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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

Except that that's already failed; it's used as an investment product, a get-rich-quick scheme, dealing in illegal products and services, untraceable exchange of currency (e.g. ransomware) and money laundering. Nobody pays with crypto. Except people that made a lot of money off of crypto and have a vested interest in its success.

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If you look at transaction number and volume it has been basically constantly rising, so I'm not really sure what you're on about. "Haven't replaced all other currencies in all use cases" is not the same thing as "has failed".

If you look at transaction number and volume it has been basically constantly rising,

I wonder what percentage of those transactions are generated by people trading in cryptocurrencies vs them actually being used as a 'currency'.

Some 2 years ago quite a few services and shops were trying out bitcoin and offering it as an actual option for real-world payments. This trend has reversed, new offers are very rare and many companies who offered it in 2017 don't support it any more, as for any 'normal' business the amount of Bitcoin transactions they got (wherever I've talked with them) was extremely low after the initial buzz at launch.

The current number of transactions is not constantly rising. The current short term trend (https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactions.ht...) is downwards. It's now about the same or less than it was in peaks of 2017 and early 2018, and whatever the growth in 2018-early 2019 was made of, it doesn't seem to be in consumer purchases of goods and services (i.e. being used as a currency).

Sure, because it's still unstable, as more and more people use it the price will become increasingly stable.

> Except that that's already failed; it's used [...] dealing in illegal products and services

This actually is a currency use case. It's an illegal one, but it's a really useful one.

It's not clear to me that it's a use case that requires a blockchain, but i don't think there are currently any viable competitors.

Is it, though? I'm not saying I buy a lot of street drugs, but I know some people who know some people who do, and have literally never seen or heard mention of Bitcoin for this.

You know what I have seen being used, that surprised the hell out of me at first? Venmo.

Turns out people buy their friends a lot of sushi.

Interesting. I know of one person who mail-orders interesting things, and uses bitcoin for that.

I've heard that anecdotally too, and tbh I would never ingest something a stranger sent me in the mail. I'm sure it's mostly fine, but there's a level of trust that whisper networks provide that is simply absent in an online setting. Heck, bitcoin itself purports to do exchanges in a trustless setting; trustless is the last environment you want to have for things you're putting in your body.

Actually darknet drug sites do have a review system, it's not like people just order randomly.

I've been buying drugs on the street and online for many years and online crushes IRL, just like it does for legal commerce. Online reviews have helped me always get top notch quality and exactly the product I expect. The street can't come close.

Illegal products is an enormous market.

It doesn't look like it's failed from where I'm standing.

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