lynx234

It helps that the author already had 70k followers to get momentum on a post. The average user wouldn't have gone viral with those same tweets.

I agree with what another commenter said about getting some money and trying it out for yourself.

I'd add on though to try out some DeFi protocols as well. Using things like DEXs, lending protocols, and yield farms. Experience is the best way to learn for sure.

USDT is printed out of thin air (which is why I didn't mention it). USDC is a bit better and more transparent. DAI is decentralized and backed by collateral.

There's been a lot of talks of regulating stablecoins to ensure backing, which I don't think is a terrible idea.

Yea, it's a lot of foreign concepts. Bit of a learning curve to it. Whether or not the incentives are great enough so that the public goes past the learning curve is going to be interesting to see.

The tech is there but mainstream adoption and understanding is still coming along. It's incredibly easy and cheap to send USDC or DAI to OnlyFans if they accept tokens on a sidechain (like Polygon or Fantom).

You don't have to sign up for an account or provide any personal info, just use your wallet to send certain tokens to an address, then you can use that wallet as a sign-in.

OnlyFans can then use Coinbase or an off-ramp to go from crypto to fiat.

It's a more seamless user experience and solves the payment processing issue.

In my opinion it's a matter of educating the masses to a very different method of paying for services and using services (both on the business and consumer side).

Yea, but you can break the paper trail behind the funding coins if you want to. Would use something like Tornado or Monero.

"Eventually you end up with the worst of both: a centralised system wrapping a phony pretense of blockchain. All of the energy waste, and none of the decentralisation"

The author presents themselves as familiar with blockchain applications, but I believe the statement above has two incorrect assumptions.

For one, if a developer aims to reduce energy use, they can deploy on a PoS chain.

Also, not every decentralized application has a "phony pretense of decentralisation". Sure there are some applications like that, but decentralized exchanges for instance, could not work anywhere else other than on a blockchain.

> One part I’m unclear on: if someone outbids him, do only they get the token and pg pays nothing, or do both pay and are the contributions etched into the NFT?

No, only the person who wins the bid gets the token.

I typically defend the tech behind NFTs but this just seems like it's riding the hype of NFTs more than anything.

this is where decentralized exchanges like Uniswap come into play, no KYC, no account

For people holding crypto assets which they don't plan to sell, it's a valid way to borrow other assets for use. Potentially for other investments. Definitely not just for criminals.

And overall, it's a demonstration of a financial product which can only be built in the space of decentralized finance. I do not know of another tool which allows anyone around the world to borrow significant amounts of money anonymously and without an account. Whether it's a net good for the world I don't know, but I do believe it's a powerful technology and space.

> Cryptocurrency solves absolutely none of the existing legal reasons that banks can't issue large loans in minutes or seconds to existing (or new, well collateralized) clients.

Yes, this is definitely correct in that crypto does nothing to solve the legal requirements of the banks and does not help the banks.

But it's worth mentioning that this sort of fully collateralized and anonymous borrowing does not (and would not) happen through banks, but through platforms like AAVE and Compound. It's a financial tool separate from banks. And these tools cannot be shutdown, as long as ethereum exists, these tools exist.

You do realize that's a characteristic which gives decentralized finance an advantage over traditional financial institutions, right?