I think we're approaching a trough of disillusionment with cryptocurrency. There's been a flurry of critical articles, crackdowns, and widespread disillusionment with crummy ICOs.
It's been 8 years now and the use cases for Bitcoin / CC haven't changed. You can buy illegal things and an incredibly small number of real things you can also buy with real money. There is nothing you can do with Bitcoin / CC that you can't do with real money. Nothing you can do that you couldn't do 5 years ago. Nothing new on the horizon. The only reason Bitcoin exists is because if you google "bitcoin price" it says a big number. There is nothing in the ecosystem except that number, and anyone whose entire ego isn't directly tied to that number has no interest in it.
States where the sale of a cup of coffee doesn't involve a tax.
I live in the UK, there's no sales tax and the sole trader selling coffee at my local railway station is almost certainly below the VAT registration threshold, so there's no tax on the purchase at all
regardless, paying a tax embedded in the price of a good is not the same thing as consulting the government on the purchase
But if you don't like even that much, then replace "cup of coffee" with "lemonade from a neighborhood lemonade stand".
Gold would like to have a word with you... And seashells. And giant stone coins. And on and on and on.
In fact, as far as history goes, government backed fiat currency is a very recent invention.
Real money is in your control, money on an account not necessarily.
If I wanted a store of value that's really real and keep it under my control, I would much rather store up on gold, canned food, and bullets. Even among these three, only one (food) has any intrinsic value and everything else is social convention.
I think in terms of new technical details there are lots of cool stuff. Atomic cross chain transfers are starting in earnest, LN is looking more and more real, zcash style tx might land in ETH. In technical terms that's all awesome, but new use cases do those allow?
They typically just allow the same use cases, but slightly better and cheaper. Those aren't the things that are holding back new use cases.
If predicting that unimaginable benefits will flow from this space, analagous to the early days of the web when people's understandable first ideas were to put newsletters & mail-order catalogs online, makes me sound like a naive blockchain cultist, so be it; but then again, what forum am I on right now?
Yes, that is what belief without reason looks like.
Without malice aforethought I had given them the best show that was ever staged in their territory since the landing of the Pilgrims!
It was easily worth fifteen million bucks to watch me put the thing over." - Charles Ponzi
I too can quote the thing I believe Bitcoin is most like. I can even reason about it: Bitcoin is like a Ponzi scheme because the only value comes from selling at a higher price than you buy it for before it hits zero. Because no value is being created, only moved around, for anyone to make money they have to get out before everyone left loses everything.
Why do you think Bitcoin is like the internet, aside from the fact that the internet was not believed to be valuable, and it turned out to be; and Bitcoin is not believed to be valuable? Many things are not believed to be valuable, they do not all become the internet.
You can sent [it] anywhere in the world at a reduced cost and faster speed vs the old way.
You can send [it] to anyone without anyone's permission*
You can back [it] up in multiple electronic locations.
[it] is resistant to censorship*
. . . and so on. Like the Internet, it's not invincible. States can degrade it if they choose to make the effort. But why would they, if it were valueless? Just to protect investors from an evil Ponzi scheme? OK - let's assume that's the case.
Isn't gold a Ponzi by your definition? If you say no, it's not because of the collective idea that gold is a store of value, it's because of this or that industrial/practical application, I respectfully disagree.
I'm sure if you think hard enough about it you can imagine some actual value from programmable money. Here's a start, this guy does a better job than me of articulating just some of them:
Funny how this premise is completely true but his prediction fell completely flat.
It turned out that most economic impact didn't come from people talking to each other but making it possible for people to part with their money when "talking" to machines.
In that regard I see a very bright future cryptocurrencies that enable machines to pay other machines automatically and programmaticaly.
There's obviously interesting things you can do with smart contracts when they're actually tied to real world events, but for that you need oracles. That hasn't been figured out as far as I can tell.
I personally think that there will be innovation soon. In the next couple years there'll be a CC that establishes a storage market, once there is a robust storage market we could start to see serious attempts at selling compute time for something useful.
It's possible normal tx could be disrupted by CCs at some point, but that day is very far away. Even in legal cash only markets we haven't seen businesses adopt CCs.
Bitcoin's scope is deliberately limited and focused on being a currency. Other cryptocurrencies have a wider scope and more potential utility.
2008: Satoshi posts a paper to mailing list, nearly everyone declares the idea non-workable.
2009-2010: Satoshi releases software, no one cares. People throw away wallets with mined coins.
2011: A 8-month decline after the first speculative bubble.
2012: "Nothing" really happens price-/news-wise, only minor bubble from $5 to $15 to $10.
2013-2014: A year-long price decline in '14 after mtgox fallout, after the second and third big Bitcoin bubbles in '13.
2015-2016: Price went up from $250 to $1000 among the news talking how "Bitcoin is not cool, DLTs/R3/private blockchains are more interesting".
2017: Price continued from $1000 to $4000. Bitcoin is now finally entering a "trough of disillusionment".
What on earth would define success? It's like nothing is ever enough for you people.
If you look at the bottom of [1], you'll see it's pretty hard to get just a "volume" metric as well.
People using it as a currency.
i.e. having some practical value.
It was meant as an electronic CURRENCY, something that you can use as a payment for every day items.
Currently it's similar to Tulip Mania[1].
It might be okay for domain specific uses but for general purpose currency use it's awful. If the world ran on Bitcoin as presently implemented we would enter a permanent depression.
(Too much inflation is also really bad, but Bitcoin definitely doesn't have that problem.)
I'm very bullish on the idea of cryptocurrencies and the technology of block chains, but I regard Bitcoin as kind of a proof of concept toy. It's version 0.1 alpha of something that might someday change the world.