>>518998050
ETH (ethereum) ERC-20 tokens can have code in them so you can make them contractable, and all sorts of things like requiring third party escrow. also everything is traceable.

so they're basically making a non-tamperable record of stable currency.

think about it this way: say you are a company or a bank, and need to keep track of money. fine. but how does a customer know you aren't cooking the books, or moving money without their consent? they don't know, and can't know, and the company and 3rd party auditors can't prove it either way.

but with cryptographic ledgers, the company can mathematically prove that your money and the money they hold does what they say it does, and can only be moved or spent when you and/or third party auditors/parties sign off on it.

I'm not a cryptobro (I am a maths guy tho) and hate the speculation over stuff, but these things were "a thing" before crypto took off.. they were just called Merkle tree/chain ledgers prior to 2008.

the issue is that the ledgers required a lot of computational proof, so how to incentivize others to run the computations and prevent one party from altering the ledger through a lot of computation? well, distributing the computation via proof of work (bitcoin) or proof of stake (ethereum) fixed that problem.

another good thing that crypto does is degree and credential verification. say you want to prove you went to 4Chan University, USA. well, currently you have to apply for a certificate issued by degree publishing clearinghouse run by the US government, and they issue a cryptographically signed degree that proves that the university authorized it. any other institution in the world can verify this signature and know you are legit. but the US government can still alter this private ledger by issuing fradulent degrees. a public cryptographic ledger would prevent even the government itself from tampering, as other entities would see the tampering.