None of the smart contracts have done anything materially useful without huge risk of scams, rug pulls, or enabling criminal activity (e.g. mixers for money laundering.) After a decade, there are no examples of widely used smart contracts or even long-running projects that haven't been fueled by boom and bust speculation cycles (e.g. NFTs.)
Every time there is a "code is law" gone wrong with large $ at stake, people immediately fall back to real life police. Because "code is law" is either a bad idea or immediately has to compromise to meet real human uses (for example, people forget their passwords all the time and not supporting password resets—which right now requires a centralized key store—is a non-starter.)
There is both a ton of money in crypto and it has completely failed to reach its promised potential.
The largest uses in the next half decade will continue to be scams, pump-and-dumps, speculative frenzies, and money laundering. We'll see shockingly open corruption with the president of the United States having a coin for on-chain bribery.
> After a decade, there are no examples of widely used smart contracts or even long-running projects that haven't been fueled by boom and bust speculation cycles
MakerDAO, Aave, Uniswap, Ethereum Name Service, and OpenSea are all long-running smart contract projects that have weathered multiple speculation cycles chugging along all the same.
> Every time there is a "code is law" gone wrong with large $ at stake, people immediately fall back to real life police.
It's one potential recourse. As opposed to legal contracts, where falling back to real life police is the only recourse.
Code is not law, but it does solve the "possession is 9/10 of the law" issue by aligning possession with legal ownership more closely than legal contracts do, so that the law has to get involved a lower percentage of the time. This is especially helpful for low-value contracts in the hundreds of dollars or less where it's not economical to involve a lawyer. Same for cross-border contracts where international litigation is infeasible.
> There is both a ton of money in crypto and it has completely failed to reach its promised potential.
Smart contract tooling has only been mature since about 2018 or so. Blockchains have only started scaling since about 2021. Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency-related company, didn't launch their chain until 2023. Sharded data availability won't even be in production on a major blockchain until next year, with Ethereum's PeerDAS. Zero knowledge proof technology is both in its infancy and developing extremely rapidly. In other words a text-based browser isn't going to host a video stream over a dial-up connection. These roadmaps are long, and it takes time for new breakthroughs in math and computer science to mature, standardize and reach production.
> The largest uses in the next half decade will continue to be scams, pump-and-dumps, speculative frenzies, and money laundering.
The "largest" uses aren't really relevant unless you're trying to make an overarching moral judgement and say "blockchains are bad", which whether true or not, I think is an observation about as useless as "knives can be used to hurt people".
If you're trying to determine whether a tool has any legitimate helpful uses, look for an increase in its legitimate helpful uses.
stablecoins are useful but you don't really need a blockchain. you just need enough of a rube-goldberg machine to claim it's "decentralized". The most popular "blockchain" for stablecoins is Tron, if that tells you anything about why the technology itself doesn't matter
The blockchain can't do anything with stablecoins, because that's interfacing with a financial system that's out of the reach of smart contracts. Even if we assume that a stablecoin is backed by real USD sitting in a bank account, there's nothing stopping anyone from just taking money out of the bank account, and the smart contract is none the wiser. You still have to trust someone at the end of the day.
Problem with stablecoins is that in reality they are just extremely fancy IOUs or namely debt. Issuer promises to give money back. And if they don't well best you can do is to sue them.
