Does Crypto Have Any Good Use Cases?

Crypto and “Web3” are really all about blockchain tech. And what a blockchain lets you do is run perpetual decentralized applications.

We’re at the fun part of the market where crypto has lost trillions of dollars in value and people are scrambling to make up reasons why it’s useful.

I try to keep a relatively level head about crypto, and at least 90% of it is nonsense right now. Maybe more like 95-99%. 
But there are some real use cases right now that are quite good and provide a legitimate case for the value of blockchain tech.

If you were hanging around when they first started wiring computers together and you said, “One day this simple innovation is going to let people make millions of dollars selling pictures of their feet to strangers,” Al Gore would say, “please put on some shoes and get out of my office.” But that’s what the Internet did!

Crypto is EARLY. Painfully early. If you’ve ever used any of the types of applications I talk about in this newsletter then you know the user experience is usually terrible. If you make a careless error you might lose all your money. If you pick a token at random it’s more likely a scam or shitcoin than anything legitimate.

Anyway, it’s a short list, right? Well, this is why crypto critics aren’t wrong when they talk about how “useless” crypto is. It doesn’t do very much right now, but these few things do show some hints at what might be coming later.

They’re perpetual because they will always run forever if the blockchain is running. You don’t have to keep “hosting” the application like you do for a Web2 app. And they’re decentralized because they’re running everywhere all at once.

It's important to highlight that crypto is a backend innovation, akin to the first Internet innovation, and very different from mobile, which was a user experience innovation. Just as the first web pages looked a lot like newspaper or magazine pages translated onto a computer screen, we’re still in the early skeuomorphic phase of crypto application... See more