Turns out, virtually nil, because it's been around for 8 years and nobody is using it, because there is no real-world use case for contracts written as software.
I love how this comment amounts to "nuh-uh!" because you can't think of a single example even though you're an enthusiast.
The only people using smart-contracts are enthusiasts and proof-of-concept startups that have no traction in the market because smart contracts don't offer any advantage over any other computing system.
And what are those smart contract fees being used for?
- Speculators buying ETH to ride the bubble
- A revolving door of Proof-of-concept startups with backing from starry-eyed VCs and no viable business plans that pop up, use a bunch of compute, and then fail, every couple of months.
Ethereum mining conglomerates don't even use Smart Contracts, they just cite "a long history of successful payouts", trust, and old-fashioned promises written in vernacular English.
So you're moving the goalpost from "no users" to "no users I approve of"?
A few other use cases: DeFi (mainly crypto backed loans), NFTs (so far not too interesting to me), distributed ETH2 staking pools, distributed betting markets (the coolest one in my opinion).
No, the goal posts are standing still at "competitively successful commercial activity". The fact that somebody somewhere hammers nails with glass jars doesn't mean that glass hammers are about to take over the hardware world. Early investors getting rich off of a Ponzi scheme doesn't make the Ponzi a good businessman.
DeFi is used almost exclusively as margin for speculation. Since smart contracts have no legal force, the only way lenders can be guaranteed their money back is by demanding collateral that is greater than the value of the loan. When is the last time you needed a loan of $10,000, for which you were happy to put up $15,000 of your own dollars in escrow as collateral, other than securities gambling?
NFTs are just cryptokitties by another name, ETH2 staking pools are just private equity firms but without security because millions of dollars are stolen out of them every year, and crypto distributed betting markets are patently illegal.
Which brings us right back to where these conversations always end: the only things blockchain has or will ever be useful for are speculation and obscuring criminal activity.
> nobody is using it
> no competitively successful commercial activity
Those are two wildly different claims but I'll bite anyway:
Your argument against DeFi could be made about Schwab, or any brokerage providing margin so I don't find it very compelling. Is selling margin to gamblers not a "competitively successful commercial activity"? Your original claim was that there were no users.
> crypto distributed betting markets are patently illegal
That's like saying self driving cars are patently illegal. Of course they are (more illegal than grey market sports betting), but it's a nascent technology and it's not obvious that it will stay illegal.
Every competent English speaker knows that the phrase "nobody uses X" is never meant to be taken literally. When I say "nobody uses PowerPC", I mean that its market share is miniscule and the industry has moved on, I am not claiming that there does not exist some nerd somewhere who maintains a 20 year old imac as a hobby, and finding that nerd is not a disproof.
> margin trading
Margin accounts are not commercial activity. When you buy or trade securities, whether on margin or otherwise, no new value is being created, no workers are being paid, no commodities are being traded, no products are being consumed.
The entire market could vanish overnight and nobody would notice, because it isn't doing anything, it's just making increasingly complicated guesses at what other people will do.
> betting is like self-driving cars
Self driving cars are new technology. Online betting is not, it has been around since the beginning of the internet. Blockchain is doing nothing but helping the illegal gamblers to hide from law enforcement.
> When I say "nobody uses PowerPC", I mean that its market share is miniscule and the industry has moved on, I am not claiming that there does not exist some nerd somewhere who maintains a 20 year old imac as a hobby, and finding that nerd is not a disproof.
Well that's bad analogy, because unlike PowerPC there are more users of Ethereum than ever before, and Ethereum is generating more revenue than ever before.
> Self driving cars are new technology. Online betting is not, it has been around since the beginning of the internet. Blockchain is doing nothing but helping the illegal gamblers to hide from law enforcement.
I think you're being obtuse. Ethereum is the new technology here, that enables a distributed betting platform that was previously not possible. Self driving cars are a new technology that enable a type of transportation (existing market, like betting) that previously wasn't possible.
What do you mean by compute power? Smart contracts (which run on-chain code) pay fees for each command they execute. The most popular smart contracts are token exchanges and DeFi (ie crypto backed loans).
Turns out, virtually nil, because it's been around for 8 years and nobody is using it, because there is no real-world use case for contracts written as software.