Anyone who has access to the internet can use the above (and it's just few examples, more on https://ethereum.org/) without any arbitrary restrictions set by any governments.
How can you look at these things and not be in awe?
And how on earth can somebody be so confident about something yet know so little about it?
The websites you all listed are just vehicles for further speculation and gambling.
Gaining interest on cryptocurrencies by providing liquidity so other people can speculate on cryptocurrencies, prediction markets (literally gambling on cryptocurrencies), NFTs (speculating on infungible cryptocurrency tokens), and some virtual game where you can further speculate on NFTs with a touch of gamification.
Nothing seems to tie into any real world usefulness, everything ties back into itself where the core is always 'will the value of my internet coins go up'.
The only single useful thing cryptocurrencies can do is you can buy drugs from the darkweb, semi-anonymously, or maybe completely if you use something like Monero.
You could borrow a stablecoin like USDC with collateral on a platform like AAVE, trade the USDC for dollars or another currency that is accepted, and use it to buy a house, car, etc, without anyone's approval or a bank being involved.
I'm curious because I don't know how this works exactly, how much collateral do you have to put up to borrow something on a decentralized exchange? If it's less than 100%, how is it enforced that I ever return the money, and if it's more, why would I borrow if I already have the money I need? Asking in good faith.
Also if you plan to buy a house, a bank can give you a mortgage over let's say 25 years where information about your identity, income and credit history is used as a risk assessment, and the loan is backed by the whole existing legal system where your home can be repossessed if you fall behind on payments. You can get a LTV ratio of even 95% in some cases.
How would this work in a decentralized way ever? On the other hand, if you already have, let's say 500k in the bank to buy the house outright, why would you involve cryptocurrency in the transaction. The counterparty is going to probably want to receive their money dollars in a bank somewhere, are you sure that a bank is not going to ask any questions when you do your magic conversions to dollars from crypto and try to send someone 500k?
This doesn't integrate into the real world well unless the other person selling wants to receive crypto already and is ready to take upon all the risks themselves that transferring, accepting and holding cryptocurrency entails. At that point you don't need to do the conversion magic anyway.
It's all over-collateralized loans. So if I want $50k cash to buy a car, I can deposit $100k of ETH to borrow $50k USDC. As ETH price changes, your loan has a "health" score and if it gets below a certain threshold you can get liquidated if you don't start repaying the loan.
The reason for involving crypto in this scenario is so you don't have to sell your crypto assets. This will be more useful going forward as platforms allow users to use NFTs as collateral for example.
What would be the purpose of this with USDC though? Since you have to put in more than the loan amount as collateral, aren't you just paying to access your own money? For non-stablecoins that you don't want to sell, it makes more sense, although it seems risky.
Because the original commenter is not arguing in good faith. There are countless examples of crypto and bitcoin helping civilians escape tyrannical states, conveniently non were mentioned.
Most of these things are either likely to be fads (NFTs) or just ways to fuel the speculation and ponzi schemes (compound and uniswap.) Theoretically lending could be used for doing things in the real world I guess, but it seems like once the money is in crypto, it just sloshes around creating more crypto. The betting market is an interesting one, I hadn't seen that. IMO DAOs and DeFi are interesting, but I haven't seen it have a big effect outside of crypto yet.
...
https://compound.finance/
https://pooltogether.com/
https://polymarket.com/
https://app.uniswap.org/
https://rarible.com/
https://axieinfinity.com/
...
Anyone who has access to the internet can use the above (and it's just few examples, more on https://ethereum.org/) without any arbitrary restrictions set by any governments.
How can you look at these things and not be in awe?
And how on earth can somebody be so confident about something yet know so little about it?