Much of HN is stuck in 2017 Blockchain era. Most haven't looked it serious since that crash. Many still think of Blockchain and can only think of BTC, LTC, Doge and ETH. DeFi is so new that it even caught HN off guard.

Much of HN is also middle of the curve and don't care/know about finance. Finance, financial engineering and P2P is a different beast compared to deploying bloated Docker containers running React frontends. It's a shame because there are a lot of smart people here that could help working on sustainable economics for fun and profit.

This seems to be one of the problems. The other is just a weird contrarianism -- many on HN want open source software and systems, but in no way do they want an open economy or money system.

Curve is just leverage for speculation: deposit token A, withdraw token B, earn the appreciation on both token A and B. Speculation is still the only use case.

DeFi provides absolutely nothing novel. Nobody said it wasn’t used. They asked for a non speculative, “real” use case.

By that standard, majority of Wall Street has no use case either, since much of the money is made entirely on speculation. Is betting on whether oil price will go up or down really that much of a use case?

Unless you count making money as not enough of a use case.

I give up though. HN will willfully ignore crypto and miss out not only on life changing money, but one of the few places in tech that is still fun and exciting and hasn’t been “corporatized”.

> By that standard, majority of Wall Street has no use case either, since much of the money is made entirely on speculation. Is betting on whether oil price will go up or down really that much of a use case?

Absolutely. Price is the single encapsulation of all information in a market. But this is only the case because oil is a scarce resource, which needs allocating, and efforts are made to ensure that markets are fair. That is not true for crypto.

However, your presumption about “mostly speculation” also isn’t true and just reeks of someone who has no finance experience. I’ve spent my career as a hedge fund trader, focused in commods. Oil markets exist principally for bonafide hedgers to exchange risk. I cannot tell you how important hedging is to global market efficiencies.

> Unless you count making money as not enough of a use case.

So then you're agreeing that the only real use case for crypto is speculation, and not something normal people should care about.

> By that standard, majority of Wall Street has no use case either, since much of the money is made entirely on speculation.

I think most educated people would agree that Wall St is a drain on society the same as targeted ads. The world is better without it. Are ads also useful because of how much money they make?

> HN will willfully ignore crypto and miss out not only on life changing money, but one of the few places in tech that is still fun and exciting and hasn’t been “corporatized”.

I really hope you're not so naïve that you don't realize crypto markets are being manipulated by big banks.

Right now, if I want to invest in US stocks, I have to go through a handful of local brokers. They want a minimum of 10k inr in the trading account. I have to clear kyc and get my account approved. Once approved, they can shut down the account anytime for any reason.

And all of these are recent developments - until a couple of years ago, it wasn’t even possible to invest in US stocks.

Alternatively, I can buy tokenized versions of popular stocks. This will be an erc-20 token that I will have full custody of at all times. I do not have to get “approved” or have a minimum amount in my account. I can be an investor in, say, AAPL with any amount of money from any part of the world. Unlike my own local stock markets that are filled with insider trading and subpar companies, I get to invest in and gain wealth from a more competitive market - without ever needing anyone’s permission.

Do you consider financial inclusivity a bad thing? Would you say that having control over your own money and removing gatekeepers is good?

I know plenty of people in India who trade US stocks and they don't have to put up that much in assets. You've made so many other factually incorrect statements I don't know if you're lying or ignorant but I know for a fact you're wrong.