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Comment by etr-strike | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin is under perpetual innovation:

Here it is yesterday performing a lightning transaction on mainnet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a73Gz3Tvx3k

Here's an implementation of Ethereum smart contracts running as a bitcoin sidechain on mainnet: https://www.rsk.co/

Here's Greg Maxwell discussing scaling while keeping the network decentralized: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHIuuKCm53o

Bitcoin has been taken as a joke for 9 years by anyone unwilling to actually learn about it. It's come a long ways since Mt Gox and is arguably the freest market in existence. There are online exchanges in every major country that run 24/7. You can trade without an exchange at all using localbitcoins.com. Anyone is allowed to participate and no one can manipulate the fundamental rules of the currency.

Keep living in denial.

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But what can I actually buy with it? It's not really useful for anything.

How is censorship free money not useful for something.

You've got an entire darknet, you've got 80% of the world's population living in areas where censorship resistance is valuable. Chinese wanting capital flight, inflation infested countries looking for an alternative, areas of high political risk and instability.

To say its not really useful for anything is just facetious. Bubble sure, tech isn't there yet sure, no future use cases, now that's definitely not true. Will the use cases be worth 400 billion, that's a better question.

"Will the use cases be worth 400 billion" is not the better question, it is the whole question. For a potential investor in this moment it doesn't really matter if in the end Bitcoin turns out to have a market cap of 4 billion or 0, in both cases they've lost (almost) all that they invested.

Yes, censorship free money is useful for some people for some purposes - but most people in most purposes won't be willing to pay a single cent extra for this feature; if I'm buying a sandwich for lunch, I'm not going to buy it with censorship free money unless that service is better on its own disregarding the censorship issue, and BTC-as-it-is-now is not better in other aspects nor is it cheaper. While a lot of people might want a few such transactions for some special needs, those transactions are the edge cases that constitute a tiny, tiny fraction of the daily global commerce.

> you've got 80% of the world's population living in areas where censorship resistance is valuable

Setting aside the fact that censorship is not a technical problem but a political and societal one, Bitcoin's max transaction rate is so pathetically low that if 80% of the world's population used Bitcoin, they'd be lucky to make a single transaction every 45 years! Bitcoin can't even scale to what would be required to service a single football stadium during halftime.

> To say its not really useful for anything is just facetious

It's useful for anything illegal -- money laundering, drugs, murder for hire, etc. And even then, the traceability, extreme volatility, and long confirmation times make Bitcoin a poor choice for even the sketchiest of mob bosses.

Bitcoin's primary use case is scamming naive, starry-eyed libertarians, an-caps, and goldbugs out of their hard earned dirty fiat.

(source: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(5.7+billion+transacti...)

Newegg takes Bitcoin...... so electronics?

You can also buy fiat currency (dollars, euro, yen).

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is....

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