If you spend your brainpower on crypto, cheer up! You're likely one of the contributors to the allocation of brainpower on advertising in-app purchases of crypto as well!
if the iPhone was released in 2007 but in 2022, you couldn't use it to make calls, browse the web, and chat with friends. Instead, it could only run a bunch of Candy Crush clones, but with real money.
And given how bad Android is with its plurality or majority market share, how much worse would it be without iPhone competition? I wonder how few years Android devices would be supported if iPhones didn't set the bar so high.
Bitcoin is 13 years old. The "crypto" that you're most likely referring to is Smart contracts based dApps, 7 years old.
The Internet in early 1990s was still over a decade old but had it disappeared overnight then, absolutely nothing about anyone's life would've changed back then.
Crypto usage is entirely tied to the market. If the market is doing well, dApp usage collapses.
Google search volume doesn't collapse if the stock market isn't doing well. You still send emails even in a recession.
No one uses crypto outside of speculation. Even the dApp with the most "mainstream" use case, OpenSea, has collapses in usage as soon as the market turns bearish. Why? Because no one wants to buy "digital art" when there is no bigger fool to sell it to.
I haven't even logged into my Metamask for weeks now.
My point above is still relevant to your response as well - the Internet in the 1990s was in a similar state. No one was buying things online and it was too slow to replace TV shows.
> No one uses crypto outside of speculation.
Same old argument while closing your eyes to actual use cases. You have this technology where - leaving aside free cross-border trustless payments to anyone, you can have an immutable record of data to store, unhackable, solves spam and you actually still think this is all about speculation? You're on Hacker News, really recommend putting on your hacker hat and re-evaluating it.
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On a slightly different note, Opensea is not a true dApp and it's a little centralized in places. But yes of course NFTs right now are extremely speculative. Look elsewhere, ENS domains usage is at an all time high and rapidly growing (even after the recent price correction), Uniswap recently crossed a trillion $ in total transaction volume in its lifetime.
Blockchain tech is an extremely powerful tool, it's a shame most hackers on HN are hostile to it which makes them miss real use-cases happening under the surface.
Man, I've been in the crypto hole for two years straight. There's not a protocol that I haven't tried yet. And there's not a protocol that I now use outside of speculation.
Even ENS domain usage has been going up because of the speculative frenzy around valuable domain names (look up the race to register all 3-letter ENS names).
You can start off by naming three projects that you actually use regularly outside of speculative investments. Because for the life of me, I can't.
1) I'm hosting a blog on my ENS domain - this cannot be censored and this exact version will always be available for anyone to access (as long as someone's pinned it on IPFS). So it solves a real problem that DNS does not. For example, you can checkout Vitalik's blog at https://vitalik.eth.limo/
2) I was in Budapest and had lost my debit card and was in need for Euros - I literally looked up the closest Bitcoin ATM, which was 10 mins walk from my hotel and instantly had access to cash (global borders, international payments can be a nightmare). On a similar note - I often make payments in crypto to international contractors.
3) I regularly use Poap (https://poap.xyz/) as proof of participation in various events like hackathons / workshops, etc and this has in turn helped me in the space.
All three of these are not speculative investments.
And as I keep repeating, this is literally the start. We're builders, we can see where the space is heading and where it will be in 5 years.
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