<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>tim333</author><text>You&amp;#x27;ve missed speculation and gambling. Not to say it&amp;#x27;s a great use case but it&amp;#x27;s the biggest. Most people buy them because the number goes up, not to buy drugs etc. Which is perhaps a bad idea but not actually illegal.</text><parent_chain><item><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></item><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><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>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>xwolfi</author><text>I dislike crypto too, but let&amp;#x27;s give them the benefit of the doubt: it&amp;#x27;s also presented&amp;#x2F;sold as a sort of easy stock, pure of anything other than an inflation prevention.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s as electronic as a stock, as purely abstract as a piece of gold, as resistant to inflation (theoretically) as anything having an intrinsic value that won&amp;#x27;t depend on currency.&lt;p&gt;Ofc, criminal transactions are also supposed to be eased but you know what, I think a bank made entirely to dodge annoying regulators will have a bit more success than an amateurish exchange: they&amp;#x27;ll give all your info, and therefore all your public transactions at the first little threat, while a big bank like Credit Suisse, would try to leverage lobbying power at first.</text><parent_chain><item><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></item><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><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>