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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

For actual use of Bitcoin I don't think the value even matters. You buy it, transact it, and the seller sells it immediately. It doesn't matter what the value was as long as it doesn't change in between this process.

In my perspective the only real use of bitcoin is transferring money where you can't use traditional payment providers.

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How do you quickly buy and sell it at an agreed price without going through a traditional payment provider?

It's the same thing, you're just adding a lot of steps with a ton of overhead.

There is a pretty common situation where your operation is legal and you can use some form of financial service but you can't have the provider be publicly known. Say you are a political related org and you need to accept donations. You can't use paypal, stripe, etc because those platforms will receive enough complaints that they will de platform you, but you can take crypto and sell it later in a way the complainers can't work out who to complain to.

This doesn't strictly have to be some instantaneous automated buy and sell. You could accept some % of loss but you don't want to hold for more than a day.

If buyer and seller are both willing to hold value in bitcoin, you can just do the math and send that amount with a thin client - super simple.

If either party wants to hedge their exposure to bitcoin volatility, it gets more complicated.

So... money laundering and drug deals (again) are the only valid use cases?

There are _some_ cases where the transaction is legal but can't run through traditional payment networks. I agree it's quite a slim use case, a bit like downloading linux ISOs over bittorrent. But it does exist.

I've used crypto for the property of fast irreversible online transactions. You can buy bullion cheaper than with say a card this way as there is no risk of the transaction being reversed and the merchant is able to pass the savings from reduced risk to the consumer. It also clears much faster than most ACH or wire transfers.

If you are involved in buying legal items online where the merchant has to deal with a lot of claw-back from the bank or card companies, they will generally give you a better deal with crypto.

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