It's not fair to say that cryptocurrency has had "zero benefits" as it's clearly being used more and more for legitimate purposes such as zero fee international money transfers and providing a more cost-effective option for merchants compared to credit cards. It is important to consider the potential benefits and drawbacks of any technology or innovation before making blanket statements about its overall impact.
I think it's an interesting model, one of the issues I see is that unpopular users who are almost free to message would seem "cheap" which could make them even less attractive.
> Altogether cryptocurrency is such a terrifyingly irresponsible ecosystem, I'm surprised anyone wants to be involved in it.
Here are some reasons why people might be interested in the cryptocurrencies ecosystem:
- Paying 3% per credit card transactions isn't efficient
- Decentralized Finance matters. The DeFi movement is actually really interesting. You should look into decentralized lending protocols with stablecoins.
- Decentralized Governance is exciting and can facilitate new experiments like Quadratic voting
I think it's very clear that Oculus engineering efforts are dedicated to standalone devices like Quest rather than PC VR headsets. Which makes sense if you want to get 1 billion people using VR.
What do you mean by ETH collapsing? You mean going to 0? ETH has lost more than 90% of its value in 2018 but DAI remained at $1 which seems pretty stable
So it seems that our main disagreement is about the cost of the implementation of such system.
While I agree that the current state of Blockchain and Ethereum doesn't allow this I also believe that a part of the scaling issue will soon be solve with Plasma, you can learn more about it here (https://plasma.io/plasma.pdf). In this case the transaction fees and processing time are drastically reduced and Plasma could support (in theory) 1,000,000 transactions / seconds. The sender will pay for the tx fees (probably around half a cent) and the payment will be delivered almost instantly.
So "the single reason why it would be better than current system", since you asked for it is really because transactions operated on an efficient Blockchain would be less expensive than credit-card payments.
1. To accept DAI you simply need a phone and a dedicated app that would generate the payment QR code. No new device needed. (67% of payments in convenience stores in China are being made with QR codes: https://technode.com/2018/03/16/qr-codes-nfc-china/)
2. There is definitely a chicken and the egg problem as there wouldn't be as many people ready to pay with DAI at first but it has never stopped good projects to take off. In my opinion the main issue (once the tech is ready with Plasma running on the main net) is to get merchants to accept this new payment method which should possible since it's literally free to try.
3. Paying with Bitcoin is completely different since most of the people who own some Bitcoins don't want to spend it as it's mostly used as store of value/speculative asset.
This seems to be the equivalent of saying "I don't want to use the internet because it's too slow" in 2001. There are numerous organizations working on ways to reduce crypto processing fees, one of the most advanced in certainly Plasma: https://plasma.io/
You should look into projects like Golem (https://golem.network/home/), it allows people to use the blockchain to perform complex calculations such as 3d rendering or training machine learning models.
This is a great use case for the blockchain but you may have missed it if you only read Techcrunch articles about CryptoKitties.
dappradar offers a very limited view of the activity on the Ethereum Blockchain. You should look into projects like Golem, it shows a great use case for the Blockchain and definitely justify an ICO.
- The Brave browser is being used by millions of users every months, it's powered by the BAT Token (used to pay web publishers instead of showing ads).
- The Golem token is being used to render 3d models on the Blockchain (instead of using your computer), tens of thousands of tasks have been performed by the system since it launched a few weeks ago.