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Comment by dkersten | Hacker News Reader

> Well there isn't, and I mean it. They do way more harm than good.

Tell that to the Venezeulans who used bitcoin because their local currency is suffering from severe hyperinflation.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47553048

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/venezuela-bitcoin-story-puts-...

I've personally used bitcoin to send money between my brother and myself (he was in Australia at the time, I was in the EU) because it was both faster and cheaper than a bank transfer or western union.

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> I've personally used bitcoin to send money between my brother and myself (he was in Australia at the time, I was in the EU) because it was both faster and cheaper than a bank transfer or western union.

You do realise Bitcoin is unable to scale with a large volume of transactions, grinding it to almost a complete halt.

So even if Bitcoin reaches critical mass, your brother will be waiting a very very long time to receive their funds, all with extremely high fees. Questioning the use of Bitcoin would start and by then the BTC price would have gone down had a mass sell off occurred.

Not hypothetical by the way, actually happened only months ago. [0]

So how is this better than Paypal or Western Union?

https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/massive-bitcoin-selling-sp...

I always love the "grinding to a halt" metaphor because it's so terrible. Bitcoin average block times don't change when lots of people are using it, and neither does tx throughput. Nothing grinds to a halt.

> You do realise Bitcoin is unable to scale with a large volume of transactions, grinding it to almost a complete halt.

Please research the topic more, the Lightning Network solves this problem and is already being used with no issues in El Salvador.

> ...with no issues in El Salvador.

Sounds like this is a huge issue in El Salvador [0].

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57507386

Throughput in blockchain is solved. Just saying.

Any evidence or sources for this statement for it to be completely solved?

Or are you 'just saying this' because...?

Avalanche, algorand, solana, hashgraph, etc.

Listing random coins isn't sufficient evidence for your claim, back them up with links.

Since you claimed it's a solved problem, I am assuming these coins never had congestion issues which is why you chose them?

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