The End of My Crypto Explorations
Well looks like my timing is off.<p>Despite never touching crypto  up until now, I feel it finally has a solid use case.<p>ETH’s merge along with the existence of L2 networks means it can put western Union out of business for international same party (sending money to yourself) money transfers, The KYC on both sides not withstanding.<p>Hell even NFTs —- the clearest feverdream tinted scam —- had a use case after all: tokens for securitizing and allowing speculation in membership networks (see Gary V coin).<p>Sure someone could have just made a much less wasteful self-hostable&#x2F;SaaS secret club membership app but NFTs seem to have found exactly one use case as a membership mechanism du jour which enables speculation (importantly, giving people a way to profit from their early “investment” in one creator or another).<p>At the risk of stoking the ire of HN, does anyone still think crypto does not have a use case?<p>There are a lot of things it is not and has not turned out to be, but IMO the biggest issue was needlessly destroying the earth and that seems to be all but solved now.<p>Of course, FedNOW may prove to  make crypto for money transfers an even worse option relatively but… I think we may be at the start of an actual crypto boom (where there is actually Utility underpinning ETH’s value)<p>Another thing I find quite exciting is the idea of trading shares via a blockchain.<p>While obviously becoming a financial exchange is a key choke point for innovation because of the requirements, I can imagine a shadow network based on settlements of contract negotiated with blockchain with small trusted networks of investors.<p>All you need is to request the stock certificates and you can actually sign them over (let’s consider this an unorthodox “settlement”). Does this mean that we have a substrate for person to person hawala systems (which are normally outlawed by the government?)