Cryptocurrencies do solve several issues, but some of them have become less important and others are, well, not so transparent for ordinary people. Do you remember when bank transfers using ebanking still took several days when you did them on a friday afternoon? For many banks this is actually still a thing. Yes there's Paypal and Venmo and god knows what these days, but good luck trying to send large amounts of money that way or sending anything abroad (especially to a country where the service is not available). Which brings us to point nr 2: There are many people with lots of money who would prefer to send it not just faster and easily verifiable, but also away from the prying eyes of governments and banks with strict oversight. Bitcoin only works if you manage to get it anonymously (e.g by giving some dude cash and hoping he's not monitored by the NSA), but other Cryptos give you privacy for all transfers and still keep verifiability. Every drug dealer, money launderer or tax evader can easily sneak millions of dollars across continents in an instant. This used to be damn difficult when using hard currency or art or any other tangible asset (and when you did it electronically you would set off even the most trivial alarm systems). So yeah, there certainly are big problems that were solved - the question is: Did we really want them to be solved.

Are there really counterparties with millions of dollars of privacy preserving crypto in every country?

Like say you are a cocaine kingpin. You instruct your minions in countries where you sell your product to buy crypto. How do you access that value where you live?

Or say you are a wealthy Russian with millions of rubles that you want to move out of the country. Is there really a seller with unlimited willingness to exchange their crypto for rubles?

You're assuming that the counterparty must be purely transactional. But there are people with big money in this system who have no problem holding vast amount of digital currency. They wouldn't have any problem accepting it as payment for larger investments. Also, imagine you sold one ton of cocaine and now you want to move the money out of the country. You'd instruct your dealers use their local crypto handlers to transfer the money from cash and then wire the digital assets to your crypto wallet. You can now cross any border with that wallet and access it in any country and noone will be able to inspect it if you do it right. And there's already a lot of infrastructure for getting cryptos back to cash - even (and sometimes especially) in poorer countries (think of an ATM, but you can use your crypto wallet to withdraw).

Yes, moving the money into crypto is going to be the relatively easy part of using it for drugs. Finding liquidity where you want to spend time may not be so easy.

You say "think ATM", the street value of a ton of cocaine is tens of millions of dollars. Nice ATM.

I kinda have to agree, can anyone elaborate on the uses of crypto, what does it actually solve? I understand blockchains offer a decentralized system. but how about crypto?

So... I am not at all trying to advocate for crypto here, but the putative value is in having an anarchic currency that is easily exchangeable. That is, if you had money and wanted to convey it digitally outside of traditional regulated institutions, how would you do it? There's gold, art, etc but that's not easily movable.

Now, there's lots of issues here, like how you translate the crypto into other traditional regulated assets if need be, or traceability, or energy use, or security, but that's the putative value: easily moving value outside traditional governmental boundaries.

To be fair, if you've ever looked into buying something grey or black market online, I think the value of some sort of cryptocurrency in theory is apparent?

I'm not sure any crypto at the moment checks all the boxes, though, and some of the assumptions about use seem a little naive or disingenuous, but I can see the idealized use case value. I could in the abstract imagine some kind of decentralized accounting system taking on the role of currency, probably de facto, but I'm not sure current cryptocurrencies are that.

There are cases where crypto solves a problem better than anything else, but they're pretty niche.

I used to live in China. Many of my friends still do, or did until recently. China makes it very, very difficult to legally transfer money abroad, even if that money was earned legally and had all required taxes paid on it.

It is trivial, though, to buy Bitcoin in China, and trivial to immediately sell it elsewhere. You are not exposed to much risk, because you can execute the transaction quickly, and although you're breaking the law in China, because you're circumventing their capital controls, you're not breaking the law anywhere else — the money was earned legally and all required taxes were paid on it.

So Bitcoin is pretty popular as a way to get money out of China if you are not living there any more (or are comfortable with the risk, if you are living there). I imagine there are many other places where it's also useful in this way.

During the trucker protest in Canada, the government froze the bank accounts of participants. That the government can do this, shut down movements it doesn't like with the click of a button, is a dangerous centralization of power. Crypto (at its best) safeguards democracy by serving as a check on such power. This still leaves the option of shutting down dangerous protests using the police which requires the cooperation of a lot of people - thus less dangerous, striking a better balance between freedom and safety.

Nothing really. A nice vehicle to strip retail investors that don't understand money or tech, or the tech of money.

Funnily enough, the only thing I see any value in are NFTs. (Remember crypto currencies are essentially just the T in NFT). But not the url asset nonsense.

Rather as a distrubuted authentication system. Concert tickets, system access etc. are all viable.

I’m seeing the concert ticket thing around lately as something this space could “solve”.

But why would NFTs or a blockchain be good here? We have an identifiable central authority, the ticket issuer, so… why do we need a decentralised record for that?

I mean, you could issue tickets to an event as NFTs, and it would probably work ok, but why bother?

> We have an identifiable central authority, the ticket issuer, so… why do we need a decentralised record for that?

And look how well this is going for us? Ticketmaster is one of the the most anti consumer companies in history. There is no need for a single central authority here. Plus you get the benefit of authenticating the tickets in case of resale, etc.

It's actually a great usecase. Fraud is rampant, binding tickets to individuals doesn't make sense, and the main issuer is a literal supervillian.

Regardless - "concert" tickets isn't even my point. It's as a general purpose access token that literally anyone can verify. There is obvious utility in this.

You've told me why you think you would like it, not why the industry would embrace it.

> There is no need for a single central authority here.

Right, but there is one. If it's not tickemaster it could be the venue, the band, anyone. In which case, we don't don't need a trustless, decentralised register. We have a ticket issuer, therefore we don't need a heath-robinson type blockchain arrangement.

> Plus you get the benefit of authenticating the tickets in case of resale, etc.

Blockchains aren't needed for this. We have a central authority that can easily run its own marketplace, if it shoudl wish to.

> Fraud is rampant

A central authority can solve this just as well as a blockchain, without the need for the tradeoffs.

> binding tickets to individuals doesn't make sense

Sure it does, many bands and venues specifically want to prevent resales as it encourages profiteering over fan accessibility.

> There is obvious utility in this.

Yet the example you came up with doesn't seem to have anything over a more traditional solution, other than "I hate ticketmaster". All of this stuff can be done anyway.

>You've told me why you think you would like it, not why the industry would embrace it.

You're absolutely correct. And this is because I never told you that the industry would embrace it.

> Right, but there is one.

Right but there's no need.

> heath-robinson type blockchain arrangement

A system already exists and is perfectly usable and understandable. Hyperbole isn't doing any favours here.

> We have a central authority that can easily run its own marketplace, if it shoudl wish to.

This is true of all distributed systems.

> A central authority can solve this just as well as a blockchain, without the need for the tradeoffs.

They haven't though have they? And it comes for free with blockchains, alongside being able to do so without silly blockers like having to sign up for a business account and be verified by ticketmaster and pay fees as though you are a venue etc. etc.

> Sure it does, many bands and venues specifically want to prevent resales as it encourages profiteering over fan accessibility.

Fair, but this isn't what happens. What happens instead is that not only are people making fake accounts and bots, but the ticket issuer themselves is involved and profiteering. Literally the worst. If this takes place on a public chain then the ownership and scalping of any given ticket is fully traceable.

I'll grant you however that blockchain stuff doesn't solve KYC problems. It can certainly help though, given vouching systems by trusted third parties can be implemented and blah blah blah

Additionally, overbooking is easy to see coming and know about in advance, as well as a host of other benefits (expecting a big gig? Traffic reports can grep the chain and see attendance expecations. Blah blah public data.) Once again you can say something _ridiculous_ like this can be done by a central authority - but I'll let you be the one to hold your breath for ticketmaster to create data APIs for individual gigs.

> All of this stuff can be done anyway.

Yes. As discussed everything that can be decentralised can be centralised, basically. Unless you want / care about the additional data transparency and public programmability the chain gives, ofc you won't care.

> Right but there's no need.

There is always a need for a central authority to issue tickets. Some company operates the venue, and opens the gates for people. There is an organisation that is running the show.

When this is the case you don't need a distributed ledger and all the complications that come with that.

> Hyperbole isn't doing any favours here.

That system is overcomplex for ticket issuing. Anything that requires the general public to keep secret keys secret (and not lose them, ever) is pretty much a bad idea.

> This is true of all distributed systems.

No, it isn't. As much as I'm not a cryptocurrency fan, the whole point of things like Bitcoin is that there is not a central authority, and all the complexity in the protocol comes from building a distributed consensus. When you have a central authority (ticket issuer, venue operator, whatever) that is not going away in this scheme, you don't need that.

> They haven't though have they?

This is a market failure and won't be solved by a blockchain. What you need is competition which unlocks the venues and their exclusivity agreements. Nothing about the specific software implementation of the ticket issuing system really helps here.

> And it comes for free with blockchains

No, it doesn't, someone has to run the infrastructure (even if it's just nodes), write the smart contracts (and pay the gas or whatever to run them), tie in a web UI that runs somewhere, connect all this to the information about the venues, all sorts. That's not 'free'. A database can manage ticket records for a trivial amount of money, and would have a similar amount of other infrastructure needed around it to provide a full service. The datastore implementation here is not a particularly interesting part of the problem.

> If this takes place on a public chain then the ownership and scalping of any given ticket is fully traceable.

Yet we don't need a chain to do that. We can do that with any old DB. Blockchain also can't (for instance) stop people selling their private keys to each other instead of actually performing transfers, just as a DB can't stop people doing that with a username and password or whatever gets used there. And if you say "Well we tie that to real ID using a third party system"...

> I'll grant you however that blockchain stuff doesn't solve KYC problems. It can certainly help though, given vouching systems by trusted third parties

Again, a blockchain adds nothing, if there's a third party vouching system we can just use that in the traditional system too.

> I'll let you be the one to hold your breath for ticketmaster to create data APIs for individual gigs.

And I'll let you be the one to hold your breath waiting for them to embrace your blockchain solution too. Again, it's the market issue that you need to tackle, not the implementation one.

> Yes. As discussed everything that can be decentralised can be centralised

Right, and in this case it is centralised by necessity, because someone is running the gig. You can't remove that authority and that renders the blockchain part of solution a complete irrelevance and an implementation detail.

The problem here is you are looking at a market failure and deciding that if we just throw blockchains at it then it'll magically be fixed. But the blockchain solution doesn't address any of the market problems, and everything you're saying is a wonderful side-effect of using a blockchain can be done with any ticketing software solution.

I could sing the praises of a piece of software I'm building with a nice web front end and API access and a database backend, ownership traceability through simple DB records, the same third party ID integration. I can make the whole DB accessible for the public to query if I want, so data transparency is preserved. See how this solves the same sorts of issues? I could even claim mine's superior because if you phone me up and say "my ticket was stolen" and can prove your ID through that neat third party service, I can sort that out for you because my data structures aren't immutable.

But in the end my magic solution would be just as useless as yours in the face of ticketmaster's swathe of venue exclusivity agreements and stranglehold on the market, because the software implementation details are not a solution to the actual problem.

So you can shout "this could all be solved if we forced the world to use a blockchain solution!" and you wouldn't be wrong, but the fact that it's got a blockchain or not is not the good part, it's the forcing change that's the good part.

> Unless you want / care about ... public programmability the chain gives, ofc you won't care.

Exactly! Spot on! If public programmability was the whole problem in that space, you might have a great solution, but it's not! That's not even a tiny part of the problem with the ticket marketplace, and certainly isn't remotely interesting to most ticket-buyers.

This whole argument is the very definition of what's wrong with the cryptocurrency/blockchain space - instead of trying to solve the real problem (ticketmaster market dominance and abusive practice, backed up with effective monopoly) you're trying to see where you can shove a blockchain, and pretending that fixes something. It doesn't, it's just an implementation detail of a software solution that by itself does nothing to address a market problem.

Wouldn't it be nice if ticketmaster didn't rule the roost and act like dicks? Sure would. And if we could do more with our tickets? And maybe push profiteers out of the system? Oh yes. The specific way we encode, store and transfer ticket ownership records in a non-ticketmaster ticketing system isn't going to change that. Market competition or market regulation might. A specific data structure can't achieve this by itself.

It's a nice idea in theory, but only in theory.

So the idea as I understand it is that tickets as NFTs would allow you to prove your ownership of the ticket. With tickets being increasingly electronically-issued, there's currently no way to prove you've been sold a genuine ticket, or the only copy of a genuine ticket - until you get to the gate, they read your barcode, and turn you away.

So we have a second-hand market that runs through ticketmaster currently, which solves this trust issue by interacting with the issuer directly. Tickets via NFTs would help remove this dependency on ticketmaster, so we could have a healthy, trustworthy second-hand market that doesn't just feel like ticketmaster encouraging bots so they can sell the same ticket twice.

So the question is - does this benefit ticketmaster in the slightest? What problems does this solve for them? Because without them issuing the tickets as NFTs in the first place, and recognising them at the gates - it simply doesn't happen. As you say - from the issuer's POV, "why bother?"

As far as I can tell, everyone hates the current system - except the people that control it. The solution to this isn't some wonderful modern technology, it's plain and simple competition.

So it mostly exists as an example of why you'd want to be able to prove ownership of a unique token. Everyone can see the problem if I print my ticket 10 times and sell it to 10 people, it's easy to explain. The telling question is why we don't have a good example of an implementation.

The fun thing there is that ticketmaster is still the authority, and could implement rules like "resold NFTickets will not be honoured", which some bands and events are insisting on to try to save their fans from some of the outrageous profiteering, and it would be just as easy with an NFT as it would with a centralised solution to verify this. Possibly easier.

I guess my point is that there's already an authority in the picture, and there always will be, so a blockchain solution is unnecessary complexity. What's needed, as you say, is a better authority!

They absolutely aren't. Or at least not in the way people think. IF the tech has value it won't "Kill ticketmaster". It'll be adopted BY ticketmaster to make sure they have to pay fewer people on the front line to strip money from your wallet.

The, in theory, idea is that you can tie an NFT to an account, and make sure it can't be resold, but you could also tie a ticket to an ID, and that'd probably work better because it's not hard to spin up a wallet, get the "ticket" nft, and then sell the whole wallet.

crypto is just purely distilled capitalism. Of course it's not going to solve any problems - it's an ecosystem entirely dedicated to the pursuit of profit, without the inconvenient side effects of actually producing useful work.

it's a descriptive take on capitalism. profit is the motivating force for businesses, and in the crypto economy the profit is primarily derived from speculation and scamming. in the real world, at least capitalism is driven by demand that often comes from actual utility. crypto is like if the entire economy was wall street, including boiler rooms and market manipulation.

Profit might be #1 , but immediately after profit there is a huge moat to protect profits.

When you don't build anything of value the only moat you have is your political ability to convince people that you are.

I mean banks and insurance companies don't have to justify their existence, whereas the massive campaign that crypto enthusiasts mounted on the interwebz is telling that they are not even sure that their movement can survive.

Capitalism and Marxism are ideas.

The historical acts, good or bad, due to these ideas are owned by the actors.

Capitalism isn't an idea, it's a system that we live within.

Yes, if you care about blame then you can just blame people for bad actions and call it a day. But if you care about actually preventing bad actions then you need to look at incentives, and that's where the study of political economy comes in.

Indeed, to quote myself within this very thread:

> Incentives matter in the buyer/maketplace/seller realm of economics.

then what was your objection? Capitalism incentivises profiteering, the crypto industry is an example of practically pure profiteering.

Capitalism is an intellectual concept, like Socialism.

Materialism is the driver of the mischief in either the capitalist or Socialist case.