FishyJoe wrote:
There are many things that crypto and blockchain can do other than wealth building. Digital contracts, licensing, money transfer, etc. It's not useless, that's the strength, the potential use cases.
Ok, but what does it do that is better than a conventional solution.
For example, money transfers. Electronic money transfers already exist and I can't see any reason that blockchain would do it anymore efficiently than conventional solutions. In fact, it will also be less efficient and require more waste. For example, if I want to transfer money from a Chase account to a Fidelity account, there are of course some tiny overhead for that. But wouldn't a blockchain need all that same exact overhead, plus an additional proof of work or proof of stake layer? It requires that additional layer and those layers must be some sort of pain, because if they did not require much work or stake, then they are not secure. So I can't see how it avoids being less efficient than conventional methods. Plus those banks have all sorts of regulations that make my money way more safe as a bonus.
Now it is true that the fees that conventional methods are higher than some blockchain methods, but that is because of a choice of the institutions, if they were under threat by the block chain, they could easily undercut the blockchain in money transfer fees. For one reason they could undercut it, they don't have to the whole wasteful layer of proof of work or proof of stake.
Bitcoin was super super clever, but I am still waiting for someone to come up with some actual use case that makes sense, beyond foreign remittances because banks are overcharging for money transfers. Because that use case will go away if banks choose it to go away.