Item — HN Reader

Devil's Advocate: Do cryptocurrencies have _any_ legitimate use case?

I can see that some newer and non-mineable coins, Solana, Avalanche, Hedera, XRP, XLM, etc don't have mining issues that the big coins (BTC, ETH, Chia, etc) have.

Is what I am seeing from critics that there has been absolutely no progress whatsoever in this space?

2 comments

Of course they do. The biggest one to me is micro transactions to me. Of course being required to pay capital gains on every transaction kills that.

It opens up ways to run ad free online services without thinking of dumb schemes like charging exhorbitant amounts of money for digital “stickers” and other crap. Like tipping with a small percentage going to the platform, charging tiny amount per min/hour of usage, tiny subscriptions. In game currencies/economies that use regular crypto.

But you can't do micro transactions on the blockchain - or rather, everyone can't do microtransactions on the blockchain because it's fundamentally anti-scalable and has to transmit every transaction to every full node.

(LN does not solve this unless you re-centralise on a common broker with whom you have a channel!)

This doesn't solve any of the other problems such as microfraud or friction either.

Are there _any_ true Scotsmen left?

It goes like this, I ask a question and an answer is given, not another question.