>But until Bitcoin there was no real way to do cash-like transactions electronically.
There was Venmo and all the other small cash transfer apps. BTC is decentralized but that's of questionable worth to an end user.
The entire point is Bitcoin is like "cash for the Internet" in that once I hand someone $20 in BTC it's just like handing them $20 in physical cash. I have no third party either telling me I can't make that transaction, or with the ability to reverse the transaction after the fact. This is a feature, not a bug.
Anything to disintermediate financial institutions that like to apply political and corporate policy on who I can conduct business with is a good thing in my opinion. This means my options when the third party frauds me are the traditional options employed by folks dealing with cash transactions since money was invented. I can sue them in court, forget about it, or round up some friends with lead pipes.
I think many folks completely miss the point. Cash is useful. Cashless society is about the worst dystopia I can imagine - with unaccountable third parties and government able to track your every spending move, while simultaneously applying their political or legal policy to every transaction. Bitcoin's first step into introducing cash-like digital currency is the innovation, and it clearly is needed. Certainly not perfect (privacy could be far better, security is a real problem, etc.) - but it's far better than anything that had previously come along.
Comparing venmo to bitcoin is simply not a comparison - they solve entirely different problems. Venmo lets you send money from your bank account to another bank account with all those political and legal restrictions applied to your transaction. Bitcoin effectively lets you send cash to anyone you want, in any amount, and no one can stop that transaction from happening because they didn't like the person you are sending it to or what you were buying.
I do agree most users do not have the same concerns so the use case is far more limited than the hype. I do also still see a lot of value in "digital cash" as a whole, but I never really bought the whole store of value argument and the raft of grifters it attracted.
Yep. Gotta agree with Jayd16 here, if you still need law enforcement, (ie - government), then bitcoin is not useful for operating without trust. The breathless hype about bitcoin was not just the technology level "distributed ledger" thing, but also the idea that you could do things independent of the system. If you still need the system to make it all work, then it definitely fails on the latter hype point.
Bitcoin is independent of the "system" but that doesn't mean you don't still need some system. You're just not locked in to any particular system. Using bitcoin doesn't automatically make you an anarchist.