps people around the world to send and receive money that doesn't have the privilege to do so in a conventional way.
It is easy claiming it is useless because you don't need it, when you have no limitations or in the best case you don't need to swallow fees that start from 30%
It is by far the easiest way to pay people who are in another country. Trying to use a bank account for that always seems to get thwarted by a bunch of "fraud alert" false alarms.
Remote uses Stripe's Tempo chain [1] to offer USDC payments to remote workers. Revolut seems to use Stablecoins also in their Fintech products [2], though I'm not sure exactly where or how. Western Union launched [3] their own stablecoin.
One I am familiar with is Polymarket, a big prediction market, who uses USDC on Polygon [4] to denominate their bets and to post bids and asks.
These are all real uses, but also they are purely a regulatory arbitrage. Firms that are not allowed to deal with dollars instead deal Pokémon cards worth a dollar.
I'm not dissing it, fine, it's a real business, and maybe honest too. And indeed crypto is easier to send internationally, though overall presents more friction to the average user with access to high quality banking as an alternative.
I like crypto conceptually, but I'd love to finally see a use case that isn't just a regulatory workaround or recursive (something that shuffles other crypto around without an world-facing application).
Not to mention: banks are fiercely regulated FOR A VERY GOOD REASON. And all these stablecoin issuers are effectively unregulated banks. It's all fine if they are all honest, prudent, and don't take excess risks, and no one pulls their money. If either of those goes away, it's going to be a disaster.
> Not to mention: banks are fiercely regulated FOR A VERY GOOD REASON. And all these stablecoin issuers are effectively unregulated banks.
They're not. In the US stablecoins are regulated by the Genius Act and in the EU by MiCA. That's why interest in stablecoins is growing. The Genius Act mandates 1:1 backing of coins to treasuries or cash so the stablecoin custodians make money from treasuries and enjoy a risk free yield.
> I like crypto conceptually, but I'd love to finally see a use case that isn't just a regulatory workaround or recursive (something that shuffles other crypto around without an world-facing application).
I mean there's plenty but it's only interesting if you like finance. I've come to the conclusion that HN may have liked finance when it was populated by more startup folks but now that it's another tech forum, the average reader here doesn't really care for finance.
Prediction Markets are a big cryptocurrency usecase. There's also novel financial instruments like perpetual futures (patio11 is gonna write a Bits about Money post about them if you're curious.) From the sovereign currency perspective of Bitcoin, to the privacy of ZCash and Monero, to the subdivisibility of assets on programmable chains like ETH, the novelty is in the finance. If you're not into fintech then yeah you'll find the usecases all boring.
If you're curious about the tech there is a lot of interesting stuff around iterated consensus though.
> > I like crypto conceptually, but I'd love to finally see a use case that isn't just a regulatory workaround or recursive (something that shuffles other crypto around without an world-facing application).
> I mean there's plenty but it's only interesting if you like finance.
As it happens I do like finance. And all the use cases I know of are basically regulatory arbitrage.
There's nothing about prediction markets that makes them benefit from crypto. It's betting. Sports betting exists without crypto just fine. But the intersection of betting, real world events and US dollars is murky waters. So instead they work on crypto.
Monero is perhaps the one novel case, of untraceable payments. But is that the best crypto can do?
I agree the mechanisms are novel, it's just a shame to me that they didnt create a novel use case too. But I'd love to hear more tangible cases too.
Existing rails are slow and expensive due to anti money laundering laws and taxes. Enterprise customers want to move funds without those pesky laws and paying taxes.
Your linked article is solely about SpaceX customers paying with stable customers, as reported by Chamath Palihapitiya. Even if I disregard the fact that I strongly think Chamath must be lying because his lips are moving, everyone in that story has a clear biased incentive to pump crypto.
Point being, I don't think you can take this story and think it applies to a broader, general group of enterprise customers without more mundane examples.
While it’s easy to dismiss one story, stablecoin payments are gaining legitimate adoption.
> monthly B2B volume has more than doubled since February, rising 113% to about $6.4 billion. The expansion lifted the cumulative value of stablecoin payments since 2023 to over $136 billion, representing that on-chain money is no longer a niche settlement tool.[1]
And $9T in annual payment volume[2].
As it turns out stablecoin payments are actually a real thing, especially B2B.
I cannot for the life of me articulate why, because I actually don’t understand its value prop (despite lengthy conversations with ChatGPT and people on HN about it) or see any reason for its growth, but it is a thing whether we admit it or not.
I had a look at the second source. It goes to crypto investor A16Z's report, where they are looking at all crypto trading volumes. $46 trillion transaction volume but once they remove bots $9 trillion per year.
Note that forbes seriously misquotes. A16Z is counting transactions, not payments.
They compare it to visa which seems like a rubbish comparison. People use visa to buy things. Crypto trades are much more like forex, and A16Z seems to be measuring crypto for crypto purchases.
Global forex volume is about $9 trillion per day. But even that's a poor comparison as most people trade forex to DO stuff with the other currency.
Crypto is largely traded to trade crypto.
As for payments, supposing we take $136 billion cumulative lifetime payments as accurate. Mckinsey reports that global annual payments are $2 quadrillion dollars per year.
The crypto industry LOVES to throw big numbers around and tell tales of use cases just around the corner but the majority of actual use cases still seem to be skirting regulations.
>But even that's a poor comparison as most people trade forex to DO stuff with the other currency.
No, most of this volume (>99%) is institutional speculation. If people actually do something with this money you would see payments of over 9T a day, which is not happening.
Then you're doing it wrong? Solana has low fees. Lighting on Bitcoin has low fees. L2s on Ethereum have low fees. Curious when you did these transactions on what chain?
Goldman did a gold <---> painting swap via ETH like 12 years ago. The ship has sailed. It's okay, you don't have to like the calculator code as a DLL to use the calculator
So does literally everything other than Bitcoin. Bitcoin was a first draft that decided to freeze development in beta. There are much better technologies out there.
What alternatives actually scale to the level that they could seriously replace fiat currency?
I feel like every time I hear about scaling crypto the answer is to build a system that’s actually decoupled from crypto and occasionally writes back a little bit of info.
Edit: It seems like Solana was actually built for decent scale
and claims ~3k tps. This is surprisingly high, though, given, that Visa does about 7k tps on average. What are all these transactions on Solana?
I don't know what you mean by replace fiat currency, exactly, but that wasn't the post I was replying to. parent post eluded to BTC's famously extremely low throughput rate. All I was saying is that this low throughput is not a feature of crypto, it's a feature of the very bad design of Bitcoin that was never improved. This is to be expected- BTC was a basically brand new thing and nobody expected that it would ever be in a position that it needed to provide visa-level throughput.
It's problem is that the Bitcoin development community is allergic to improvement in a way that, for example, Ethereum is not. Ethereum never would have existed if the BTC community was open to developing the protocol.
RE: Other crypto with proper consensus mechanisms that have better throughput: ETH's L2 ecosystem is reasonably fast - something like 19000 TPS sustained was achieved recently, with an average around 10000 TPS and an instantaneous peak of around 24000. This is just an organic number - it certainly could go much higher, there just isn't demand for those transactions right now. It's hard to say how fast it could go.
RE: your last point, Solana is junk - it abandons proper consensus mechanism in favor of throughput. It's subject to all the same problems that delegated POS systems have because that's what it is.
How does this work? It feels like moving all of this off the blockchain loses a bunch of the supposed value.
If I move to a “side chain” do I get to keep the guarantees around settlement? I would assume no, not until this gets worn back to the block chain.
I think I understand (theoretically) how the side chain would increase throughput and reduce transaction fees, but these benefits as I understand them come specifically from making the side chain high volume. If I need to do one transaction with you, the side chain is redundant, right?
> RE: your last point, Solana is junk
Good to know. I only know what I learned in maybe 20 minutes of research.
Not all L2 are about throughput exclusively, some are, for example, more focused on private ZKSnark based transactions. There is a huge quantity of development out there.
Generally the security guarantees on L2 range from identical to the main chain to 'good enough' to 'I pinkie promise not to take your money'. It's a permissionless protocol so that's kinda what you get.
Absolutely agree, but most know nothing other than the almighty BTC.
I want 3 things from crypto:
* throughput that _could_ scale to something like visa. 50k/second christmas.
* privacy by default for everyone - "public ledger" for a currency replacement is INSANE
* reasonable transaction completion time ( < 1 minute)
A good currency is stable. Bitcoin has gone up over 5x in the last 5 years. This is not a good currency, though it’s certainly been a good speculative bet.
What is BTC inflation? How much BTC was printed by government in recent years? And of course - how much it grew in value?
In other words:
* deflationary nature
* independence of any government
* speculation
Governments will keep printing money. Stock market is only good in US (check Japan and China). Bitcoin is good alternative investment in places where options primarily limited to property.
You can equally ask what was inflation of natural gold and diamonds. It was zero since there is fixed amount of gold and diamonds on the planet. Same with bitcoin.
What?? There has been more Bitcoin today than there was yesterday since the first BTC was mined. It's the definition of inflationary. You have no idea what you are talking about.
Crypto values are arbitrary decree of crypto holders
We're just creating techno religious sects preaching from their pulpit
The only thing unique about anyone is their biology. Same old gibberish coming out their mouth, keyboards; not their values! My values! My line go up! Not their line!
Ooh yeah "fiat money" you mean. An arbitrary decree to constrain the definition. Infinitely endless arbitrary rhetoric. Incompleteness theory of primate language.
"For a speculative asset-one which produces no income and relies solely on hopes for future capital gains-the absence of a fresh bullish narrative to justify further price rises is a challenge."
No income, but significant expenses. Miners have to sell Bitcoin to pay their electricity bills. Miners also increase absolute supply, causing downward price pressure.
I think crypto is finally maturing. Consumers directly using it is just not going to happen. But institutions using it as a settlement layer seems to have traction. I'm curious to see what Stripe does with Tempo.
For all the crap that is in the crypto ecosystem I do think a lot of people underestimate its potential. Defi can replace entire institutions like banking. Combine it with regulated local stablecoins and governments dont seem too unhappy with it either.
economic value is distinct from social value. the former can be used to describe small groups (e.g. criminals who benefit from a crime), while the latter can be used to describe the negative sum relationship between criminals and their victims.
so, "positive [economic] value [for some]" and "negative [social] value on net" are not mutually exclusive.
Well, I was referring to its social value. A positive value solely for criminals is hardly an excellent economic indicator and I’m a bit surprised you would argue otherwise.
That's interesting, I'd say that it's no business of my government who I decide to transact with. If I'm buying or selling something illegal, charge me with a crime.
I think the bigger problem is not people selling naughty things. It's the absolutely reckless approach governments (and one government in particular) have taken when we give them the lever and dials that control the financial system. The modern fiat financial system is designed to transfer wealth from the least powerful to the most powerful, nothing more and nothing less.
...are we not on the same page here? I'm talking about inflation, if that's not clear. Inflation is a tax from people who don't hold assets to pay people who do.
The sane answer to monopolists abusing the system is not "we should just throw out all regulations and standards". It's "we should insist the government enforce the antitrust laws already on the books against these behemoths, rather than giving them deference".
One of things actually works on the scale of a useful human lifetime. The other does not, and currently is headed in the opposite direction. If things ever get fixed it will be my great great grandchildren that see the results.
I don’t know if crypto is the solution, but watching even supposedly technologically literate places like HN largely cheer for cashless societies where every transaction is monitored and gatekept, while limits continue to be dialed downwards is all anyone needs to see to realize working within the system is a plan for failure.
Transacting money is not a crime, it’s simply a lazy way to fight it. It enables enforcement of trivial policies and more or less removes a key pillar of human freedom.
> One of things actually works on the scale of a useful human lifetime.
One of those things actually works, period.
Throwing out the baby with the bathwater is not going to lead to a better system overall. It may fix a few of the specific problems with the current system, but it introduces enough other problems that it becomes, at best, a wash.
And in practice, it's abundantly clear that cryptocurrency does not work. People don't want it. The only reason it is experiencing a resurgence in popularity now is because Trump, under the influence of various cryptocurrency scammers (note: this is not me saying "all cryptocurrency is a scam"; this is me saying "the specific people influencing Trump on this are scammers"), has been promoting it in order to feed their scams.
Some of us can recognize that the fascist takeover of our specific government doesn't change the fundamental truths about how governments function.
Yes, antitrust enforcement in the US is a joke right now. It was actually ramping up to be pretty darn good under Biden. Now it's not, and we have several other problems to solve before we're going to be able to get to it.
None of that makes cryptocurrency a better overall answer to the problems described than fiat currency with proper antitrust controls. Frankly, it's not even a better overall answer to the problems described than fiat currency without proper antitrust controls.
Only problem is, fiat is better at most of the "good-natured" crime too.
The only application I can even think of where cryptocurrency is actually better than fiat is ransomware. Actually I suppose any kind of ransom payment might benefit from using crypto, as there's no risky physical cash handover for police to intercept. Seems like it could be equally useful for kidnappers as ransomware hackers.
But I can't think of single non-ransom transaction where fiat isn't better than crypto. Legal or otherwise.
For example when buying illicit substances, I don't see why I would want to pay extra to make the transaction traceable and public?
Without incriminating myself too much, uh, let's just say I've seen considerable volumes of illegal business conducted with physical fiat cash, to a degree that likely would have been more difficult with crypto
Crypto has uniquely allowed the huge uptick in ransomware.
Before they had to figure out some way to get paid using the banking system without getting caught. These days maybe they would be asking for $50 million in iTunes gift cards, I don’t know. But it was a hurdle.
Once Cryptocurrencies started to get well known ransomware embraced it incredibly strongly. A far far more anonymous payment method that any random company or person could pay through?
That is such a fallacious argument that crypto bros love to trot out. If you look at the ratio of crime to total transaction, then crime makes up a tiny portion of what is happening in real money. Meanwhile, the situation in crypto is the other way around: Actually useful transactions are almost negligible, while >99% of what is happening is speculation, gambling, and crime. If you could shut down the entire crypto ecosystem, literally nothing of value would be lost.
I think you underestimate how much speculation, gambling and crime happens in the fiat ecosystem. The forex, just to name one thing, is $7.5T exchanged a day.
In comparison, it’s estimated that Americans spend about $10T per year. I don’t have the numbers worldwide but America is a big piece of the cake.
So, speculation is vastly higher than regular spending, even for “regular money”.
Do you really not understand that the forex market has several real use cases and serves an actual purpose. Unlike crypto, it doesn't primarily or solely exist to facility crime and speculation. If you somehow shut down the forex trade, the global economy would experience severe disruptions. If you shut down crypto, nobody in the real economy would even notice.
crypto is a kind of live estimate of the frustration with government restrictions on using one’s own property. that in itself seems to have some social value.
in the US, banks will question you if you try to withdraw your own cash from your own bank account past a certain limit set decades ago and never adjusted while the dollar continues to lose value.
