What can I do with a bitcoin except hope to sell it for more USD later?
And then you can either try and meet someone in an alley somewhere, or go to a gatekeeper exchange just like Visa/Mastercard to try and convert those transactions back to money that can actually be exchanged for food and shelter!
I mean, let's be serious here. In theory, blockchain could allow us to build a good online payment system -- and that is a problem worth solving.
But in practice, Bitcoin in particular is completely awful as an online payment system, and I don't understand how people can reasonably claim otherwise. If the goal of Bitcoin was actually to make online payments easier, we would be using a different coin other than Bitcoin. The community would have moved on to any of the far better alternatives.
The fact that Bitcoin is still the predominant coin proves that the technology and the convenience of online payment processing is not the end goal for most people getting into cryptocurrency.
As for bank transfers, at my previous company we had to send hundreds of international payments each year and all of the transfers were finished within minutes of initiation.
And Paypal and other companies have made it possible to donate to charities without a credit card for almost 2 decades.
I sure as hell wouldn't want to be associated with a cryptocurrency that has a public ledger then if that's the type of punishment I am trying to avoid. You're just one exchange leak or hack away from being imprisoned.
But the drawbacks are plentiful, even for this sort of use case. And this use case doesn't get easier with a whole bunch of speculation. In fact, it gets harder.
And there's no particular reason for such users to leave it in a volatile form. Rather, they would be rational to cash out once the illegal transaction is over.
So the real value of bitcoin should be the expected float for all the crypto-compatible types of black market transactions. Which I'm quite sure is many orders of magnitude below the current price.
So it's not just that the black market has incentive to use it, there's incentive to make it and even to prefer it over alternatives, because the operation's excess is a good front.
The actual conclusion I think is most relevant is the nilhilistic one: "None of these tokens really matter!" The actual place of decentralized ledgers is as one of several tools for designing autonomous, non-coercive communities, and when designed as such most of the overhead of proving disappears(e.g. DAG coins). Everything else is an attempt to extract rent into the coercive economy, which in due course will be trivially subverted by forking the chain or starting a new one.
The government could just look at your electricity bill and ask how you paid for it and then ask where you got all those mining rigs without a loan. If you can't find an explanation where that money came from you are in a bad spot. It's actually harder than laundering cash since cash can be spent directly without depositing it somewhere where your identity is known.
>The actual conclusion I think is most relevant is the nilhilistic one: "None of these tokens really matter!"
Yes, it's always the same boring old answer. If you could wave a magic wand and make it impossible to pay with euro it would suffer from the same problem. The value in the euro doesn't lie in itself, it lies in the ability to exchange for a service or good. Because I value the good or service I value anything that grants me access to the good or service, the euro grants me access to goods and services, thus I value the euro. Foreign currencies are worthless to me since I cannot use them to buy things, unless I want to import something denominated in a foreign currency, then the currency suddenly gains value for me.
It's laughable that Bitcoin exclusively being a store of value is somehow lauded as a benefit, as if being able to purchase goods with Bitcoin would be a bad thing for Bitcoin. It gets worse now because people insist that it is merely a settlement layer. As the price of Bitcoin goes up its value proposition is somehow getting worse over time. How is this even possible?
What can you do with USD besides exchanging it for goods and services? (Pay taxes)
There is no reason a parallel banking system with all of the same features cannot built with Bitcoin being used as the denomination. I think this future is increasing likely (probably much to the chagrin of decentralization advocates) as Bitcoin increases in value and number of holders.
efficient high-volume transfers - risky and expensive to do with cash, really requires a hawala-like middleman (often a bank)
reversibility - not true of cash, only true within the context of softer credit systems. You could build a "Venmo backed by Bitcoin" where funds cannot be withdrawn for the reversibility period if you thought there was market demand for it.
ID verification - subject to discretion of counterparty
fraud investigation - Bitcoin is likely much better than USD for this because of it's traceability.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/16/business/citibank-revlon-laws...
Bitcoin is a decentralized protocol for moving value on the internet, that is not useful enough for you sir? Is this hacker news? or lumberjack news?
Besides, Horses >>>> Cars. Horses are more useful than Cars. Cars need roads to work, Horses don't.
