<story><title>Why I have zero faith in crypto venture capitalists</title><url>https://bennettftomlin.com/2021/06/12/why-i-have-zero-faith-in-crypto-venture-capitalists/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>steveBK123</author><text>I find crypto super interesting and have dipped my toes in with some small real money just to force myself to try out different products.&lt;p&gt;That said, so far, almost 10 years in, there really are not a lot of real world use cases.  Sure there are glorified POCs of things that could potentially lead in the direction of real world use cases.&lt;p&gt;But most of these products&amp;#x2F;tokens are just extremely meta.  Tokens you get paid&amp;#x2F;pay for when you trade&amp;#x2F;borrow&amp;#x2F;lend&amp;#x2F;invest&amp;#x2F;stake your other tokens.  Derivative tokens which allow you to get exposure to underlying tokenX on chainY.&lt;p&gt;The transactions are slow, or fast.. cheap or expensive, good luck understanding which in advance.&lt;p&gt;It doesn&amp;#x27;t feel like we are any closer to normal people using it for normal real world transactions&amp;#x2F;finance.&lt;p&gt;Right now it just feels like pump&amp;amp;dump&amp;#x2F;frontrunning&amp;#x2F;private placement games on each new token before it hits mainstream, completely nothing to do with what the alleged business behind that token is supposed to be doing or its prospects of success.  It&amp;#x27;s just a game of getting hold of difficult to acquire tokens before they hit the more normie venues like Binance, Coinbase, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>treis</author><text>&amp;gt; there really are not a lot of real world use cases.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s effectively just one.  To make illegal transactions.  That&amp;#x27;s a long list of things: drugs, hiding wealth, evading currency controls, extortion, and so on.  Otherwise, existing currency and transfer mechanisms are more or less available and convenient.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why I have zero faith in crypto venture capitalists</title><url>https://bennettftomlin.com/2021/06/12/why-i-have-zero-faith-in-crypto-venture-capitalists/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>steveBK123</author><text>I find crypto super interesting and have dipped my toes in with some small real money just to force myself to try out different products.&lt;p&gt;That said, so far, almost 10 years in, there really are not a lot of real world use cases.  Sure there are glorified POCs of things that could potentially lead in the direction of real world use cases.&lt;p&gt;But most of these products&amp;#x2F;tokens are just extremely meta.  Tokens you get paid&amp;#x2F;pay for when you trade&amp;#x2F;borrow&amp;#x2F;lend&amp;#x2F;invest&amp;#x2F;stake your other tokens.  Derivative tokens which allow you to get exposure to underlying tokenX on chainY.&lt;p&gt;The transactions are slow, or fast.. cheap or expensive, good luck understanding which in advance.&lt;p&gt;It doesn&amp;#x27;t feel like we are any closer to normal people using it for normal real world transactions&amp;#x2F;finance.&lt;p&gt;Right now it just feels like pump&amp;amp;dump&amp;#x2F;frontrunning&amp;#x2F;private placement games on each new token before it hits mainstream, completely nothing to do with what the alleged business behind that token is supposed to be doing or its prospects of success.  It&amp;#x27;s just a game of getting hold of difficult to acquire tokens before they hit the more normie venues like Binance, Coinbase, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>borrowcheckfml</author><text>I think of it like this. Various tokens give you certain types of exposures with different risk profiles. Yields are so high because of the risk.&lt;p&gt;This really isn&amp;#x27;t so different from the centralized financial system where we have built complex structures (exotic derivatives, structured products, etc) to give you certain types of exposures. The difference is that DeFi is globally accessible and permissionless.&lt;p&gt;Even if DeFi never moves beyond these &amp;quot;financial speculation&amp;quot; use cases, if it replaces what&amp;#x27;s currently centralized in government-regulated financial markets, that&amp;#x27;s a multi-trillion dollar opportunity.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m doubtful we&amp;#x27;ll see any retail use cases or mass option beyond speculation soon, just like your average retail user does not buy exotic derivatives. That doesn&amp;#x27;t mean it&amp;#x27;s not useful.</text></comment>