Thing is crypto already has huge negative impacts and I'm yet to see any utility that would even remotely compare. It seems like the ultimate buble hype market for people to speculate on and sell bullshit stories.
I have seen no proof that it solves anything the proponents have been touting for 5+ years now - just examples of increases in negative externalities.
Reposting my comment from another thread about DeFi. There's clear innovation and utility in that space and it would be a shame to kill it all over the worst crypto has to offer.
"There are financial primitives that cannot exist in traditional finance that I'd call pretty novel. For example flash loans allow uncollateralized loans for millions of dollars[0]. Or take KeeperDAO[1] or Dai[2] or any of the other meta protocols generating returns by providing utility. Also the sheer fact that this is all decentralized/identity-less is already a novel aspect.
Read into it- it's not as scary as it sounds and it allows for more efficient aribtrage meaning tighter markets across services. The whole transaction is atomic meaning no risk for the lenders (lump sum must be paid back in a single transaction + small interest fee).
Flash loans are only executed if the entire transaction is valid monetarily. A transaction on Ethereum is like a database, if there are any issues it's rolled back.
It’s the easiest and 2nd most secure way to pay for Mullvad VPN (also used as the backend of the Mozilla VPN). The only other alternative that leaves them with nothing to log is sending cash in an envelope.
Donations to people where paypal doesn’t work are also easier.
Those are the only uses cases (for me) I encountered and used though ;)
Can't get a log that has been wiped. But yes, Mullvad are only as good as their word. The other more expensive and complicated alternative would be to host your own vpn server, which still has the server provider as the trust anchor.
Tor is the only network sufficient enough to thwart malicious state actor's efforts.
Rumor no more [0]
No sane person should want the state marking them an enemy. Playing that game quickly becomes a contest of who'll be the first to blink. And you will in the end, blink.
It seems fairly obvious once you trace the funding on a lot of nodes. Plus that court case that got dropped with the child porn guy - they dropped it because they refused to show how they found him. 0day most likely.
It's certainly a nice tool if your country is falling apart. Nearly every other asset class is less accessible, transportable or secure against seizure than Bitcoin.
When countries descend into chaos or go full on authoritarian the best option is often to leave, but there might already be capital controls. So what can you take with you? Stocks: good luck if held by a broker in the country. Physical gold or cash: good luck at the border/customs. Foreign accounts: hard to come by for most people even in the first world due to regulations. Any serious amount of money is very hard to move between jurisdictions, especially in times of crisis, through traditional means.
If you believe your host country doesn't own you and you should be able to relocate to wherever you are treated best, Bitcoin can be a good tool if you were unprepared so far (e.g. because you didn't think a crisis could hit _your_ country). This might not be a use case for you today, especially if you are happy with your country and it is stable. But don't discount that the situation of others might differ.
That only really works for stable countries anyway. While shit is hitting the fan there will be enough incentive not to care about some silly rule as long as breaking it is not easily detectable. In the worst case trading moves from centralized exchanges to decentralized OTC trades. I don't think any government can really stop Bitcoin at this point.
I have seen no proof that it solves anything the proponents have been touting for 5+ years now - just examples of increases in negative externalities.
Using money online has an obvious utility.