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The History of Paper Money - Origins of Exchange - Extra History - #1
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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.The ~1 hour YouTube series The History of Paper Money by Extra Credit is a good, factual starting point presented in an entertaining fashion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nZkP2b-4vo
"Crypto" is a general set of fundamental primitives for decentralized infrastructure.(1) A decentralized, "trustless" ledger. There are a ton of use cases here -- akin to databases, but without having to trust a central authority to not go in and just tweak the rows. Good examples: Land registries, stock ownership (current status quo with entities such as DTCC are "interesting" in the loopholes), etc. Bitcoin made this datastructure popular, but it has become (effectively) a Digital Gold; I do not think it will "win" the day due to some key limitations around Proof of Work.
(2) Futures contracts on compute power. Ethereum is a good example. Each "smart contract" lives on the blockchain and is akin to a perpetual AWS Lamda-style program. You can spend ETH to publish or execute programs. By owning ETH, you have a futures contract on said computation.
(3) Futures contract on file storage. The most prominent examples are IPFS/Filecoin & AR Weave. People earn tokens by storing files & spend tokens to have someone host files. Owning tokens gives you the ability to store files in the future.
(4) Decentralized governance (DAOs). These are new ways for people to organize and control the direction of projects. It makes things like voting trivial & verifiable. See recent US elections for examples of how this is beneficial.
(5) Decentralized Finance (DeFi): Combining the above, you can do amazing things in finance without relying on centralized institutions. For example: DEXs (decentralized exchanges) are marvelous -- you can convert between virtually any pair of crypto currencies automatically without restriction.
(6) You can build incentivization structures to enable microtransactions. A good example is Helium -- a LoRa wireless network (900MHz, super-low datarate IoT) ecosystem that covers vast areas. You earn Helium by providing area coverage & transferring data. You spend Helium by using bandwidth. All of it is done without a big central authority (e.g. legacy telcos). Currently in the process of supporting cellular & wifi.
Using these primitives, you can build a host of valuable applications. E.g. rideshare is really just a giant decentralized auction on moving things from A->B -- doesn't matter if it's Uber, Lyft, taxis, autonomous cars, or random people with a vehicle -- you could implement the auction via smart contracts and have "perfect" balance of supply, demand & pricing.
I would liken the state of crypto today to the internet in 1995-1998 -- bubble & all. My suggestion: Try not to judge the www by your experiences with usenet. The "toys" of today could very well become the most valuable institutions on the planet in 20 years. And above all, remember that in the scope of humanity, money is not that old -- and fiat less the gold standard even less so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nZkP2b-4vo
Hmm. Reads a lot like the video series on "The History of Paper Money by Extra Credits": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nZkP2b-4vo