I'm not dissing it, fine, it's a real business, and maybe honest too. And indeed crypto is easier to send internationally, though overall presents more friction to the average user with access to high quality banking as an alternative.

I like crypto conceptually, but I'd love to finally see a use case that isn't just a regulatory workaround or recursive (something that shuffles other crypto around without an world-facing application).

Not to mention: banks are fiercely regulated FOR A VERY GOOD REASON. And all these stablecoin issuers are effectively unregulated banks. It's all fine if they are all honest, prudent, and don't take excess risks, and no one pulls their money. If either of those goes away, it's going to be a disaster.

They're not. In the US stablecoins are regulated by the Genius Act and in the EU by MiCA. That's why interest in stablecoins is growing. The Genius Act mandates 1:1 backing of coins to treasuries or cash so the stablecoin custodians make money from treasuries and enjoy a risk free yield.

> I like crypto conceptually, but I'd love to finally see a use case that isn't just a regulatory workaround or recursive (something that shuffles other crypto around without an world-facing application).

I mean there's plenty but it's only interesting if you like finance. I've come to the conclusion that HN may have liked finance when it was populated by more startup folks but now that it's another tech forum, the average reader here doesn't really care for finance.

Prediction Markets are a big cryptocurrency usecase. There's also novel financial instruments like perpetual futures (patio11 is gonna write a Bits about Money post about them if you're curious.) From the sovereign currency perspective of Bitcoin, to the privacy of ZCash and Monero, to the subdivisibility of assets on programmable chains like ETH, the novelty is in the finance. If you're not into fintech then yeah you'll find the usecases all boring.

If you're curious about the tech there is a lot of interesting stuff around iterated consensus though.

> I mean there's plenty but it's only interesting if you like finance.

As it happens I do like finance. And all the use cases I know of are basically regulatory arbitrage.

There's nothing about prediction markets that makes them benefit from crypto. It's betting. Sports betting exists without crypto just fine. But the intersection of betting, real world events and US dollars is murky waters. So instead they work on crypto.

Monero is perhaps the one novel case, of untraceable payments. But is that the best crypto can do?

I agree the mechanisms are novel, it's just a shame to me that they didnt create a novel use case too. But I'd love to hear more tangible cases too.

Great, more shadow banking entities dealing in a money-like substance without any FDIC protection—because that turned out so well the last time.