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> This is a genuine question - should anyone take cryptocurrency seriously? To me, the only purpose of it is to make money. It's the stock market, but with less rules, and it's 24/7.

I would say no. It's a technology that serves no practical purpose, since the problems it addresses are ones purely created by certain peculiar ideologies. If you're not indulging in one of those ideologies, there's no point. And, like you mentioned, it doesn't even succeed at addressing those problems. A virtual technology can't free you from real-world power, because it's dependent on the real world and can be attacked there, where it's weak.

From outside those peculiar ideologies, something like Bitcoin is like an application written so badly that it's like 486 PC that requires as much energy as Argentina to run. Why should anyone want something like that?

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No practical purpose EXCEPT for the ability to easily take assets across borders to leave authoritarian regimes, bringing a form of storing assets to the 2 billion or so unbanked individuals of the world, and comparatively cheap remittances for people sending money back to their families in another country. These are just a few of the incredibly practical use cases that quite literally change people's lives.

> easily take assets across borders to leave authoritarian regimes

How do you get your assets converted to crypto in the first place, if an authoritarian regime prevent you from having something akin to a bank account?

> comparatively cheap remittances for people sending money back to their families in another country

According to cryptofees.net, BTC transaction fees average 4% and ETH 1.6%. Even the median fees are pretty high when compared for example to Wise.com and there you only have fees when converting currencies.

> bringing a form of storing assets to the 2 billion or so unbanked individuals of the world

This is a fair point, but I would argue that people who are unbanked are not the kind of people who will find it easy to securely manage crypto keys and wallets.

> According to cryptofees.net, BTC transaction fees average 4%

That site hasn't been updated in almost a year. (Check the prices and recent transactions it links to.)

Here's a more accurate way to estimate bitcoin's fees. Go to mempool.space and look at the current estimated Low/Medium/High priority fees. That is based on current pending transactions and most of the time, unless you are in a hurry, "Low" is enough to get a transaction confirmed in the next hour.

At current writing, and for most of the past year, those fees are a few cents.

And this is the expensive way to transact bitcoin -- on-chain! Nowadays most commerce is moving to the layer-2 Lightning Network, where transactions are instant and typically nearly free via payment channels that are settled on-chain in the future.

Thanks for correcting this. Can you explain the layer-2 network? Is this a separated kind of chain?

Lightning Network is a "layer 2" on top of "layer 1" bitcoin. The short summary is that it allows two parties to conduct lots of transactions and, when one of them decides they are done, the final balance is committed to the bitcoin blockchain rather than every single one of the transactions. These channels can also be used to forward payments to others, which means that depending on your Lightning node's connections you are able to transact in this way with many thousands of parties beyond just the ones you are directly connected to.

Each channel sets their own rates so the cost of transacting this way varies but it usually comes out to a very tiny amount, much less than 0.1%.

This is a pretty good overview with more detail: https://cointelegraph.com/bitcoin-for-beginners/what-is-the-...

The network has grown a ton in the past year and apps like CashApp and Strike now support it.

All of those things that make it easy to move money out of authoritarian regimes also make it easy to move money into them - see the recent North Korea hack.

Turns out that when you purposefully build a system without any guardrails or oversight, then bad actors will find exploits and there will be no way to stop them. Regulation and oversight might be good things, actually.

Most of our lived-in systems have very little in the way of guardrails or oversight. We maintain our safety and happiness through a social contract, not absolute enforceability of law.

The "exploits" you're describing were possible 20 years ago through various other methods (unregulated banking, cash in briefcases, etc). The new thing is government and police having a much greater degree of control over monetary systems.

I think crypto is failing at most of its promises and it's still unclear whether it will ever live up to any of them. But rah-rah celebration of government being able to monitor and halt anything it wants to is not the way to go, either; it's actually a literal doomsday scenario (Vernor Vinge has written about this, among others).

How would Bitcoin work for a sanctioned authoritarian regime like north Korea? Who would they trade it with for useful currency or goods? It's not like they can just create a Coinbase account and cash in the Bitcoin for USD.

Perhaps not, but they can sell their crypto reserves to other actors who are in a position to exchange them, for stuff that's actually useful to them.

> Except for the ability to easily take assets across borders to leave authoritarian regimes, bringing a form of storing assets to the 2 billion or so unbanned individuals of the world, and cheap remittances for people sending money back to their families in another country. These are just a few worth mentioning because they quite literally change people's lives.

I'm not disputing you can still do work on a 486 PC that requires as much power as Argentina; the question is why would you want to when a regular PC works just as well or even better?

Also, most of those use-cases break down in practice at the intersection with the real world. Sure if you've got some Bitcoin and an internet connection (and a big HD to store the blockchain), you can transfer it around to your heart's content. But how (for instance) are you supposed to get Bitcoin for your authoritarian-regime fiat? Wire it to Binance? That defeats the point. Why would you use Bitcoin as a store of value, when there are better, less volatile alternatives like the dollar, the euro, or even gold? When you work through the particulars, there's not that many cases where Bitcoin actually makes sense to use, from a practical perspective.

And providing significant funding of the North Korean regime to keep crushing people under their boots.

This isn’t happening and it’s not the purpose.

“Unbanked” is an imaginary word. If a person is “unbanked”, it’s likely that they are also “uninternetted” and/or “uncomputered.”

And even more, "unmonied".

That's really not true. You'll find a lot more people with no bank account than you will with no internet access at all. Many of the poorest in the world still have at least a cheap cell phone with some internet access.

There are actually "unbanked" Africans, according to this article they just use their mobile provider's feature of credit transfer to bank that way: https://archive.ph/imZOj - it allows them to buy and sell things and settle debts by transferring digital money between phone numbers.

But probably not good enough for the crypto-bros, it's a centralized system!!1!!

> These are just a few of the incredibly practical use cases that quite literally change people's lives.

I've heard this for a decade now but no one ever gives any evidence. Where are all these people with changed lives who aren't affluent white guys?

X: there are no use cases

Y: here are the use cases

X&Z: let's downvote and be negative anyway.

Welcome the usual crypto discussions on HN. Why do people still bother?

> X: there are no use cases

> Y: here are the use cases

You misunderstand. My gist was there were no practical use cases, and the response was to enumerate some impractical ones. I think the thing that confuses some people is that (like cryptography) some of the biggest problems are on the onramps and offramps, not in the core technology itself.

> X&Z: let's downvote and be negative anyway.

It's right an proper to be negative about something that doesn't really work (when compared against alternatives), especially when that thing is as overhyped as cryptocurrency is.

If it actually worked, the value would be obvious, and wouldn't need to be constantly justified by the kind of contrived use cases that are usually offered.

Like I said, if someone comes with an obvious use case, and you claim it's not a use case, or however you want to twist your words ( impractical use case or whatever), well, then the discussion ends right there. What else do you want to discuss then?

> Like I said, if someone comes with an obvious use case, and you claim it's not a use case, or however you want to twist your words ( impractical use case or whatever), well, then the discussion ends right there. What else do you want to discuss then?

Did you not read the comment where outlined some of the holes in those use cases?

Here's a gist of how these coversations usually go:

>>>> We should use literal bricks as currency.

>>> That sounds dumb and pointless.

>> No it isn't. Here's an obvious use case: if you want to buy something from me, you can push over a wheelbarrow of bricks to make the exchange. This is superior to fiat because it's hard currency, and far more difficult to steal than banknotes or even precious metal coins. No way the government can confiscate it, it's too heavy. IT'S THE FUTURE OF MONEY!!1!

> That doesn't make any sense. It's a PITA to cart around bricks, banknotes and coins are way more convenient. Also the government has trucks.

If it has a $2T market cap and people are actually using it for that usecase, what the fuck are you arguing then?

But like I said before, these kinds of discussions are totally useless.

You don't get the usecase, fine, no problem, move on already, there is no point of discussing this any longer.

> If it has a $2T market cap and people are actually using it for that usecase, what the fuck are you arguing then?

Market cap doesn't mean squat here. The one use case that cryptocurrency has satisfied is being a speculative investment.

If some true-believer dude claims he's actually carting around brick-bux in a wheelbarrow and that it's great for buying things (and maybe occasionally actually making a transaction), that doesn't actually mean it's a good choice for that use case. It just means that guy isn't making very good decisions (or is dishonest).

> But like I said before, these kinds of discussions are totally useless.

No. There's quite a lot of utility in disputing BS, because that has a chance of eventually making it go away.

> You don't get the usecase, fine, no problem, move on already, there is no point of discussing this any longer.

I do understand the use case, I just think the application of cryptocurrency to it is BS. If you think there's no point discussing it, you're welcome to stop.

> You don't get the usecase

Another possibility is that they get the use-case and consider it worthless. As we have seen repeatedly in this space, popularity seems to have no correlation with technical viability, so this "$2 trillion can't be wrong" argument lacks solidity.

If some people are actually using it as a means to store value outside governments reach, then you might dislike the usecase as much as you like. People are using it that way, so it's a valid usecase. Like I said, there is not much to discuss here anyway.

Edit: if you are not willing to admit that crypto allows you to store or move value outside of governments reach, then there is 0 reason to discuss further. And it doesn't even matter at that point who is wrong or not.

Easily: just need the energy consumption of a medium sized country

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