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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

To me, the fact that Bitcoin is a money out of the hands of governments, or anyone really, is the use case. It's also cool that you can use your brain to effectively store your money.

Of course, if you believe that governments are good stewards of money, you will probably not find a use case.

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The problem, though, is that you give up the benefits of working within a regulated system. Things like being able to stop or reverse mistaken or fraudulent transfers, protections from fraud, protections from whoever is handling your money for you (with crypto, someone is still handling your money for you) going out of business, etc.

Everything has an upside and a downside. But in the regulated system, you at least have a chance at some sort of recourse if something goes sideways.

By government's hands being out of Bitcoin, I was mostly referring to its fixed money supply and the fact that its "permissionless", like cash.

> Things like being able to stop or reverse mistaken or fraudulent transfers, protections from fraud, protections from whoever is handling your money for you (with crypto, someone is still handling your money for you) going out of business, etc.

That's only true when you do on-chain transactions, or in the case of fiat, when you pay with cash. If you worry about dispute arbitration, you could use the same dispute arbitration services that exist for fiat. For example, I don't see a reason why payment networks like Visa or Mastercard couldn't add support for Bitcoin eventually. You'd still get a currency that can't be arbitrarily debased and that you can easily transfer on and off the payment network.

As a side note, a lot of Bitcoiners would hate me for saying the above. A large chunk of the community believes that everything needs to be decentralized and it has probably hindered adoption.

visa and Mastercard can unilaterally reverse transactions whereas the entire point of crypto is that there's no centralized authority that can rewrite history

My point was that this is not the entire point of crypto.

Is it really? If you can't change it for goods and services before turning it back into regular, government controlled currency, is it out of the hands of governments? If China can get all the miners to move to Kazakhstan, were they ever out of government control?

> If you can't change it for goods and services ..

There is nothing preventing someone from accepting it and providing the services you need.

You may have answered your own question. You don't need to turn it back into fiat for it to be used in the long run. Lightning network makes txns quick and cheap, and BTC volatility has been going down enough that it isn't hard to imagine it being stabler short term against fiat (though long term it will gain value as fiat collapses)

btc volatility has been going down? is this a joke? it's worth a third of what it was less than a year ago.

plus every time I sell or transfer, it's a taxable event, which makes use as a currency incredibly onerous

The brain wallet part is very cool unless you’re like me, and don’t have a particularly good memory. “What was the sixth word of my mnemonic? Strand? Strait? Spleen? Oh God, what if I never recover my 35 Shibs…”

You don't have to believe that governments are good stewards of money. You have to believe that they are better stewards of money than Satoshi was when he decided on the mining curve.

As soon as it becomes big enough, the US govt has the power and ability to effectively 51% the entire network. They haven't yet only because it doesn't threaten the dollar.

or just, you know, make it illegal, immediately shutting down Coinbase and cutting off the law abiding 99% of the population from using it. What is the value of a Bitcoin after it's banned by one or more major countries?

So what? It would cost like 50+ billion dollars to censor the network for a few hours until the mining algorithm is changed.

You are aware of how fiat currency works, right? The government can create that money with as much friction as is present in their keyboards.

And anyway, they don't actually need to run any new nodes, just compromise communication between them until all the blockchain records on the individual nodes are bunk.

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