Apart from poker, speculation, drug dealing, and other gray market and nefarious activities, what actual use-case will create natural demand for Bitcoin in the US?

What will incentive Americans to engage in the the equivalent of a street corner drug deal to acquire Bitcoin en masse? Demand for poker chips is unfortunately insignificant.

They will suffer the same fate as Bitfinex. Apparently, only a handful of US banks process international wires to/from the US then route the payments domestically. Any accounts caught engaging in cryptocurrency related activities will be shut down, and in the case of prohibition, the money seized and forfeited to legal authorities.

Seems naive to think this way. The internet of money doesn’t care where imaginary boundaries lie.

Chinese using Bitcoin to escape capital controls to then buy real estate in San Francisco and Vancouver is a more natural use case then buying a cup of coffee at your local Starbucks.

Is this fake? Curious your opinion. I assumed real.

https://youtu.be/whrORgwyLE4

drugs and gambling are two of the biggest markets in the world and they're only going to grow

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I specified "that know what it is" to avoid some pedant saying "If you asked 1000 people about BTC, 950 would say "what's that?"", because that's exactly what I'd probably say.

For the purpose of the hypothetical, we had to agree the the people were trading bitcoin, so I would assume they're not the college kids in the video.

Tom Collins knew whats up.

My usecase is holding my wealth in a fixed supply currency and expecting others to prefer a fixed supply over an inflated supply over a longer period of time.

Spending isn't the only usecase. I use it for the above reason.

well put homie






keep holding that paper money! one day you guys can get someone to hold your bags....

What you have suggested previously is that a governments action and pressure on the domestic exchanges can and would put downward pressure on the domestic price. I am asking which government can do this and affect the price in every other nation? Or do you want to argue they will act in tandem?


You are conflating economic concepts such as market valuation and price. These are not at all necessarily the same things but often in economics we use assumptions to make simpler models and one such assumption is that the market valuation and price are the same thing.

When mount gox sky rocketed to 1k usd before going busto many people would have thought they were rich. But just because an exchange gives a price of 1k doesn't at all mean that you can sell your bitcoin on that exchange or anywhere for anywhere near that price.

If the US puts pressure on a US exchange such that the trading ceases do you really mean to argue that as the orders disappear on that exchange that the prices on foreign exchanges will drop accordingly as well as the street value?

They are coming and it is what Hal Finney suggested would be the "ultimate fate" of bitcoin. He is one of the number one suspects for being Satoshi. It takes time, our governments make the process of change slow which is probably in one sense a good thing.

Voskuils argument doesn't require any legal (aka white market) use cases. So you are basically asking for white market use cases to establish legitimacy which says nothing to the long term longevity of bitcoin (ie from his view).

Nonetheless as the market grows bitcoin can serve higher and higher value settlement. Eventually settlement among nations and at this point the cost (including speed) is dramatically lower than settlement using something like gold.

It is also irrevocable unlike a banking network and censorship resistant unlike an oil or gold shipment.

And this can be considered black or white market too depending on who's side you are on such as if Iran wants to settle with a country that US has sanctions against.

In the discussion of money use cases for bitcoin we are talking about non-savings/speculation use cases because people want to point out if no one is transacting with it then its "savings" usefulness is effectively that of a ponzi wave.

No, that's not how this works. I decide for myself when I value spending on something higher than hodl'ing. You can not separate these 2 forces at work.

At this point I value hodl'ing a lot higher than spending. There are situations where I spend my BTC because there's a lot of friction otherwise, that's where my current personal cutoff to spend is. Arguing BTC has no usecase because people's preference to spend should be different (read:now) is just ignorant.

You've made a semantically based (counter argument). The topic is "what is bitcoin's NON-SAVING use case?". And you are answering: saving.

Well, you can't separate the two, so that's an irrelevant argument to discuss in that case.

And for all the people who say Bitcoin has no use case, and also include hodl'ing as not being a use case my argument stands.

Yes so you aren't engaging in the debate because many believe if something has no non monetary use case (here monetary can including hodling) and no transactional use case then it can't hold value.

This is why they accuse bitcoin of being a game of bag holding. If you say "hodling" is a monetary use case you are just using different definitions.

People want to understand what are the transactional use cases (assuming there are no non monetary use cases). If you can come up with some then they will not be so convinced its a ponzi.

So you are convinced hodling means its not a ponzi, but then you are not using others "priors" when you are debating them so you aren't really in the same discussion. Thats all.

bah i didnt note that and failed here ;p

Less than 0.001% of my wealth is in cash (paper) and lest than 0.25% in cash equivalents. How many people will I need to hold my bags in 20 years?

I am engaging in the debate by trying to make them see their own basic flaws when they refuse to accept storing value as a use case.

nice, good decision, what do you have your money in?

its better at sending money overseas than western union or any of those things like paypal. you cant just have your bitcoin accoutn shut off like paypal can do to you

you can use it just like money at plenty of stores, like overstock. so rather than holding USD that you know will go down, you can hold bitc and use it the same way, even if holding it, its gains value, sometimes you have to spend money on...

Why is that? You don't like the great attributes of The American Dollar!?!?

Right now, without other uses, in the long term there is no value to store. There is a chance that at some point in the future there will be a widespread, collective belief that bitcoin has inherent value (that is certainly not the case now) and it would become a store of value. The question is two fold - how widespread does the belief need to be and how long will it take to reach it (if it ever will). You seem to believe both questions are fait accompli. Others differ.

As a unit of account, short-term store of value, and method of exchange, it's great! Best in the world! I'm just not dumb enough to think that currency=paper.

U arent engaging them. If we assume bitcoin has no other usecase than hodling, no transactional use case otherwise, then u need a like minded hodler in order to cash out. That means there is only this speculative type of bag holding game that drives its value and u seem to agree.

wtf just happened