> Basically, Ethereum is no longer just a financial ecosystem. It's a full-stack replacement for large parts of "centralized tech", and even provides some things that centralized tech does not (eg. governance-related applications). And we need to build with this broader ecosystem in mind.
I have respect for ethereum. It seems like one of the few cryptocurrency projects actually trying to push those ideas as far as they'll go, instead of just being endless scams.
But still, at the end of the day, this feels like endless complexity and in the end we are just back we started: applications we could already do much better using traditional technologies.
What even is the elevator pitch use case of all this?
My (non-crypto) company uses USDC daily on L2 Arbitrum for international settlement, and have seen the fees drop to a few cents per transaction with the release of blobs. We have replaced the need for wires/TransferWise/Revolut on several of our routes.
There is absolutely no reason for USDC to be on a blockchain other than to interact with DeFi. Once DeFi hype dies USDC will be outcompeted by a centralized solution. It's multisig controlled anyway so it's the same thing.
Why is it that no other solution has been developed in the 40 years of the internet, but you believe now is a particularly ripe time for one to pop up?
Because there's not enough demand to justify the regulatory headache for most types of international payments, unless you have the added benefit of interacting with DeFi protocols during a massive shitcoin bubble.
Sorry, but I thought you said in your last comment that you believe USDC will be outcompeted by a centralized solution. Do you believe that, or do you believe that there is not enough demand to justify the regulatory headache of launching a centralized solution? Those seem to me to be opposing viewpoints.
Yes, because Circle will either start using whitelists at which point it will shrink to the point where competition is trivial or it'll just shut down completely. If for some reason there's massive demand in the next decade for sub-minute international money transfers then surely CashApp will get back on that. There's just not, existing slower solutions work fine in most cases and not enough people need something better.
Also important to emphasize, I know I said it'll be outcompeted by a centralized solution. But actually USDC is centralized because it has a multisig, and all of its contracts are 100% upgradeable. So it's like a very inefficient centralized solution that really doesn't belong on a blockchain or at least not a popular one with high fees. But again, DeFi protocols exist, and people want to swap USDC for crypto hedge funds to frontrun.
That's because it has regulatory approval (for now). It's not because of a blockchain.
You can start the thought experiment by asking why USDC is on Ethereum and other popular chains rather than own private blockchain. People could make payments faster. Fees would be lower or more likely zero.
No one would use it because people don't actually want to send money internationally badly enough to create a profit opportunity. They want to interact with DeFi protocols, that's why USDC exists on eth, once the DeFi protocols die then so will USDC.
There's no good other way because people don't actually want to send money internationally badly enough to create a profit opportunity.
Huh? International payments are a HUGE industry. What are you talking about? Western Union and Transferwise are both huge companies that specialize in international payments.
DeFi protocols are a benefit, but even without it USDC would still persist.
There's no good other way because of extreme regulations that harm law abiding citizens under the guise of AML and other junk.
If your application is evading AML then your scale will always be limited. I don’t know how you could possibly feel like that’s a serious pitch. Sounds like, “We’ll just evade the law”. I guess ICOs got away with it for a bit.
They want it sure, but again, not enough to create a profit opportunity. Profit is revenue minus costs, so there's a lot of revenue opportunity (from the bank deposits by the way, not the payments), but the costs are huge. The revenue has to justify the legal headache involved with processing payments in under a minute. That's why the only live solution needs a DeFi bubble to support it.
AML is good, no I don’t. My turn to ask the questions. Is there literally any scenario where you'd accept that maybe crypto isn't actually useful and maybe it is just a big scam? Think about it hard, otherwise you'll waste years of your life in an internet libertarian larp. Bro USDC is multisig'd, it isn't decentralizing anything and it doesn't even need a blockchain except to interact with DeFi.
Kinda crazy how willing you are to let government step all over you under the disguise of AML, when it does jackshit for it. Soon enough you will be convinced that government being able to intercept all communication is good because think of the children!
> Is there literally any scenario where you'd accept that maybe crypto isn't actually useful and maybe it is just a big scam?
What scenario? Crypto is useful in current world. Not useful to everyone, that's fine, no one is forcing you to use it, but a lot of people do find it useful, myself included. Disregarding something as a scam just because you don't find it useful in your life is shortsighted. Think about it hard, otherwise you'll waste years of your life whining about how others are enjoying their lives and you will miss out on yours.
Blockchain/DeFi allows USDC to exist, even you admitted to that. The fact is, USDC exists on the blockchain. Sending international payments is the easiest with blockchain (provided both parties have a way to ramp on/off).
Idk what to tell you. Profit model that can’t work without a speculative DeFi bubble, which will die eventually because it’s not useful. AML is good and there’s a lot of history there. I don’t care much about the libertarian stuff.
The blockchain's security depends on native token value and the native token is a memecoin with no backing and if there's a speculative dump then the network has no security, so no not quite impossible.
ETH is not a memecoin and it has a real economic model. It's used to pay transaction fees, which are mostly burned. There's a small amount of issuance but most of the time that's less than the burn, so the supply shrinks. You can model it as a company, where fee burn is revenue, issuance is cost, the net is earnings, and earnings are distributed to ETH holders like a company doing stock buybacks. You can calculate a PE ratio; when I checked sometime last year the PE was around 100.
Having an economic model doesn't make it not a memecoin. LINK has an economic model and most would agree that there's no reason for it to exist other than to dump on retail. The burn is there in large part to enshrine ETH so that investors can dump on retail, otherwise fees could be paid in other ways. It provides no liquidation or dividend rights. The closest thing to that is rights to MEV, which the base fee controller actively prevents. Value is speculative and if it went to zero then the network would completely die unless it forked to disable the burn.
You need ETH to pay transaction fees. As long as there's more demand for blockspace than the space available, ETH will have a non-speculative value.
The reason for the burn was the 1559 upgrade, which fixed the horrible user experience of guessing what minimum fee level would get your transaction through in a timely manner, and often either overpaying, or underpaying and suffering long delays. If not for the fee burn, the 1559 protocol would be trivial for validators to exploit.
Basically you're arguing for chartalism, it has value because validators say it's the only thing they'll accept. That can change at any time, it's not the same as a company's stock's value being backed by liquid revenue. Imagine situations where the network just decides they want to accept other tokens at the expense of ETH. Imagine what happens to network security if there's a huge speculative dump - would network hard fork to avoid other protocols getting owned? What happens to ETH then?
Not at all. The validators get a small portion of the transaction fee for themselves and certainly they could ask for something different. But the ETH burn is built into the protocol. In theory that could be changed, if you got agreement not just from validators but from the rest of the ecosystem too. But nobody wants to change it. 1559 became very popular within days of hitting production, since it improved user experience so much. And the bigger the ecosystem gets, the harder it is to make fundamental changes.
But sure, in theory all the protocol rules could be changed. In theory Bitcoin could change their 21M supply limit. In theory, a company could sell its fixed assets and pivot to an entirely different business, or the US could change its constitution and take away property rights. But in practice, we usually estimate values based on the way things are working now, and put little weight on unlikely fundamental changes that might happen someday.
The difference is that the US would not do that in response to a speculative dump. With ETH, the system stops working and everything breaks without a HF. So it’s valuable because it’s valuable.
If the company pivoted to a different business, it would likely violate securities laws. Corporate governance is in place to stop that from happening.
US taking away all property rights is significantly less likely than an ETH hard fork. Hard forks have happened.
Ecosystem is getting smaller because everyone knows there are currently no useful DeFi projects. ETH is failing to pump again so this is the peak of network security.
Bitcoin is also a memecoin for the same reason, but at least it’s a credibly neutral memecoin unlike ETH.
Ethereum would not stop working just due to a price crash. It would get cheaper for an attacker to purchase majority stake, but good luck purchasing that much without making the price go back up.
To me, the pitch is take whatever you wanted to do with traditional technology and run a distributed lottery game for cash and prizes on top of it.
A database with a game show component for cash and prizes.
People want exactly this coupled with a bunch of hand waiving to obfuscate this reality so it has more emotional impact when you win the lottery. The traditional lottery is too obviously random with such poor odds. People want a more distributed lottery payout and crypto has delivered.
There is nothing wrong with this. No one pretends though that the state lottery is some mathematical investigation into the dynamics of a stochastic process. Playing the state lottery is not doing research in stochastic calculus. I suspect if the state lottery had started for the first time today though that is exactly how it would be marketed.
For businesses, doing the same thing for transactions between businesses that ERP systems did for internal transactions. Right now there's a lot of cumbersome and expensive mutual auditing, and nobody wants to put it all on a centralized third-party database because inevitably the third party will charge a lot of money once they're hard to replace.
Paul Brody is head of the Ethereum effort at EY, and wrote a book about this called Ethereum for Business. He includes a lot of specific examples. As Vitalik mentioned in the article, most of it is waiting for scaling.
I have respect for ethereum. It seems like one of the few cryptocurrency projects actually trying to push those ideas as far as they'll go, instead of just being endless scams.
But still, at the end of the day, this feels like endless complexity and in the end we are just back we started: applications we could already do much better using traditional technologies.
What even is the elevator pitch use case of all this?