Does Crypto Have Any Good Use Cases?

Three years ago, I felt crypto’s only proven use case was bitcoin as a store of value was the only clear, proven use case (it was clear that would endure and build retail and institutional value). Now, I see programmable money in Ethereum and Ethereum’s competitors as the next proven use case, with the massive influx into DeFi and NFTs a critical p... See more

In other words, crypto's use case is the one that it claims: decentralization. It's use case is to cut out middlemen, break up monopolies, and fight aggregators. It's certainly not the case that crypto is entirely useless.It may still be the case that crypto is "more bad than good", but the claim "after 13 years, there are still no use cases for cr... See more

Second, there are use cases for "crypto". Most notably: money. Money that's not issued by a central government is a perfectly reasonable use case. Crypto is successful at being money. You may think decentralized money is bad or not useful to you in particular, but if you can't accept money as a use case, then that's a hint that this claim may be un... See more

Right now, many of the successful applications for crypto technology are in finance or finance-adjacent fields. For example, people are using crypto to send cross-border remittances to family members abroad and Wall Street banks using blockchains to settle foreign transactions.

Presently, the dominant blockchain/Web 3.0 application is decentralized finance, but I think it’s easier to see the value of where things are heading, and to allay worries about hype cycles, pyramid schemes and speculative bubbles, if we look past the purely financial stuff. Once you start to dig into some of the applications that venture capitalis... See more