> Right, but if you're comparing apples to apples, you need to compare the cost of, say, going to Walmart.com (or a bunch of other places) with $1,000 and sending it to someone in India vs. starting with the same $1,000 and shipping it. Unless the conversion rates for gating in and out Bitcoin are always exactly the same you need to measure the whole cost.
Ya, but that only argues for even more cost to the traditional method, no?
> Note that I wasn't saying that there no things which were technically possible, only that very few people have a situation where it's advantageous to use Bitcoin. A possible modest savings on international transfers does not seem like a viable foundation for a decade of big world-changing rhetoric.
Let's take a look at what you said:
> We’ve been hearing this for a decade – it’ll change the world, if you don’t agree it’s because you don’t understand it well enough – and yet we don’t have a single example of it being competitive, much less compelling.
I'd say I provided a single example of it being competitive. And I think there's a lot more value there that isn't being properly realized yet, but the international wire use case is concrete and immediately available.
I think part of the reason people don't see the value (yet) is that they are so entrenched in the existing system they don't even realize what it's costing them. You see people on this site complaining about companies like Facebook violating their privacy rights all the time by aggregating their behavioral data. Do you know who's been doing that for decades? Credit card companies and banks. Nobody bats an eyelash when they do it, simply because they've been grandfathered in, and we had no reasonable alternative to them. Cryptocurrencies are a reasonable alternative to the banking / credit card system. And they're one that allows their users to maintain genuine autonomy and privacy. It's fine if you don't personally find that valuable, but the chorus of people here whining about corporate privacy violations ought to if they're concerns are more than performative.
> … so, you get rid of banks by creating a new bank, putting a “not a bank” sign on it, and hoping nobody will notice a) how many people have lost money by trusting Bitcoin exchanges and b) how quick the community was to blame them for the loss and saying that they were fools to trust an exchange?
This is a common criticism, but there is a very important difference. You cannot practically remove your money from the banking system. You can practically remove your crypto from an exchange. This gives you a degree of leverage and autonomy you simply don't have when your money is at say, Wells Fargo. You have a meaningful choice about where to keep your funds when you're dealing in crypto. You can keep them on an exchange and incur that risk, or you can hold them yourself and incur the risk that you'll lose them in some way. But you get to choose.