| ▲ | hilliardfarmer 6 hours ago |
| What a deeply troubling and cynical comment. As far as I know, nowhere in the Bitcoin white paper or the original code base. Does it say anything about what you seem to think it's use cases are. Bitcoin has one main use, digital cash, that can be sent instantly and for free or a very low fee. Edit: I would agree though, that anything other than that is probably a scam. |
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| ▲ | wpietri 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| It seems entirely accurate to me, at least in a POSIWID sense. The original theory of Bitcoin was, as described in the paper, decentralized digital cash. But in practice it was never optimized for what normal people use cash for. As system like that would be something like M-PESA. Even at the time, cash was declining in usage. In the 18 years since, it has declined a lot more. And for good reason, because what most people want for most things isn't digital cash, but digital money. E.g., debit cards and Venmo. So pretty naturally Bitcoin has value only for a few niche use cases that are not well served by more effective systems. Various sorts of crime, mostly. Digital cash, sure, but the kind that's transferred in unmarked envelopes slid quietly across the table. The kind that is delivered in a briefcase. As a side note, it also failed in its goal of being decentralized. The mining power is very concentrated. Much more so than the banking industry, for example. And most users keep their Bitcoin on deposit in centralized services. So it's again basically banking but worse. |
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| ▲ | carshodev 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Although it was originally intended to be cash it actually now is used as a "store of wealth" It allows people to build up wealth and be able to preserve it from government intervention and inflation. If you have stocks the ownerhsip and registration is controlled by a government and can be taken at any time from you. Look at china where if you have a large company and take a stand against the government all your equity will be wiped out and you will be either imprisoned or banished to another country. Cash in a government bank account is the same way, you can wake up one day and all your assets will be seized, your credit cards will stop working. Bitcoin works because you can technically have your wealth memorized. You can memorize a string of charcters that allow you to bring money with you no matter where you go. NO government or other human can steal it from you (except through torture) but you can also easily not memorize it and instead distribute the keys throughout the world in opposing countries meaning even if you are attacked by one country you still have some wealth kept in another. A store of wealth is what bitcion allows. True freedom from governments stealing your money because you have ideas which they do not agree with. This in my mind is the main usage of bitcoin. Other coins like stablecoins, or the btc lightning network have high value because they make transactions much cheaper as traditional banking systems are complex, error prone, and costly. | | |
| ▲ | grim_io 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is not a common man's dream, but one of privilege and wealthy background. The oppressed masses don't need Bitcoin, they have no wealth to "memorize" and jetset around the world. | | |
| ▲ | slopinthebag 8 minutes ago | parent [-] | | It's precisely the opposite actually; If you're wealthy you can switch citizenships, hide your assets in tax havens, and afford property and other assets to store your wealth. For the debanked, or those living in unstable or authoritarian countries it gives them a more stable way to store and transact, especially with massive inflation. Pretty much everyone I know who talks shit about bitcoin is wealthy and privileged. |
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| ▲ | maest 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | POSIWID = the Purpose Of the System Is What It Does. |
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| ▲ | natpalmer1776 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Men of principles often mistake the experience and observations of others for cynicism when it does not align with said principles. This applies to a great deal, not just bitcoin. |
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| ▲ | lambda 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What? "Instantly and for a very low fee"? Fees have historically gone up above $100 per transaction. They've since added hacks on top of the original Bitcoin protocol to get the price back down again, but the original design was not good for low fees. And transactions can take 30 minutes or more to settle, that's hardly instant. If you accept a transaction instantly, it's relatively easy for someone to scam you by double spending. So, no, Bitcoin doesn't make a great digital cash. Maybe a better wire transfer. But the biggest benefit of it is to be unblockable and unrefundable, which makes it great for scames and illegal activity, plus the speculative nature of the pricing, which is great for gambling on. |
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| ▲ | kevinak 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Bitcoin via the Lightning Network is near cost-free and instant. And it's not a hack, it's just a network of payment channels. | |
| ▲ | singpolyma3 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I've never seen $100 for a normal sized transaction that seems rather hyperbolic. | |
| ▲ | SOLAR_FIELDS 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Pointing at the BTC transaction fee and saying it is super expensive is like pointing at a problematic car model and saying all cars are bad. There are any number of other popular coins out there that have the same or better liquidity as BTC that charge tiny fractions of the fees. And also settle in seconds. You're saying Bitcoin like BTC, but the parent commenter was probably referring to the giant ecosystem of coins, that happens to include BTC, but also many other much faster and cheaper options, that are used to globally remit payments every day. What it's replacing, by the way, Western Union, Wise and the like, is also pretty unblockable and unrefundable. | | |
| ▲ | lambda 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | What? I was replying to someone who explicitly referenced the Bitcoin whitepaper, they were clearly talking about BTC. And the protocol from the whitepaper was actually pretty bad, from a cost and transaction time point of view. It's gotten a bit better with some hacks layered on top of it. And yeah, the thing is, payment systems that work approximately as well as BTC exist without being cryptocurrency and using up so much electricity on mining. The main difference is that they don't operate in some areas where BTC still can (like evading sanctions, like this), and the speculative nature of BTC (which is actually a net negative on using it as a cash). | | |
| ▲ | SOLAR_FIELDS 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | What’s your point? That BTC was the first and it has these flaws? Ok, fine, but that also doesn’t discount the point being made here which is that shitcoins DO have an actual use case that people are using them for in the real world. It might be the only actual valid (legal) use case, which is kind of what some other responders implied, but it doesn’t mean that there is no value. If payment systems that aren’t shitcoin based are working just as well, then why are these coins absolutely destroying the incumbent players like Western Union in the remittance space? If the existing solutions are good enough you wouldn’t expect incumbents to be taking such a beating here right? The systems are equivalent enough? WU does for instance 100B ish a year currently, which is around 12% of the global market. A fat share of that global remittance market is… checks notes… crypto based remittances. I’m all for trashing the next shitcoin. Don’t mistake me for some crypto apologist. I personally don’t own or use them outside of narrow use cases where they are a transient thing that gets liquidated into actual fiat as soon as possible. It’s a world ripe for fraud and abuse and the whole concept of shitcoins is probably not great for society. But to take some poorly thought out implementation that was,
mind you, the first attempt at actually doing this in the real world, and try to extract it to some general conclusion that the technology is not useful 15 years later is just patently false. If the alternatives you mention are so great, why are they not winning on mindshare worldwide? Certainly seems like crypto is winning in the remittance space. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.TRF.PWKR.CD.DT |
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| ▲ | whynotmaybe 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >And transactions can take 30 minutes or more to settle
>Fees have historically gone up above $100 per transaction So it's cheaper to use Paypal ? | | |
| ▲ | lambda 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | They've since added some hacks to enable it to handle more transactions and bring the price down. Effectively, the network had hit its limit on the number of transactions it could fit in a block, so you had to pay high fees to get accepted in a block, the miners simply couldn't accept all transactions; but they've added ways of fitting more transactions into a block that have helped drive prices back down again. So now it's back to being cheaper than Paypal, but yeah, there was a time when there were $100+ transaction fees. And it may hit that again if transaction numbers go up enough to fill up blocks with the new implementation. | | |
| ▲ | tromp 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | High tx fees are an essential goal in Bitcoin's design: in the long term, when the block subsidy becomes insignificant, Bitcoin's security will rely almost entirely on tx fees. |
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| ▲ | datatrashfire 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| the problem is as a means of cash it’s inferior to existing systems in pretty much every dimension. more expensive, slower, more risk, higher volatility. the cash story for crypto is not good. |
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| ▲ | carshodev 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is incorrect, bitcoin is slower and more expensive, but bitcoin should not be used as cash, coins like stablecoins which direclty track US dollars or altcoins with lower fees should be used, the lightning network also is useful for transactions. Bitcoin CAN be used as a store of wealth and the slowness actually makes it better as the slowness is part of the same process that makes it safer, harder to hack/takeover, and gives it value. You should not look at all crypto as one thing. | | |
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