Haha no successes? The biggest success is that it works at creating digital scarcity. That's a pretty big accomplishment. Various cryptos trade to the tune of billions of dollars a day. Ethereum has layered an open source, open computation, virtual machine on top of a monetary layer. It has inspired and spun off dozens of other blockchains each with their own takes on smart contracts. Meanwhile there are projects already implementing prediction markets, gold-backed ERC20 tokens, video games using ERC721 tokens, provably fair online casinos, decentralized exchanges (0x), automated crypto backed loans (DAI), crypto backed computation and digital storage (Sia), social networking with integrated micropayments for curation (Steemit), you've got Brave browser and it's BAT token with a novel approach to paying content creators...can go on and on. Just need to take your blinders off and do some research.
Significant usage of any kind, achieving some goal which couldn't have been achieved before without a list of massive caveats longer than my arm, or anything of that ilk. What we have right now is one neat innovation with a tonne of caveats being plugged into a bunch of stuff it doesn't work for, called "success stories", and then moved on from before people realise they aren't going anywhere.
Can you name one thing that's come out of crypto that has seen any significant usage in the market it's trying to break into which isn't just using "we have a blockchain!" as a marketing tool?
The applications which are most interesting are the first implementations of smart contracts. Most notably, truly "stable" tokens which track the price of something like the USD. One example of this being https://makerdao.com/
This is made possible through increased liquidity in crypto markets. Specifically, the movement towards decentralized exchanges for crypto to crypto transactions. As this continues to progress, interesting financial innovations like MakerDAO will be become more and more sustainable. One of the primary caveats of doing business in crypto-currency is the fluctuating value.
Imagine holding a real decentralized crypto-currency that is pegged to the USD. That will open many doors for commerce, and decrease transaction costs. The ability to swap this token back and forth using atomic swaps will allow people to remain in crypto longer, without exposure to crypto price swings.
Once this happens, people will be able to keep a portion of their net worth within crypto currency indefinitely. A stable coin is what the market needs to move forward, and it will happen within the next few years.
the latest in the long line of "no, _this_ is what cryptocurrency was always for! All the previous examples were wrong!"
>Imagine holding a real decentralized crypto-currency that is pegged to the USD. That will open many doors for commerce, and decrease transaction costs. The ability to swap this token back and forth using atomic swaps will allow people to remain in crypto longer, without exposure to crypto price swings.
Imagination is not a successful project. This is literally talking about things which _don't even exist yet_.
>Once this happens
And here we reach the crux of the issue.
_If_ this happens, not once. Just like all the previous things that would have "changed the world", if only a long series of long-unsolved problems in cryptography and distributed computing were solved.
