Crypto.com already has an NFT market. I bet it’s really soft.
Since people keep being like “what can crypto even be good for” I thought I’d post about this. Want to emphasise right up front that this is still trying to get to proof of concept stage, like this is not an actual functioning project yet, but the idea is illustrative.
The idea is this: common ways crops are ruined in Kenya are by drought or flood. What if farmers in Kenya paid an amount of money into an insurance pool, then received payouts if rainfall data showed that there had been a drought or flood on their property?
Blockchains aren’t natively capable of connecting with reliable real-world data; this is known as the oracle problem. There are startups like Chainlink who aim to solve this problem. This will enable people to bet on, or hedge against, events in the real world.
Here are the problems with trying to set up an insurance scheme like this in Africa currently:
- Corruption
- Inability to transcend national borders
- Lack of payments infrastructure
- Lack of trust
- Both economical and logistical administrative difficulty
- Usually profit motive in running a project like this, so money skimmed off the top
If you are a crypto believer, here’s what you think crypto promises here:
- Transcending national boundaries; farmers in similar situations can collaborate, rather than being artificially constrained. Transnational payments structure.
- No corruption, total public transparency in how the money is gathered and distributed, 100% predictability in what you will receive under what circumstances, no trust issues
- No administrative costs other than blockchain fees; administration via smart contract.
- Because cheap setup cost, no profit motive required, projects like this could be deployed by charitable organizations for the cost of writing the code and deploying the smart contract
Now there are currently a lot of difficulties standing in the way of this becoming a thing, and in reality the first applications of crypto will be (and are) in finance, where this ability to hedge against and bet on stuff transparently, with no intermediaries, is very useful. I’m very far from claiming that crypto is going to be an instrument to list poor farmers out of poverty, but I think the project is an interesting illustration.
I think this should at least get your brain humming about what is possible. There are plenty of people here who have thought about this stuff and are still skeptical (goofyballer for one; I’m agnostic myself). But if you look at the new capability to have transnational, totally transparent, corruption-free, trustable financial cooperation between arbitrary individuals and your ceiling on what is possible is “oh, it’s like Western Union, I can send people money” then as I said earlier in the thread, this is like Boomers looking at the internet in 1994 and being like “oh it’s a new way to send me my newspaper”. There are very, very likely going to be new forms of economic activity emerging from this. Maybe it’s just going to be derivatives trading and a ramping-up of the financialization of the economy and it’s going to be horrible, but it’s going to be something.
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My friends know what NFTs are, they just kinda irrationally hate them. I just don’t understand the dissonance between wanting to get in on the doge/shiba shitcoin pumps but then when NFTs come up they’ll be like nahhh, those are so dumb. Like how is owning dogecoin fine and NFTs are a hell no?! NFTs need better publicity!
Do they know that there are NFTs that print shitcoins?
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lol kinda. I’ve tried to explain it to them, but it doesn’t gain any traction because it never really gets past the ‘NFTs are so dumb’ mindset.
Because you’re overwhelmingly likely to have a better opportunity to sell your way out of Doge than NFT’s if the bear case for both occur.
Doesn’t the price of ether gas makes micro-insurance impossible?
btc transactions cost pennies.
but btc doesnt have smart contracts?
I mean you’re kinda right, but I doubt my friends know that because they know hardly anything about NFTs, they just know that they don’t like them as a concept, and it’s tough getting anywhere past that initial viewpoint.
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Yes. This is one of the practical difficulties I mentioned. Other chains have much lower transaction costs. It’s still very unclear which blockchains are going to win out in the long run, probably there are going to be a number of them with different specializations.
Edit: The way it’s working at the moment - and they do actually have it working, on small scale and with caveats, read the article - it’s using an EVM Layer 2 chain called Gnosis. Layer 2 is a complicated subject and I have no idea how Gnosis in particular works.
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Interesting talk about NFTs. Basically says that you will soon have drop and drag services for nft launches.
I actually looked into getting it on a sweater.
If you want it on a sweater you can buy my NFT for .25eth.
lol pwned
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Are you goofys alt account?
Some crypto dudes seems to be trying to help fund the Canada protests.
The Bitcoin campaign, which has received more than 5,000 mostly small-dollar donations, has been supported by a handful of large infusions from cryptocurrency boosters. The two biggest, with a combined value of more than $300,000 at the time they were made, were donated anonymously.
A series of others valued at about $42,000 each appear to be associated with an online challenge by a former software engineer who goes by the pseudonym LaserHodl and asked other Bitcoin fans to join him in supporting the trucker convoy. Jesse Powell, founder of the crypto exchange Kraken, tweeted his agreement, and a donation attributed to him appears in the data.
Benjamin Dichter, one of the convoy organizers, said at a news conference last week that after the cryptocurrency crowdfunding campaign began, he received offers of help from “major players” in the crypto markets.
Are there people out there working on trying to uncover the identities of the big anonymous donors by tracing wallet activity?
This thread continues to be such a trip with most of the arguments straight out of 2017 at best, but it’s basically this. Crypto is the only ponzi in the history of the world where those who don’t own the ponzi demand to be convinced to buy into it, and those who own the ponzi are like ughh this is kinda annoying but ok we can try.
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Your post is stupid in the way that someone trying to dunk on crypto while flailing to maintain a semblance of moral high ground is laughably stupid. It’s 100% true that people in Africa do already use and are capable of using crypto as much as anywhere else in the world.