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Comment by Yajirobe | Hacker News Reader

> change the way the world works

Change how exactly? To me bitcoin seems like this:

Expectation: the world ditches banks, dollars, euros, etc. People switch to bitcoin and everyone lives happily, paying for everyday stuff with bitcoin.

Reality: people do not use bitcoin to buy groceries. In fact, people do not use bitcoin per se - people are only interested in buying and holding (speculating).

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I don't think any technology will ever be adopted in a drastic switch, but I can definitely see it happening gradually. Consider some future cloud hosting provider that accepts payment in cryptocurrency (not necessarily Bitcoin) - someone building a SaaS product could charge customers in that currency, and take advantage of financial instruments that are much more difficult to implement with traditional banking (micropayments, smart contracts, etc).

Bitcoin is not going to be able to scale to the world's population. A more accurate expectation at least for the US is that the financial system is rebuilt on web3. Every day people will be holding stable coins pegged to the USD in their bank accounts. The average Joe will not be able to tell the difference. He can still deposit dollars into his bank account and cash checks. He can still withdraw USD, or use a debit card / credit card to buy things.

We are still in the very early days of decentralized finance.

The idea that Bitcoin can only be useful if it completely replaces all existing financial instruments is a strawman

Its also popular as a means to withdraw resources from dictatorships, basically improving private property protections at the expense of state ability to control their population.

You mean "withdraw resources by dictatorships", not "from" dictatorships.

As a dictator, my goal is to fill my bank accounts for when I get deposed. In most cases, countries who have their resources fleeced have lawful means to go after former dictators. Bitcoin removes that.

How exactly someone can "withdraw resources from a dictatorship" using bitcoin?

People actually use Bitcoin - to transfer money across the world where other options are unavailable or too expensive. It's very popular in Africa.

> It's very popular in Africa.

Source? Africa has mPesa which is vastly superior than BTC

Remittances by traditional methods fell by 97% in Nigeria. Central bank had to ban Bitcoin.

Look it up. It's real.

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