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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

>How can any financial instrument/currency make everybody "rich", in any real terms?

By organizing economic activity in a more efficient way than our present system of centrally planned debt supplies. That's what currency is "for" - organizing real activities.

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So what kinds of economic activities, besides ransom, drug sales and donations to wikileaks and others not liked by u.s. government does bitcoin facilitate? Remittances to countries under repressive economical regime or under embargo?

Not saying those are good or bad, just aiming to quantify the market size.

The potential of cryptocurrency is a lot brighter than the potential of Bitcoin. The right investment to make in cryptocurrency isn't buying it, it's thinking about it and economics to try to figure out how it can be gainfully used. Ethereum has many potential applications and so may be worth buying, but only if you have a use for it. (The price of every asset is such that buying it is a martingale.)

BTC isn't even truly decentralized - it's Chinese.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1200477/bitcoin-mining-b...

This summer, China banned Bitcoin mining, which resulted in a temporary drop in the hash rate. We're almost back where we were before the ban: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate

That speaks volumes about how resilient Bitcoin's ecosystem is.

Bitcoin isn't Chinese. Bitcoin doesn't belong to any country, nation, tribe, political party, institution, or person at all.

If you cut past the gold rush and speculative bubble, the current uses are pretty mundane fintech stuff. Deposit savings, take out loans, &c.

I get that, at some high level; but I'm not really seeing any of the current coins being actively used as currencies as much as investment / static store of value. They all look more like Gold than Dollar, to my ignorant eye

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