In those 13 years it has proven to be nothing more than a Ponzi scheme for cryptobros and probably one of the most wasteful endeavours that humanity has ever started. One can only hope that the next 13 years kill it for good, either by imploding internally, or it being outlawed in every country that can.
Doesn't meet the requirement: New investor money to pay old investors.
Which is not to say it's problem free, but that problem is at the exchange level. Art suffers the same flaws. And Yachts. And on and on and on. That's why we have regulations.
Desperately need regulation at the fiat/crypto exchange
This means that if you want to cash out, you need someone else to invest their "new investor money" in Bitcoin.
It’s not.
Being pedantic for fun. Isn't all crypto currency already outlaws? They operate outside of all the financial laws and regulations we have. In fact I think some proponents are citing this as a feature.
No? Here in UK you can legally buy/sold/hold crypto. HMRC even tells you exactly how to pay taxes on it with official documents explaining the process.
The Satoshi protocol is not about money.
It is a distributed, trust-less consensus algorithm. Finance was just a good candidate to start with.
But we can expand that much further.
Some strange examples I hear about how this is silly:
"You can't have a smart contract act as an employer because it doesn't exist" But neither do companies? They're an abstraction that we agree exists, enforced by law.
It needs to be enforced by law because of the issue of trust.
But if I have a mechanism that removes trust (merkle trees) then what's the issue? The contract will do what it states it does because that's the only option it has.
Granted, it's a touch utopian and I'm not advocating for setting this system up tomorrow. But it's absolutely an achievable goal
Remember when ethereum forked, because a smart contract many people cared about actually specified something different in its code than what the humans intended it to mean? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization)
The problem I have with this line of reasoning is it does not consider the interface between on chain and real world realities. Some of it is easily doable, like money (if I have a token I have a token), but many are not at all easily doable like land use. I can write I have a piece of land on the chain but that does not give me any control over it. If I have to bring in the government to enforce land usage then why not let them do the owner tracking too? If they disagree with the blockchain its not like I can do anything about it.
That it is cool is I think pretty much accepted by everyone. The objection there being just because something is cool doesn't mean we do it especially if its at the detriment to the planet we live on.
That it is useful? If you have time, please make that case. To avoid having a flamewar over it, lets try to be concrete and cite an actual project (even if in progress)
True, but when energy is used to manufacture products or services. When you turn energy into money there's no progress involved and no new jobs are created. The only linked activities which would benefit would be energy creation and the manufacture of mining hardware. Everything else will suffer when more and more money will be diverted to buy more energy (whose prices will of course be dictated by the highest bidder) and more mining farms. Of course I expect people with vested interests in cryptocurrencies to not care at all.
And that’s just last month.
Bitcoin is a product. It autonomously provides a Service. Sound money. Hard money. Censorship resistance and decentralized peer to peer money. It’s ok if you still are skeptical, but don’t wait too long!
It’s ok if you don’t have a use for decentralized money. I hope you never need it, and continue a sheltered life of luxury and convenience.
For defending one's life savings, I'd recommend investing in productive enterprises rather than speculative and volatile get rich quick schemes, but to each their own.
For dissidents, crypto might be some small help, but not much. (For example, crypto did help WikiLeaks accept donations, but Julian Assange is still in prison.) Even with cryptocurrency, dissidents still need to reveal themselves in the act of protest.
Depends on what country you look at.
"Shiny metal, ug ug, me dig up".
Which is not to say gold has no practical use but let's not pretend that's the only reason why we're mining it