I replied elsewhere in the tree on this thread. But exchanges, lending markets, human coordination over the internet, capital allocation, novel on-chain governance structures for organizations, smart contract multisig wallets, zero knowledge proof gaming, zk privacy, hell, even programmable, accessible, liquid, token-denominated assets have incredible value for the world. Value is being created despite your inability to distinguish the wheat from the chaffe.
How does any of this help a typical financial products consumer? Can you explain where I can do $0.00 transactions to my friends? Can you point me to where I can get a better deal on a refinance or HELOC loan with my house as collateral?
Because I love financial products that help me retain my earned money, and am avid about getting the best deals. Right now I have 0$ transactions, 3.75% actual guaranteed returns on cash (not a 50% chance of being worth $0 by next year a la FTX, genesis, blockfi, etc.), 3% cash back on transactions that cost a business 2.5%, and would love a cheaper HELOC than traditional banks. However, none of anything you mentioned actually does any of this better, the things that 99.8% people actually want, rather than speculative "investments" they're hoping to sell for more later.
What's that YC slogan again? "Make something people want."
Only one of the uses I mentioned is harmed by inflation. Transactions don’t require me to hold a long position in USD and inflation would be in my favor if I’m holding USD debt. That just leaves USD bank interest, which has the strongest case for it out of any, because ETH and all cryptos lost much more value this year, if you were lucky enough to not be in the 50% holdings where your “account” was fraudulently wiped out a la FTX and BlockFi.
ETH is also inflationary… Both of your provided charts show large currency issuance and only very slight recent drawdowns.
As I expected; a whole bunch of buzz words and given the chance to produce a single real example, no actual use case for the 99.8% consumer.
Deflationary money means "whoever got in early and got the most money is going to be ultra-rich forever, unlike the poor sods who get in years/generations from now"
These graphs seem to say otherwise. Leaving the gold standard seems to have ushered in the current dystopia we find ourselves in. The gold standard wasn’t perfect for sure, but having to have money rooted in something instead of nothing seems to have kept wage improvements for all classes, not just the elite.
Which graphs? I wasn't talking about 1971 or the largely US-specific chart of not compensating people.
I'm talking about deflationary currency. With a deflationary currency people who got in early and got the larger part of the pie will for ever be ultra rich, and get richer.
Because the money you get now will only increase in value over time. So you got in early and got a single coin X for something. Congrats, you're nearly infinitely richer than, say, your grand kids who'll be getting fractions of a percent of that coin for that same something.
I;m not going to comment on the crypto side, but I would argue that your conclusion also applies to the traditional currency system; it's not like created money was freely handle to the poorest.
All of this may be true, but each one of these things is one tiny programming mistake away from complete and irrevocable collapse. The track record for this category is poor.
For new projects, yes. New projects should be treated with caution, especially if from unknown entities or entities with a poor security track record. But Uniswap V2 is almost 3 years old at this point, and Uniswap V3 is almost 2 years old. The contracts were audited before they were deployed. They're open source. They've got billions of dollars in the contracts. If they could be hacked, they would have been hacked by now.
Almost 3 years old! There's a great joke in the movie _LA Story_ about this kind of thing.
Heartbleed, Shellshock, Log4Shell, Spectre... there are plenty of examples of serious flaws found in software far more mature than these smart contracts. Audits and testing only confirm the presence of bugs, not their absence.
