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Comment by jey | Hacker News Reader

How do you know that? Are you judging based on a representative sample of all uses of cryptocurrency, or the uses you hear about?

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If there are any large scale positive uses of cryptocurrency, I'm sure that we would have heard of them by now; The proponents would have shouted them from the rooftops.

That said, proponents do have a shot at enlightening us (me and other viewers of the thread). What large scale positive application are you aware of?

The main one I know of is international money transfers (remittances). Usually these have to go through an oligopoly that sets the fees and exchange rates to be favorable to itself. This is the kind of market that's pretty big on the international scale, but it's completely boring and non-sensational to read about a bunch of people who are sending $400 to their moms on a regular basis.

As far as I know, nearly everyone uses Western Union (Transferwise etc. etc.) for that. Bitcoin is too costly* and complicated for most people.

* Two set of fees to exchange crypto to fiat + transfer fee compared to one set of fiat currency exchange + transfer fee.

I recall these services used to be pretty crap, bitcoin added a bit of much needed competition

BTC is not the only cryptocurrency used there. I've sent LTC and XRP most often, but XMR lately. tx fees need not be large (also Lightning Network exists).

But you're making an assumption here that both the sender and recipient will be using fiat currency in the end, and that crypto is only being used as means to make the transfer. This is not necessarily true.

IMHO, it's a pretty reasonable assumption, as very few businesses agree to be paid in crypto directly.

It's great for bypassing mass censorship. Wikileaks, Hatreon, 4chan are all prominent examples.

https://wikileaks.org/Banking-Blockade.html

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