There is still quite a valley between feasibility of crypto currencies in real world settings, and the current state of affairs.
It's all part of technological maturation.
Bitcoin is more than 10 years old. That is almost as old as 1st generation iPhones. How much longer do we have to wait to fix these deeply fundamental flaws in the stack?
> It's all part of technological maturation.
An alternative interpretation might be that Bitcoin is fundamentally broken and isn't a useable technology.
A lot of developmental progress in the ecosystem with models/architectures, tools, and infrastructure hasn't happened until recently (past year, give or take).
I've been following Bitcoin for almost its entire life and am probably vastly more informed than most of the shysters who show up on sites like HN to shill their coin.
> A lot of developmental progress in the ecosystem with models/architectures, tools, and infrastructure hasn't happened until recently (past year, give or take).
I've heard this line forever. Lightning network, for example, has been "just around around the corner" since forever. So far, it is still just as "just around the corner" as it was 5 or 6 years ago and ranks among the top all-time vaporware software projects out there.
The attempt to refocus on "The Blockchain" is only done to distract from the fact that Bitcoin, poster child of "The Blockchain" has no lawful use. It doesn't scale, it isn't free, it isn't trustless, it isn't censorship resistant, it isn't a good store of value, it isn't instant and it isn't anonymous. It isn't even deflationary (as if that is a good thing) because it has been forked and cloned thousands of times. Oh yeah, it also requires more energy than small nations to secure. (And don't feed me the line about it being "green energy" or "less than conventional banking"–we both know that is a laugably horseshit argument)
The whole space is a joke. Aside from self-driving cars, Bitcoin will be the biggest overhyped pile of complete nonsense this decade.
The paper was released April 2015. Progress is definitely slower than I'd like, but wanted to correct this claim.
[ Disclaimer: lightning developer and specification guide ]
>For you to center the conversation around those arguments shows you're not very informed on the topic.
The "it's too complicated for you to understand" tact is a tired, overly-used canned response from cryptocurrency evangelists, who seek (intentionally or not) to derail discussions about very real issues.
Who exactly am I cutting out when I'm trading USD-backed currency via a smart contract owned by a company?
Computers the size of tennis courts made a lot of sense when those were the fastest, cheapest way of calculating ballistics tables.
This line has been the standard party line in Bitcoin land since time began. Everything about bitcoin is "just around the corner".
All of your talk is a thin veil around the hidden message: "don't sell your Bitcoin or it will crater the value of my stash!" and of course layered under that message is "buy my Bitcoin!!!!".
Again, its been like 10+ years now of 'cryptocurrencies' and its failed to provide a use case apart from 'speculating' and getting yourself uninvited from family Christmas.
1. Paying for a VPN, VPS, mail, domains or other digital goods.
2. Paying for physical goods. I usually buy via the Swedish sites webhallen and inet for example.
3. Dark net markets.
4. EatBCH charity which give food to Venezuelans.
5. Cam sites accepting Bitcoin. First search result: https://www.bestwebcamsites.com/bitcoin-cam-sites
* chmuranet.com (VPS focused on torrents but you get root)
* njal.la (domains with privacy focus)
* mullvad.net (VPN)
There are others if you search but I can't vouch for them.
... And also don't immediately convert it to dirty legacy fiat using a third party service?
I would hope that someone who owns 200 BTC would put a little thought into how to secure it and would not be affected by this hack.
This would be the social prudence equivalent of walking around 24/7 with all of your life savings in cash.
It's possible to implement chargebacks on a smart-contract platform, or even at layer 0 as EOS and XRP do. What's so bad about the possibility of marrying the benefits of cash with the convenience of electronic money ?
Why bother replying to comments in threads about cryptocurrency if they don't have any benefit ? Clearly now that cryptocurrency long speculators have pretty much all died, cryptocurrency should just disappear by itself if it doesn't have any use over fiat. Or do you not believe in your own opinion ?
Am I not allowed to post if I think cryptocurrencies are useless?
> Clearly now that cryptocurrency long speculators have pretty much all died, cryptocurrency should just disappear by itself if it doesn't have any use over fiat. Or do you not believe in your own opinion
Why don't you just articulate some of the benefits instead of invoking bloviated sarcasm? The argument that "bitcoin exists so it must be useful" is pretty obviously fallacious logic.
My apologies if you weren't being intentionally disingenuous though, in that case, here's a link with what seems like good answers to your question: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-advantages-of-Cryptocurre...
Posting a page full of quora answers as your response is not a practical way to have a discussion. If you have a point to make I encourage you to lay it out here so that I can address it, I am not going to spend time constructing a response to a page of quora answers you took 30 seconds looking up on google.
It's just a lack of fake enthusiasm coming from stakeholders in the cryptocurrency community (mostly longs/business owners).
Many people who were wrong about the dot-com bubble still think they were right. Some external agent just screwed them.
People don't tend to change their views about stuff like cryptocurrencies. The best we can expect is a wealth transfer to saner minds.