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Comment by Temasik | Hacker News Reader

What's Bitcoin use case besides speculation?

Buying $10 worth of namecheap domain and pay $5 on fees no thanks!

Bypassing financial regulations, extortion, llicit substance trade and many other forms of small-time illegal activities. If you strip speculative value and all the technical gloss, what's left is essentially Liberty Reserve 2.0.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Reserve

P.S. Fees has actually got lower since the worst back in May, but there is no telling it won't happen again. Paying for anon hosting is not a bad idea but fewer providers are willing to provide it now - Vultr still accept bitcoin but require to have credit card on file as well due to abuse.

You forgot some:

-Peer to peer remote transactions

-Embed money into a binary, a puzzle, an image, a file

-The only money no one can take away from you, even states. Protection from governments like Greece

-Inflation hedge. Protection from governments like Venezuela.

-The only money no one can take away from you, even states. Protection from governments like Greece

except hackers, if they get their hands on your wallet.

Volume-wise, the biggest use case is speculation and store of wealth (just like gold in the physical world). By number of transactions it is gambling (eg poker), another one you forgot to list.

I will admit that I am not very familiar with the bitcoin gambling scene. It's hard to imagine that people will go through the trouble to bet with bitcoin when most places in the world with good infrastructure to support bitcoin also tend to have accessible gambling activities using fiat.

You could currently pay a fee of about 5 cents and be confirmed likely within 3 blocks.

https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

Not sure how you came up with 5 cents but I get $1.36: 4000 dollars/btc * 10^-8 btc/satoshi * 150 satoshi/byte * 226 bytes/transaction = $1.356 per transaction

If you wanted to get confirmed in the very next block you could probably use 25 satoshi/byte at this point in time. Personally, if I were sending a non critical/time-sensitive transaction right now I would use about 5 satoshi/byte.

This. I just bought 0.007 btc and sent it to a friend, and it cost less than 10 cents in fees overall.

Bitcoin is designed to be a decentralized store of value. A form of money that belongs to the people, as opposed to the banking sector.

That being said, I don’t think Bitcoin will become truly relevant (to the average saver) until either a) inflation picks up to a worrying degree, or b) negative interest start prevailing. When/if this happens, the advantages of a decentralized monetary unit will become obvious.

a decentralized, unseizable, cross-border, deflationary store of value. it's next-gen gold.

unstable and unusable. next-gen pyramid scheme

I sure hope so for your sake, because if the real bubble is fiat money, and you have 0 cryptocurrency, you are basically screwed.

If it comes to pass that "Not having crypto" = "screwed", then the chaos will be such that everyone's screwed, anyway.

Don't worry, people in hyperinflation countries also survive(d). So no need to worry.

As long as you have trust in your government for making the money, and the banks for multiplying it, you have nothing to worry about.

Gold wouldn't have this role if there was not substantial consumer and industrial demand for it.

The portion of gold's market cap attributable to consumer and industrial demand is miniscule compared to the portion attributable to its wealth protection function. Bitcoin is a better mousetrap for that use-case and the market is figuring that out.

The market's decision about what to use as a store of value is a market-wide Schelling point decision based not around "what asset has underlying value" as any underlying value is quickly dwarfed by the magnitude of the value that needs to be stored, but instead the Schelling point decision is based on what asset has the best properties for money. If you look at what has been money in the past, you'll see examples (like giant stones) that were clearly not based on underlying industrial demand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)

Bitcoin wouldn't have any value if there wasn't demand for it.

In the short term price and value don't have to align.

Bitcoin has existed for 9 years. While you are waiting we are reinventing how money works.

i don't think we are close to general ai, but bitcoin is a key ingredient for AI being independent. Currently, electronic banking requires a human in the loop, even for corporations.

at the very least, it's better than western union

Sending money is a good use case.

* would be * a good use case if it were reliable.

I don't want to say I'll transfer $1000 to someone and by the time the transfer is complete the vale has dropped/I need to wait 5 days for confirmation/ the bitcoin exchange has collapsed.

You don't need an exchange to make a bitcoin transaction, that's the whole point. It's decentralised.

Exchanges are only for trading your fiat currency for bitcoin.

Wow.. I think you guys should read financialcryptography.com before commenting

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