The fact that a lot of people care about blockchains and are willing to make speculative bets on them doesn’t mean that the idea is actually useful for much.
The FAANGs at least have made some real products, some of which some people find useful.
But Facebook hasn't succeeded. It was supposed to do something useful but all it does is mine data for ads. They were supposed to connect everyone but all they did was corrupt our political system.
But Apple hasn't succeeded. It was supposed to do something useful but all it does is pump out a new Iphone color every year and remove a port. They were supposed to revolutionize computing but all the did was figure out how to sell shiny junk made by poor people in developing markets to middle class people in developing markets.
See how easy it is to play that game?
Somehow I'm guessing most people who like bitcoin in 2011 aren't reeling from the failure of bitcoin.
Comparing the usefulness of Bitcoin to Google Search or the smartphone is asinine.
> Somehow I'm guessing most people who like bitcoin in 2011 aren't reeling from the failure of bitcoin.
Of course not — they’re all extremely wealthy. That’s irrelevant to the discussion; I’m sure the author of this piece understands that Bitcoin has increased in value, but that’s not at all what the piece is about.
Turns out that various people may find all of these various things either useful or not useful because it is subjective.
No quasi-governmental agency can unilaterally decide to print gobs more of it & drive inflation through the roof...
Or Monero. It's a bit more stable since people use it as a currency more often.
You have options, which pretty much depend on what that person wants to receive. It's not that big of a deal guys, stop the hate. It's a bit childish really
Gmail, docs, sheets, slides, drawings, calendar and geez just 1000 other things disagree with you. Yeah I know the ad network is paying for that stuff: that's the bargain that people who use their ecosystem of software products have made, just as people on Apple's ecosystem accept their tradeoffs. It just seems extremely cynical to suggest Google has done, or is doing, nothing useful. If there was no utility flowing the other way in return for the eyeballs and profile data I don't think they'd have a business.
It is, without a doubt, successful.
You can also buy tons of stuff with USD. The only innovation of Bitcoin is that it allows you to do illegal stuff.
A more expensive and cumbersome way to do what you could already do with other tools is not “success”.
> You can transfer it around the world basically for free (transaction fees amount to the equivalent of pennies no matter how much you send).
This is also true of, for example, TransferWise.
> It’s immutable
This actually makes it worse than the existing financial system, because being able to reverse fraudulent transactions is a feature, not a bug.
> It’s gained widespread adoption, a while economy, thousands of businesses.
Also true of USD. You still haven’t demonstrated any advantage of Bitcoin other than illegal transactions.
Not for small to large amounts for less than pennies
>A more expensive and cumbersome way to do what you could already do with other tools is not “success”.
You're vastly underestimating the amount of people trapped in regimes where they cannot spend their funds abroad or risk having them devalued at whim.
doesn't that describe a lot of cryptocurrencies? or are you suggesting the people in these regimes use cryptocurrencies as an intermediary to transfer their local currency into more stable foreign currency?
What percent of those business denominate their prices in bitcoin?
What percent of those businesses do anything but immediately convert the bitcoin back into fiat the moment they take possession?
To move money out of an authoritarian country, you have to know someone who wants to move money in. The only reason it works at all is because the total amount of Bitcoin doing this is comparatively very small compared to local corruption and mining which can support this use case.
To make this transaction someone else in your local authoritarian country has to have Bitcoin, and be willing to exchange it for local currency. It's no huge surprise a lot of mining power ended up in China, because of course this is a transaction you do not want to do in China: you want to originate Bitcoin and then get some Americans to pay you nice clean USDs into bank accounts outside of China.
Which of course works because electricity consumption in China is relatively unsuspect (or was: naturally China has cracked down on this and is having ongoing power shortages to boot).
Which of course creates a weird compromise: if Bitcoin is good at getting money out of authoritarian countries, then either you're outsourcing to someone who can move currency around locally, or you are outsourcing an increasing fraction of the Bitcoin mining compute, and thus control of the network.
Or Internet Computer, which is more or less a blockchain equivalent of the internet allowing you to for example host a website on it versus say AWS or GoDaddy, which has some potentially very positive benefits for data security and users being able to manage their own data as practical benefits.
https://messari.io/article/an-introduction-to-dfinity-and-th...
I'm not really a big fan of crypto, but you do have to admit that some of the projects would do some good for the world when they catch on.
I would love to have an easy system to distribute ML models and databases for projects without having to pay AWS fees for example.
> but you do have to admit that some of the projects would do some good for the world when they catch on.
The will not catch on because they are useless for real world use. The most cost efficient way to do processing or data storage is within someones datacenter.
> I would love to have an easy system to distribute ML models and databases for projects without having to pay AWS fees for example.
I would love a free meal as well. It does not make sense for me to expect free lunches though.
How is this any better than S3, which lets me rent storage space in exchange for USD?
There's an entire blockchain-based industry being built in the gaming space as we speak, to allow player to trade NFT's (unique items in games).
There are many more.
> other than illegal money transfers
To address your point more directly: depending on the regime you live under, illegal money transfers are a life-saving device, so just that use case makes Bitcoin worth it.
You missed the "provably fair" part.
It's true that if your measuring stick is toilet paper, the current price of Bitcoin doesn't tell you much.
> b) has been up till now
Past performance is no guarantee of future ... etc
Sure, that's what every traditional investment prospectus says in the first paragraph. They usually then proceed to explain how well they've been doing and why you should therefore invest.
There is something called Baye's rule. Ignore it at your own (opportunity cost) risk.