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Lot of commenters saying they're all scam pump-and-dumps, but I suspect a lot had something to them that the builders believed to be of value.

As best I can tell, the value props were 90%+ "more efficient crypto", "more decentralized crypto", "more private crypto". I think Compound had a different mechanism for rewarding validators, but even that's just fiddling with the finances of the network.

I want novel use-cases outside of just finance. There was a layman's NFT video suggesting they'd work as a way of doing concert tickets, and there's FileCoin for distributed storage.

I tried asking Bard for more, and didn't get much, but ChatGPT-4 gave me a bunch: Golem ("decentralized supercomputer by allowing users to rent out their idle computing power to others"), Basic Attention Token (Brave's thing for fixing ads/micro-transactions, Chainlink ("decentralized oracle network that allows smart contracts to access data from external sources"), Siacoin ("Users can rent out their unused hard drive space to store encrypted files for others, in exchange for Siacoin"), Augur ("decentralized prediction market platform"), and Decentraland ("users can create, experience, and monetize content and applications"???)

Don't get me wrong, it makes sense that cryptocurrency's use-cases are mostly financial, but there was a lot of energy, much of it honest in this space. I'd love to see a readable, not-super-technical blog post that lays out the ideas people came up with (and which, if any, panned out), rather than just the thousand's "it's all a scam" dismissal. Golem and Filecoin/Siacoin both sound like they might actually solve real problems / create rel value.




> I want novel use-cases outside of just finance. There was a layman's NFT video suggesting they'd work as a way of doing concert tickets

Most of those "novel ways" either make no sense or make trivial things hard and hard things nearly impossible. Most people peddling (there's no other word for it) these solutions have no idea how the real world works, or what the real world needs.

> I'd love to see a readable, not-super-technical blog post that lays out the ideas people came up with (and which, if any, panned out)

6 years ago these two articles already described how many "novel ways" make no sense, no matter the intention. All the issues described remain, regardless of how many new buzzwords people come up with in the crypto space:

- https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-...

- https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...

For newer descriptions of how these systems fail, see Molly White: https://blog.mollywhite.net/is-web3-bullshit/ (and other essays and talks)

Edit: There's also The Edited Latecomer's Guide To Crypto https://www.mollywhite.net/annotations/latecomers-guide-to-c...


People really need to stop listening to molly white, her skepticism is fundamentally no different from what crypto shillers do. It’s toxic and exploits people’s ignorance about legitimate and balanced routes to crypto education. Only the sign is inverted.


Demagoguery. That's crypto proponents' only response to legitimate criticisms.


For NFTs it’s very easy to grasp their novel use case. Any digital asset (content subscriptions, software licences, passes to gated communities, in-game items etc. — all are supported by real, functional examples today) can be distributed easily to the wallet of your users and you don’t need to worry about building additional middleman infrastructure to store and verify the data or to enable your users to trade the assets. In fact the users gain unprecedented property rights: they can sell the assets freely, take a peer-to-peer currency loan against them, exchange them for something else, destroy them etc. As the creator of the NFT collection you don’t need to worry about how that happens because it takes place on decentralised protocols that are already operational.


And this ignores everything else: actual artist's rights, the fact that most NFTs reside on centralised services etc.

As to "there's no middleman": there is. The person who wrote the NFT's "smart contract".




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