I’ve spent a lot of hours analyzing “crypto” and keeping up with the fads, and to this day I still cannot find a problem that I have, and that it can solve.
Bitcoin solves my hard globally-portable savings problem. I don’t see better money than this. And that’s a big problem to solve.
Stablecoins solve some developing market intermediate-term money problems in very inflationary environments as a bridging tool while Bitcoin is still volatile. Okay. That’s big for now.
Digital collectibles are fine. I mean, I have cardboard Magic the Gathering cards worth thousands of dollars. So you buy an ape NFT and get membership to an exclusive ape club (which is like all dudes, nearly entirely devoid of women) and can show your status by displaying your supposedly elite avatar. I do see how there is a nonzero recurring interest in this sort of digital elitist collectible thing. But it doesn’t solve any of my problems or seem to be relevant on the macro scale. A niche thing that doesn’t appeal to me. Like, Pokémon might make a billion dollars but it won’t make a macro-scale trillion dollars.
DeFi is mainly about trading and leveraging worthless tokens. In a world where there are much more real-world tokens involved (eg tokenized Apple stock or whatever), then maybe there is more of a use for that. But until then it’s mainly a circular Ponzi. And even then, that industry is limited.
So almost 15 years into this industry, there have been a handful of interesting experiments, but barely anything other than bitcoin and stablecoins interests me at scale.
Beyond that, it is just things that they can empower.
Nostr, for example, doesn’t need a blockchain. There is no reason to go to the expense to maintain a global state. It certainly is empowered from the fact that Bitcoin and Lightning exist (new good money allows for new good technologies), so it’s a tangential technology.
The vast majority of “crypto” projects either don’t solve a problem, or just solve a smaller niche interest.
