FreeBaGeL
Footballguy
Appreciate the thoughtful reply. The gaming use cases makes sense I guess, although they mostly seem like ways to entice people to dump fiat currency into the gaming companies' ecosystems and entice players to spend and play more so the gaming companies make more money. Back in the 80s I could send pictures to Activision of my Pitfall high scores and they'd send me patches. Maybe I could have sold the patches in a speculative, secondary market. But really it was just to keep me playing Pitfall and buying their next game so I could get more patches. This just seems like the evolution of that, but I'm not a gamer and finally got my 25-year old, VR goggle-wearing step son out of my garage last year, so I admittedly don't understand that world. (cue old man yelling at clouds meme)
Most of the examples that really make sense to me are really more about blockchain technologies. Money transfer, supply chain/inventory tracking, that kind of thing. But why do we need all these coins for that? From my admittedly limited understanding, BTC and ETH are so inefficient and slow that they're still essentially useless at processing transactions at scale. And yet many seem to think those are the two "blue chips" of the crypto world. As you said there are much faster blockchain projects in existence and in the works, but it seems so fragmented I'd be curious how any of them gain enough market share to be relevant, especially as so many around them are pure ****coin "projects" at best and scams at worst.
My gut tells me that in the end, governments will just issue their own stable coins that can be used to support most use cases, and all of these others will fade away. Doesn't mean some money can't be made speculating along the way, of course, which is the whole reason I've dabbled.
Even the slowest and most inefficient crypto currencies are orders of magnitude faster than electronic money transfers now. Right now, they take weeks. We just don't notice because companies have created a business out of fronting that money to give the illusion of transferring it quickly. When you send me money via Venmo, that money doesn't actually get transferred from you to me instantly. The bank behind Venmo just fronts me the money, trusting that eventually the money you sent them will get there, or they will come after you for it.
With crypto, those companies wouldn't really need to exist anymore (though they still could if you wanted it even faster). But where it all really breaks down in the current system is with larger transactions. Because Venmo is willing to front me $20 from you and if your $20 never makes it then hey, it's only 20 bucks. But if you want to transfer $100,000 to me then they're not going to do that, and we're going to have to wait the 2 weeks it takes to actually move that money.
I work in real estate and deal with 6+ figure transactions every day. Even most 5 figure transactions require waiting on the money to actually move. It is a NIGHTMARE. Everything takes forever. Banks constantly decline transfers, set arbitrary limits on when you can move money and how much, etc. The blockchain solves all of that. Even the slowest currencies.
The other thing to note is with most currencies switch to proof of stake, the transactions get faster the more people use it (and stake their currency). People get paid to stake their currency (instead of banks getting paid to hold the currency), which makes the network faster for everyone and better at quickly handling transactions that are publicly verified on the global ledger (instead of, again, a bank being required to privately verify them).
Regarding gaming, we're maybe a few years too late on the biggest application for gaming. That is, ownership of digital assets. Because I used to be able to buy a video game and, when I was done, trade it in to a store or give it to a friend, etc. That was the big sticking point for the move to digital games, people wanted to actually own them instead of just a non-transferable license. But eventually, the convenience of digital games was just too much to pass up, and people gave up and accepted "you buy this product, but you don't actually own it". NFTs could have solved that, but probably too late now as companies aren't going to give back that control now that the consumer has given it up.
The other big use case though is digital items compatible across games. Right now if you buy a skin for a game, and you stop playing that game or the game gets old and they take down the servers, that skin just fades away into nothingness. But what if you could take that skin into another game and use it there? Or what if you could take the currency you earned in one game and into another? Or what if you could sell those assets to someone else even if there wasn't a marketplace built for that game (you can sell World of Warcraft items on ebay, but not Madden items or thousands of other games).
Being able to create ownership of digital assets has been a problem that we've been trying to solve since the internet became popular. And now we have it, but everyone has just kind of forgotten, because they gave up a few years ago and just accepted "we don't ever get to own anything digital" as the answer.
What can that do for us? I've provided some major examples on previous pages of this thread. But I'll go back to my favorite clip here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgODUgHeT5Y
13 years after the internet was created, and even with the idea of digital media right in front of their face, everyone laughed at the idea of the internet having an impact on media consumption. We had radio and tape recorders, why do we need this stupid internet thing? Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, streaming TV, these people couldn't even DREAM of these things one day being the primary (and FAR better) way they consumed their media.
The best use cases for the blockchain haven't even been dreamt up yet.