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Comment by ptrincr | Hacker News Reader

Yep, very true. However the Internet itsself was a mystery to most people during its early life. The technology was refined, made more user friendly and opened up to the masses.

The same happened with Bitcoin (as a payment method) and I'm pretty sure someone will find way to make this simple enough for the layman to use.

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This drum keeps getting pounded, but a cogent answer to the question "why would I use Bitcoin when I can use existing payment methods?" has yet to be given.

The benefits of the internet were pretty clear and obvious. The benefits of Bitcoin are neither clear nor obvious.

This seems very hindsight driven to me. I didn't realize how powerful the internet could be for news until Di died and I heard about it online something like a half hour before my parents confirmed it on TV. My mother didn't trust the internet for film information until imdb had existed for many years, still relying on yearly Leonard Maltin books all the time.

Obviousness doesn't tend to come until something compels it. But in the meantime, people who recognize it before others do are working to profit off that difference.

> "why would I use Bitcoin when I can use existing payment methods?"

Bitcoin can be used for other reasons beyond payment system transactions; for example, a bunch of coins are stored in cold wallets, as a physical store of value which cannot be confiscated. Market fluctuations still happen but that's unrelated to physical coin storage.

I've never believed this line of logic at all. You really think in a serious shit-hits-the-fan scenario (be it natural disaster, government takeover, whatever) you are going to have reliable internet connectivity?

Yeah, I expect sneakernet to work pretty well. A few weeks is way better than nothing. Also, you don't need to use an active internet connection to make reliable zero-confirmation transactions (see lightning network, although it's true that monitoring for confirmations requires internet data- so you have to set the timeouts to be way way into the future, which is reasonable and not unexpected).

How on earth does that work? Forget double spends, here come the quadruple and quintuple spends!

Zero-conf is fundamentally broken.

> Zero-conf is fundamentally broken.

Yep. Double-spending zero-conf transactions can work as long as you are using a payment channel (where the other side is receiving each transaction). That's how the "payment channel" concepts work.

If the s hits the fan, the only currency is guns and ammo.

During relatively low intensity conflicts mobile networks usually work, e.g. in Syria or Ukraine. I think it's the most common scenario in the modern time for shit-hits-the-fan.

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/zh/originals/2015/04/aleppo-...

http://dlca.logcluster.org/display/public/DLCA/3.4+Ukraine+T...

No, it's just that there probably aren't any use-cases you would or should care about. Some fans seem hell-bent on showing that everything should use btc and that's as silly as thinking Visa or US $20 bills are the only solution we need.

But for people who want non-refundable payments, or scriptable m-of-n payment rules, etc, it's almost the only game in town.

One benefit is not having all of your online purchases tracked by your credit card company, which can produce further benefit for you down the road when insurance companies and whoever else is unable to purchase meaningful data about you to exploit you.

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