My question is, which real-world problem is actually solved by crypto? All I know is transferring money over the border gets much easier than pre-bitcoin era.
Digital currencies don't enforce any policy other than avoiding double-spending. (Set aside smart contracts for now.)
Other online payment methods (Visa, PayPal, Stripe, your bank's ACH, etc.) do. These policies start by disallowing illegal transactions (crime). Then they disallow unfair transactions (buyer claims not to like the quality of the item, etc.). Then they disallow immoral transactions (gambling, pornography, etc.). Then they disallow anything... unseemly? (2022 Freedom Convoy protests, Stripe briefly banning certain legal, non-adult LGBTQ+ transactions in 2025, etc.).
Is it a problem that your currency-transfer system enforces policy? Many people don't care, but to some, yes, it is a problem. They don't want PayPal telling them what they can and can't do with their hard-earned money, because that's the job of their government, their religion, and their conscience. They want their online cash to behave like offline cash.
If you were designing a system architecture for value transfer, would your low-level primitives throw policy exceptions, or would you delegate that responsibility higher in the system?
The only real world problem is probably solved by low chain fees where I can hold usdc or gold coins and then pay or recieve payments without too much hassle
But that again, is such a low niche and something that includes exchanges fees too
Recently I wanted to get a domain name on black friday so I went to namecheap and paid them 10 $ in crypto, I had to pay 80 cents to an exchange to convert my usdc polygon to btc to then + some btc fees because namecheap just accepted that
I am a teenager so technically buying this domain pseudo-anonymously (yes I know I can do things with monero too so thus anonymously too) is the only real use case
I think stablecoins have potential to atleast remove this stripe/paypal/visa/mastercard etc.'s monopoly and allow cheap payments
Honestly I wish UPI from India or Pix from brazil were implemented at a global scale, they are so good.
My thoughts are nuanced but since I am a teen and yes I have a bank account but it cant be operated fully until I turn 18 by me, its all just complicated and crypto kinda solves some aspect of it
But this whole field is niche too and most people who build on these primitives basically build gambling as the author said
> "buying this domain pseudo-anonymously (yes I know I can do things with monero too so thus anonymously too) is the only real use case"
The domain registrar is required to have valid contact information for you. Sure, you could lie to them, but then you risk having your account terminated.
So I'm not sure this is a real use case for crypto.
In practice is sorta allows reasonably quick bank transfers.
Something that outside of the US is solved by SWIFT, or the state equivalent of instant bank transfer. Most of the rest of the world has instant, or near instant bank transfers. The US doesn't, it has venmo or similar.
There is a lot of money "wasted" on intermediaries due to the closed nature of the global financial system e.g. 3-5% fees for updating a row in a database.
Besides those it allows other novel products that traditionally required trusted entities:
- p2p lending
- reputation systems
- p2p insurance
Also we have things like Open Banking i.e. sending money instantly for free which banks started implementing in 2015, one year after Ethereum mainnet went live which suddenly allowed people to send fiat money instantly and (almost) free. Banks and fintech companies having competition is a good thing for consumers.
That's the main legal use-case afaik. If you like travelling to a country that has no banking connection to your country, it might be more convenient to open a bank account or make friends in the target country and move money there via Bitcoin marketplaces. I've seen that plenty of times.
How does that work? You transfer the money in BTC, you exchange that into real money, you open a new bank account, you deposit that money, the bank's anti-money-laundering detection sees a large deposit to a newly open account and triggers an alert, the bank locks you out of the account and asks you for a proof of income/tax payment, you have no explanation of where that money came from legally, they freeze your account and report you to their local revenue services, you're SOL.
I only refer to bitcoin (and lightning as Layer2), not crypto. Real-world problems will become more relevant if you live in a 2nd or 3rd world country:
- private (as in privacy) store of value without necesity to build a vault (or trust a 3rd party for storing)
- Transfer of money by immigrants "back home". Good luck sending money to Cuba or Venezuela right now
- Micropayments / Webpayments via Lightning (TradFi failed on this) - you can literally send 10cent right now to someone at the other end of the world - or pay for a news article.
- Decentralized / Ad-free social media like Nostr. Pay with micropayments for everything (hosting, forwarding, micro-donation for content). If you look at how damaging the ad-based social media economy is fighting for engagement and attention, it is obvious society is better of without Instagram/Facebook/Youtube/Tiktok trying to get you to watch more, to get more ad revenue
- Insurance against dictatorships taking over free democracies. If monetary policy is not done my the government, they can't use it to control the people. In Bitcoin, the people are deciding and voting on monetary policy independent of the government (miners, node runners/validators, acceptance of transfers etc.)
- Insurance about fiat devaluation (governments printing money)
Write permission is needed to let AI yank-put frankenstein-ed codes for "vibe coding".
But I think it needs to be written in sandbox first, then it should acquire user interaction asking agreement before writes whatever on physical device.
I can't believe people let AI model do it without any buffer zone. At least write permission should be limited to current workspace.
I think this is especially problematic for Windows, where a simple and effective lightweight sandboxing solution is absent AFAIK. Docker-based sandboxing is possible but very cumbersome and alien even to Windows-based developers.
The whole point of the container is trust. You can't delegate that unfortunately, ultimately, you need to be in control which is why the current crop of AI is so limited
That's true Qualcomm in general, but is fortunately outdated for the Snapdragon Elite X (and only the X). Qualcomm has been upstreaming patches to Linus' tree[1] - but only for the Elite X - the Elite P processors get the classic Qualcomm treatment.
You're mangling Qualcomm's branding to the point that it's impossible to be sure what you're trying to say. Qualcomm's current laptop SoCs are called "Snapdragon X Elite" or "Snapdragon X Plus" or "Snapdragon X", all derived from various bins of two SoC designs, and all pretty much in the same boat for driver support purposes. "Snapdragon X2 Elite" and lesser siblings are due in the first half of next year, so a respectable degree of Linux support would mean having driver support for those chips in an upstream kernel release now so that there might be a mainstream distro supporting the hardware at some point in the quarter after the hardware ships.
My apologies to you and the entire Qualcomm marketing team for my brand-guideline violations - I was going off the top of my head. What I meant in my inscrutable comment was: "Elite X" => "X Elite", "Elite P" => "X Plus", I really should not have mangled the products using such an elegant and intuitive naming convention.
Ok, so having clarified the naming, it still looks like you're wrong about which chips are getting driver support upstreamed, because the Snapdragon X Plus parts are (with maybe one exception, IIRC) literally the same chip as the Snapdragon X Elite parts. Do you really believe that the upstream Linux kernel would accept patches that are specifically crafted to only work on certain bins of the chip, or to fail to enable a peripheral if not enough of the CPU cores are enabled?
Don't take my word for it - go to the Ubuntu Concept Snapdragon thread[1] and search for "plus" or "x1p".
> Do you really believe that the upstream Linux kernel would accept patches that are specifically crafted to only work on certain bins of the chip, or to fail to enable a peripheral if not enough of the CPU cores are enabled?
It takes more than a kernel patch to boot a laptop. Qualcomm has been neglecting to release the dtbs for Plus laptops. If you want good peripheral support, don't buy a "plus" variant. Getting back to your question, the answer is "Yes, Linux has always accepted patches that only work on some configurations" with no requirement to support all h/w configuration variants. Infact, some configurations are so obscure only the submitter can test - the maintainer/subsystem chief/Linus may not even know what the potential variants are.
I don't think your link contains the evidence you think it does. I'm not seeing anything that looks like Qualcomm contributing device trees on behalf of system OEMs, for any of the Snapdragon X products, so I don't see how you can claim that they're being selective. It looks like the device trees are mostly being reverse-engineered by the community, adding new system support derived from device trees for systems that already have some support.
Do you have any clear instances of Qualcomm contributing something that's specific to Snapdragon X Elite parts and does not work for Snapdragon X Plus bins of the same silicon?
Or even for the more general issue: have you ever seen a Linux driver include arbitrary restrictions that make it refuse to work on identical hardware just because the marketing name for that bin of the same silicon was different?
> Do you have any clear instances of Qualcomm contributing something that's specific to Snapdragon X Elite parts and does not work for Snapdragon X Plus bins of the same silicon?
You're getting caught up by inconsistencies in an argument you brought up. Which suggests the argument itself is flawed.
My unchanged position is Snapdragon X Elite laptops have better Linux support than the Plus variants. You thought I was wrong on that count - but I wasn't (see the thread).
Qualcomm only ever pledged to support Elite processors, and perhaps not coincidentally all of the Plus laptops require reversing- this is enough for me to draw conclusions. If you need the technical root cause, feel free to delve into why the originally supported models with devicetres had Elite chips.
> Qualcomm only ever pledged to support Elite processors
Link, please.
> and perhaps not coincidentally all of the Plus laptops require reversing
You're still acting as though Qualcomm has made meaningful contributions to Linux support for Snapdragon X Elite in a way that has not also helped Snapdragon X Plus support. But you haven't specifically pointed to any Qualcomm contributions of any nature, let alone ones that were as narrow as you claim. All you've done is point to weak evidence that machines with Snapdragon X Elite bins reached a reasonable threshold of "supported" earlier than models with lesser parts, while ignoring that your evidence also points to the lower-tier processors coming to market later.
Can you point to any laptop device tree that was contributed by Qualcomm, and not merely reverse-engineered from the device tree for the reference design that was not offered for sale to consumers? Can you point to any driver contributed by Qualcomm that works for Snapdragon X Elite SoCs but requires further modification to work for Snapdragon X Plus SoCs?
You made a claim about a pattern in Qualcomm's public behavior, and have identified zero instances of that pattern.
Try the first Qualcomm link I sent upthread. I have trouble accepting you're arguing in good faith because you could have checked this for yourself. All the articles I can find pivlished by, or quoting Qualcomm concerning Snapdragon X and Linux consistently refer to the Elite version: I challenge you to find a single counterexample that mentions Plus.
You call my evidence weak, and yet you have provided no evidence to support your evolving argument thus far, so I hereby invoke Hitchen's razor, and will not engage with you beyond this comment. I refuse to spend any more of my time and energy trawling a 1200+ page Discord thread, Gthub, or the kernel mailing list searching for empirical evidence to counter your 10-second thought experiments, when you can't be bothered to open links I've already shared unprompted.
Also it seems like Wall Street greedy bankers might have an other subprime crisis on their hands at same time... I wonder which one will be saved again...
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