I have been in Bitcoin since 2012. I have heard so many things that something will kill Bitcoin. And all of them have been wrong so far. I think a lot of people fail to understand the resilience of decentralised systems. Imo if something kills Bitcoin, it will be that something even better replaces Bitcoin, and then the vision lives on in it.

It takes around three days to send money from one bank to another, at least if it's abroad, that sounds pretty similar to your letter analogy. With Bitcoin it takes less than an hour, and soon it will be instantaneous if you have prefunded lightning channels.

For me it's also an outstanding way of storing wealth without trusting a bank or other entity of not losing or stealing it.

A lot of the criticisms of cryptocurrencies are rooted in the argument that there are no legitimate use cases that are clearly superior to alternative solutions. That argument is presented several times in this thread. Here are some clear and bona fide use cases that currently exist which demonstrate the utility of cryptocurrencies and provide a foundational springboard for future growth:

1. You can store millions of dollars in your pocket or your brain and nobody can take it from you.

2. You can send money from China to Russia in an hour or less.

3. You can resist spending sensorship.

These uses exist right now and they will always be handy. They can help every person on earth and the magnitude of their benefits is essentially uncapped.

This is already the case for 99.9% of the world's wealth. In fact, I would argue that you are far more likely to lose or be robbed or hacked of bitcoin keys (unless you take extraordinary precautions) than you are to have your money seized in the bank.

This is an imaginary problem than almost none of the world's wealth cares about.

By the way, what happened to the bitcoins owned by the Silk Road founder? Didn't they get auctioned off by the FBI? Pretty weird for something that "no one can take from you", don't you think? In reality, Bitcoin is less safe than money in the bank, even ignoring its volatility.
1. Not really. It has to go through an exchange to gain usable local money, especially to the two countries you mention.
2. The current exchanges do this in seconds, far faster than Bitcoin. They just haven't made that tech available to the end user. Bitcoin has no advantage here.
3. Overseas remittances like this, where you want one hour sending time, would contribute just a fraction of Bitcoin's current market cap. They're irrelevant.
Yes, this is the entire use case for Bitcoin. No argument there. It is a way to facilitate payment for illegal activities.
(1) is an imgainary problem that 99.9% of people don't have.
(2) is something that 99% of people don't care about, and 99.99% don't care about if you include the speed specifier. Bitcoin is also inferior technology for fast transfers.
(3) Yes, bitcoin helps you do illegal things. That is its only practical utility it has.

Actually, even if we take that these are fairycoin benefits, the magnitude of their benefits are capped at far less than 1% of global GDP.

Your retorts are just a bunch of air. You listed an example of people losing bitcoin who didn't have their private key. I thought it would be clear that "in your pocket or brain" implied holding your key. Silkroad and Mt. Gox are not counter arguments to the security of cryptocurrencies.

Foreign remittance isn't small and doesn't require an exchange. I participate in it frequently. You can put a sign on a telephone pole and have cash for bitcoin or vice verse in an hour in any major city on earth. It is easy to turn bitcoin into cash.

Owning your wealth without fear of government seizure is not a fantasy problem. It may not be a big concern for North Americans right now, but it is a major concern for anyone who lives anywhere that has federal currency issues or a history of government seizures of private capital. Haven't you ever met anyone from Thailand or Venezuela or Argentina? Ask them what they would do with a million dollars if you gave it to them. They wouldn't put it in a bank.

No, you just confuse theory and practice. And they're not "retorts", they're considered counterpoints which are flying right over your head.

Again, you're confusing theoretical security with practical security.

And of course a bank is a far more secure way of holding wealth than Bitcoin ever could be. Even if you're holding your own key, and no matter how tech savvy you are. That's obvious if you just think about it. The greatest threat of loss to your wealth, by far, is losing your private key or having it stolen. The risk of losing it this way is far larger than losing it while holding it in a bank, for 99% of the world's wealth.

Again, you're confusing your utility with the average person's utility. Few people want to go meet strangers for cash. Are you ****ing kidding me? That's what poor young male gamblers do, and not many other demographics. That it works for you has nothing to do with what 99% of others want or need or do.

And yes, foreign remittance is small relative to world money flows. Very small. The fraction who need or want it sent instantly are far smaller. Most foreign purchases for the average person are done via credit/debit card, which is instant (orders of magnitude faster than Bitcoin), secure and way safer than Bitcoin (they have protection from fraud and dodgy merchants - something Bitcoin can never provide as it's recipient friendly and sender hostile). Most other foreign transfers are not time sensitive.
Right. It's a concern for poor people in a handful of poor countries (i.e. a fraction of a fraction of the world's wealth). In other words, completely irrelevant for a mainstream use case.

It's a great argument if Bitcoin market cap is at $100 million. It's a horrible argument if Bitcoin market cap is at $30 billion.

TS,

I dont think I am confused by the difference between practical and theoretical utility. I may be oblivious, but I'm not confused. Your counterpoints are just begging the question. South America, Southeast Asia and Eatern Europe don't constitute a significant portion of the world's wealth? Ok, cool let's just consider China then. Chinese nationals may feel secure having their money in a bank, but it doesn't have very much practical utility for them in Los Angeles. My sister-in-law is Chinese and lives in California. Do you know how she turns CNY into USD? She buys products in China and ships them to the US and then sells them on Amazon. There's a bit of friction in that method of international remittance. This isn't a theoretical problem, and it isn't a small community that participates.

You are correct that Bitcoin is a good way for busto gamblers to move money across land and sea. And if you walk into the Amazon room at the Rio right now and throw a bag of stones into the air you will hit a European collecting 10k+ in cash while he sends bitcoin on his phone. But those facts don't support the argument that cryptocurrency use cases occupy such a small niche as to be insignificant. They demonstrate the exact opposite, in fact. The use cases are so readily applicable that we can use the members of this very forum and my real life neighbors and family members as off-the-cuff examples of practical utility.

One of the premises of your counterpoints is that certain continents and all poor people are insignificant factors in a discussion about world GDP. I'm not ready to accept that as being true.

Another premise of yours is that my utility is not the same as the utility of others. That would be a fair point if it weren't so easy to rattle off names or describe whole communities who benefit from the decentralized remittance of value.

I agree with you on one major point: a rich white dude in North America can get along just fine without any blockchains. But I don't agree that everyone else is so insignificant as to not matter.

Crypto is the currency of the Internet.

We have all these different networks on the Internet. Crypto can turn all these networks into markets. You don't only need to see the potential that is has in the world of today. You have to look at the potential it has in the world in 10-20 years. Internet is going to be everywhere, every object in the world is gonna be internet. All humans will be connected with eachother and with the environment non stop. Right now Internet is still extremely inefficient. (Lets say I need to write some code for my website. In 99% of cases there will be som1 else who has already done the same thinking/work I need to do. Perfect Internet will store his knowledge and instantly bring it to me. or connect me with him instantly so that he can help me, and in return I will pay him some money)

The world is gonna move towards much more digital work done on freelance basis. Like uber is replacing taxi-centrals, a lot of middle-men can be replaced with blockchains. Everyone who has some value to add will be connected digitally with persons that need that value. Like if I need help with my math homework I can go into digital environment and instantly be paired with the person best suited to help me. ( Machine learning will do this ). Or if i want to load up my iphone and say "Hey siri (Or google assistent) can u book me a flight to London tmrw for less then 100$?! Siri is gonna do it for you. AI agents will be talking with each-other all the time, and performing transactions. Arguably u can use credit-cards or w/e for this, but worldwide digital currencies are kind of nice. If I want to give poker coaching to some kid in Mozambique I prefer to be paid automatically in crypto. I want to be able to send money instantly world-wide to all my whatsapp contacts.

Society itself can reward its users with money for value added. There is tremendeous amount of data-collection needed/possible fueled by crypto-rewards. If you give people some crypto everytime they report accuretly what happened when they took a certain medicine, in no-time ur gonna have a sick machine-learning model that can predict how that medicine is gonna work for every individual on earth, and healthcare costs can go down tremendeously. Digital currencies can be the fuel that turns networks into markets and accelerates the transition towards efficient internet

Assuming you are right, and crypto 'takes over the internet', and you think the massive financial industry with all their money, power, and lobbying ability will allow bitcoin specifically to prevail in this supposed emerging market, you are naive as hell. There's nothing preventing central banks, credit card issuers, even governments from simply issuing their own cryptocurrency (why would they do this when people can use their credit card?) and banning the use of others. All it would take is one bill getting passed into law and no legitimate business would accept anything but what the government allows.

You think the guys with the power and the money are gonna give that up to you, simply because you got in 'early' on bitcoin? Lol.

You forget that is bitcoin is used to send money where it would otherwise be inconvenient, you have to consider the average holding period. If that is only a week, the global remittance market of $600 billion would only justify a $11 billion market cap. And that is if bitcoin takes 100% market share!

Let's say bitcoin is used for $3 trillion in transactions annually, bu tthey only hold for 6 hours on average. That would only support a $2 billion market cap.

If bitcoin is held longer, than that assumes people actually hold their coins and not exchange them for local currency.

Also if you hold your coins longer to spend them later, you do not want a wall of speculator to the moon types sitting on a large % of bitcoins outstanding. They could decide to sell their investment at any time, or spend them (and forcing merchants to cash them in to pay their bills), causing the price to crash. So for bitcoin to become more attractive as a store of value, the speculators need to be shaken out first. Which is not happening now.

So if you buy bitcoin as an investment now, ironically what needs to happen first is that a lot of speculators are really traumatized by it and the % of bitcoins held by speculators is relatively low. Encouraging the legit users to hold them for a longer period.

If they inevitably go below $50 again I will buy some . FIrst they need to be shaken out:
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-bi...-idUSKBN18T0K2

I was making the case for crypto, I never said bitcoin specifically
I don't know which crypto is going to be big, if it will be bitcoin or Google coin or a better digital version of the $. I think there is a reasonable probability that the potential for the technology in general is very high.

Also you have to look at incentives. Governments are just gonna follow their own incentives, if a country that embraces crypto is gonna get ahead of countries that don't, than there will be countries that are gonna do just that. If the best move for every country is to ban crypto and it can be enforced (more difficult than you make it to be) then that is what is going to happen.

I think the technology is interesting. But mostly for banks and governments who will use it in a walled off ecosystem (invite only), or for dark web transactions. But if you use it for small internet transactions you want it to be stable. Otherwhise you still gotta get your credit card and basically pay two transaction fees every time on a bitcoin exchange and the transaction itself.

And your example with computer code, you can pretty much get that for free already on stackexchange or other forums/websites? Just need to google a bit. And if it is truly valuable info, people will not just give it away for cheap.

And if I want to buy a research report, I can usually pay with credit card, which is much easier.

Besides if it is so useful for those things, wouldn't that have happened already? It is extremely useful for the online drug trade, and that market has already blown up to $200 million+ a year in the past 6-7 years. If it was so extremely useful for quick online transactions, wouldn't that have caught on by now? Since almost everyone knows about bitcoin by now.

Yeah. Imagine a credit card that took 10 minutes (at best) to 2 hours to go through. Where the value stored on the card/paid to the merchant could fluctuate 20% in an hour. Where the buyer has zero fraud protection from dodgy merchants.

Sounds like it'd put Visa out of business.

Again, what on earth is crytpo or smart contracts good for that the financial system doesn't do already? What need does it fill? In a perfect world, I could see blockchains making bookkeeping essentially digital and automatic (a huge labor savings), but really look at the exponential growth of the blockchain of bitcoin, a currency that is barely ever used, to the global financial market. Nakamoto believed that information storage would be cheap and fast and would cover the increase in the size of bitcoin full nodes, but the bitcoin full node right now takes days to download. How much worse would it be for a network that actually transacted?

Visa can process 48000 transactions per second. Bitcoin? 7. SEVEN. Bank wires and visa transactions are secure...not inherently secure like bitcoin, but in practice far more secure. There are a million stories about exchanges getting hacked, people losing their private key, blah blah blah. You could say well, people need to be more secure, but you could also make the same argument for identity theft with CCs, don't do a, b and c, and you will never have your identity stolen.

This takes me back to my original question, what is bitcoin/blockchain/ethereum/token 178 actually good for? What do we need it for? What is all of this talk beyond hype? I've heard arguments that it could be used to help starving people in Africa get away from the government. The major problem with that is that if you don't have money to buy food, you probably don't own a computer with internet access either.

I've never heard a good response to my question' 'what is cryptocurrency good for?', because one doesn't exist. And so long as the answer to that question remains 'it's good to buy illegal stuff pseudonymously on darknets,' then that is where it will remain widely used for its intended purpose, and nowhere else.

It only fluctuates so wildly because it is primarily bid against the dollar (in speculation). If it was thought of as money and bid against all assets (including Swiss cheese, Toyotas, and PlayStations) it would have a much more reasonable price vs time chart.

Of course, that is part of the problem isn't it? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

DoOrDoNot,

There will have to be some kind of secondary attached coin for buying coffee etc such as litecoin. Or that is what Tim Ferriss guests, Nick Szabo and Naval Ravikant, were saying on a recent podcast.

Right, because a select few people are now realizing that bitcoin is not good for many, small transactions, because it's been 8 years and no one is using it for those. Except, isn't that the whole reason why it's worth $2700/coin, because in the future it will be? It's just a bunch of doublethink and doubletalk over a technology that no one knows what it is actually useful for, beyond pseudonymous purchases of drugs and other illegal goods on darknets.

Generally currencies are complicated to value. much more so than other assets. Add in crypto and it gets even more techy and complicated. Easy to generate a ton of excitement with poor investing options currently, and you got a nice hype that can easily turn into a bubble. Everyone always wants to be part of the next big thing. Even though most people (especially judging by those threads in here) barely understand what the definition of a bubble even is.

Will take a while before people catch on, and then it will crash in the most ugly way possible, then segwit will be adopted hopefully, and I can buy some at like $10-20 or so.

Bitcoin: Store money, if you are a criminal, want to dodge taxes(huge market), want to hedge against financial crisis(bitcoin is saving people in Venezuela atm), as part of optimal portfolio allocation (Little correlation with traditional assets).

Cryptos in general: Fast transactions with anyone in the world (Ignore the current issues). Fuel to drive contributions to networks. Artificial intelligence that lives on the Internet needs a way to do transactions with eachother. (If I need tickets for a concert or something and tell my Google assistent to go buy them from someone elses google assistent on Ebay)

Smart contracts: Take out all the middlemen. Ie investment banking, venture capital, insurance companies, record labels, companies with workers doing digital work, will all be replaced ( partly) or become more efficient with blockchains. We are on a poker-forum. I personally would like the option to invest $ in someones WSOP package and get refunded instantly after the tournament ends by the blockchain with no need to trust the person.

If people like Naval Ravikant and Peter Thiel who live and breath innovation and see 1000 new tech ideas a month are super positive about blockchains it makes me take their opinion seriously. Ofcourse its not gonna cure cancer or end wars and atm people are making tons of blockchain apps that get worse on a blockchain vs central system, market as a whole looks very bubbly etc but there is a lot of potential and we are already past the point of no return. All the big financial institutions already have blockchain teams and they see huge potential for stuff like universal ID verification, digitalising of paper deals, making it easier to do business with each-other withouth the issue of trust.

Think about it like this Internet is still in its inphacy. We will soon by driving around in self-driving cars, cameras in our eyes that record everything, an enviornment that responds to you, universal world language, Everyone walking around with subtitles above their heads ("Ethereum bitchezz"). In this world if there was a working world-wide digital programmable currency available, that allows you to enter contracts with everyone else in the world withouth needing to trust anyone. Would you invent credit-cards and create Centralised systems for everything?

Most real investors have no position in crypto because it is too speculative and volatile.

Ignore the current issues lol

Good luck cashing out that crypto into real money after.

A lot of financial people are bearish on crypto too, so what? Also a lot of bank investments are bet hedging, it has no correlation to possibility of success within crypto. I do think blockchain has some legitimate uses, but it's not like the internet of money, as a lot of people claim.

Ya totally man, jetsons life is right around the corner lol

This makes no sense, the more speculative something is the better the investment opportunity. If you think bitcoin fundamental value is100$, you can invest in its downfall by shorting it and waiting 5 years. The people u describe arent real investors but people whos livelyhood depend on their reputation so they dont take a position because they are afraid of losing it if they are wrong

Its precisely the opposite. Good investors invest in things of real value. The more speculative something is, the more risk the investment is...ie: the less chance of ROI. The less chance of ROI, the less good investors invest in it. Are there people who make fortunes by making extremely risky plays and winning? Of course there are, but there are far more that do so and fail.

Lots of well known financial people, investors included, call bitcoin out for precisely what it is, a bubble of pure speculation. Of course this is about as meaningless as your statement about people who are predicting the opposite...a total argument from authority.

This is all very reminiscent of the dot com era. There were people calling it a bubble all the way up to nasdaq 5k and there were people hyping it up. Ironically, both were ultimately proven right.

Pets.com was a bubble. As were many others.

Amazon turned out to be the company that's basically crushing the entire brick and mortar sector.

So calling cryptos a bubble may end up the same way. I'm sure most Alt coins will end up losing value. Maybe Bitcoin will become the next MySpace. But, there's plenty of reason to believe we will see massive disruption due to crypto. So if you can find the next Amazon, and avoid the next pets.com, you'll make amazing returns. Feeling lucky?

I don't think people really understand all the possibilities the blockchain opens up. Think about the internet for a sec. Back in 1994, no one thought the internet would disrupt literally every industry on earth. Music. Telephone books. Porn. Politics. Brick and mortar retail. Banking. Social media was not even a thought until, what, 1998 or something?

It used to be that you didn't want to put your name, phone number, or address online. I remember those days. Now, everyone uses Amazon or online banking every day without batting an eye.

Blockchain and related tech has just as much, if not more promise. This isn't just relegated to online gambling and buying drugs, and money laundering, even though those are big markets for sure, and provide support for the price of btc and other currencies. I don't want this to be a wall of text so I'll make a new post with some possible use cases to show what I mean.

Keep in mind that no one ever predicted the rise of things like social media. So today we don't know exactly what the future holds for blockchain tech. I do think that we are in a similar spot to the internet circa 1994, and also computers themselves circa maybe 1990. Windows 95 really made it easy for the average person to use a computer. We are still waiting for that "Windows 95" moment in crypto, where developers and then everyday consumers can easily use, spend, and accept crypto and see the benefits. Here are some current interesting projects.

SIA coin: Decentralized data storage. There are other companies working on this as well. I recommend you click on their site but if you're lazy:

Completely private

Sia splits apart, encrypts, and distributes your files across a decentralized network. Since you hold the keys, you own your data. No outside company can access or control your files, unlike traditional cloud storage providers.

Far more affordable

Sia's decentralized cloud is on average 10x less expensive than current cloud storage providers. Storing 1TB on Sia costs about $2 per month, compared with $23 on Amazon S3.

So whether or not you "believe" in the tech, if they're able to pull it off, I think some companies (Netflix?) would be interested in saving 90%+ on data. If nothing else, this will force Amazon to either step up their own storage game to compete, or buy out SIA coin holders somehow. This isn't just for child porn or black market stuff. When you can save 90% on a huge cost like data storage, people will pay attention. And there are many others working on this as well.

Basic Attention Token : Blockchain based digital advertising.

From the creator of JavaScript and the co-founder of Mozilla and Firefox, with a solid team – funded by Founders Fund, Foundation Capital, Propel Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, DCG, Danhua Capital, and Huiyin Blockchain Venture among others.

Again, click on the site, but if you're too lazy:

The Challenge

Digital advertising is overrun by middlemen, trackers and fraud.
Users are abused
Up to 50% of the average user’s mobile data is for ads and trackers, costing as much as $23 a month.
Ads use about 5 seconds of mobile load time on average.
Ads decrease phone battery life by as much as 21%.
Privacy is violated when large media sites host up to 70 trackers.
Malware (malvertisements, ransom-ware) is up 132% in one year.
Publishers are hurting
Google and Facebook take 73% of all ad dollars and 99% of all growth.
Revenue is recently down 66%.
Bots inflicted $7.2 billion in fraud last year.
Over 600 million phones and desktops run ad-blocking.
Publishers cannot seamlessly monetize value added services.
Advertisers are losing
Advertisers lack good information on what they are paying for.
Marketers are often fooled by bogus websites and bots that commit fraud.
Targeting is poor, making users more likely to ignore ads.

So there are MASSIVE benefits to both consumers and advertisers, if this comes together. Far from a sure thing, but we'll see.

Those are just two use cases other than MUH DRUGS AND GAMBLING LOL ITS A BUBBLE if you actually are paying attention. There are many, many more.