So many HODLers in this thread. For the normal person on the street, Bitcoin or Crypto never mattered. The endlessly breathless PR was irritating. Whatever happens, this wont be missed.
In fact, that was used as a common sell signal with people quoting the "When your shoeshine boy gives you stock tips" stuff.
It was not “get free from the government” it was not about convenience of digital payments or whatever crypto promise was there.
For normal people it was get rich quick scheme and that is why advertising was so annoying.
I agree with parent comment - in the end it never really mattered for normal people.
Good riddance!
It's not a commodity, and it's utility as a currency was debatable.
Usually what you'd hear was "I don't get it."
Total copium from alt nerds is never ending, but the truth is neither of you know what you are talking about: Blackrock just added BTC to their $15B fund [0], which isn't much in total market-cap (despite the down market) but is a position to say the largest (and most predatory) hedge-fund sees value in utilizing Bitcoin denominated assets. So, it may have not mattered to you, but you just outted yourself as being no more insightful on financial matters than that 'normal person on the street.'
To be honest, I've been in this for over 11 years now, and the fact of the matter is we have won many battles along the way, but will have only truly 'won' when people like you don't realize you are using BTC at all, the level of financial literacy that it takes to be your own bank and self-custody and maintain financial sovereignty is FAR TOO much for the average person--I'm convinced no amount of simplification wit tech/device solutions will lead to that paradigm shift anymore in order to capture the average part of the bell curve.
What will occur is you will walk in to what looks like your typical bank/retailer which functions with BTC to reduce tx costs and settles on main chain on a periodic basis to fit business needs (and keeping some for strategic/investment purposes for long term duration like Microstrategy as an ancillary source of revenue), resulting in a situation just like how most never ask how does the plumbing work most won't realize how these establishments are running their own MC/LN nodes and probably use State subsidized solar panels for tax breaks via inflation reduction like legislation that then used to heat the building with miners if all goes to plan.
Just like engineers cannot rely on public convectional wisdom to understand the complexity and mechanics of an internal combustion engine, or the gearing ratio in their transmissions they use to get to place to place, our largest hurdle is no longer to inform the masses (I agree the PR has gotten out of hand but mainly by alt scammers and Ivy league thieves like SBF). Rather we need to focus on making the UI/UX indistinguishable from the current model all while running things on the back-end on either Mainchain or LN as needed.
People on hn complain about the 'eternal September' of the online World, I think what's sadder is that after over 5000+ years of debt based currencies that always end the same way even the supposed brightest amongst you are incapable of understanding the implications of the average age of fiat based currencies that have always led to collapse and induce war (see Russia and China) to prop up the disintegration of Society itself--de-investment, zero covid policy, real estate crashes ave put the CCP on the war path but at the core is the tight policy of te yuan on the mainland whih has led to massive real estate speculation and large holding of farm land in Australia wit capital flight.
Financial history is long, boring and tedious thing to study on your own time, but as I found out in 2007 leading into the crash its better to be informed than gullible--most don't realize the importance and take over of Washington Mutual (my bank at the time and the largest bankruptcy in US history at the time) was an expose that proved just how broken the system is and that the FDIC itself is insolvent and that State agencies will break laws in order to serve the large bank's interests whether it was this or the repeal of Glass-Steagall with Goldman Sachs etc...
I'm sure you sopped reading, by now, but if you haven't than it's probably worth your time understanding why tier has been a nearly decades long brain drain from academia, traditional finance, and tech into BTC over its lifetime.
0: https://financefeeds.com/blackrock-makes-bitcoin-eligible-in...
Challenging to find reliable sources on this that actually include financial statements.
Look at anywhere the IMF or World Bank has been involved in where predatory loans have been issued and have led to massive re-valuations and ultimately had the Bank of intl. settlements come in. Everything from productive assets, to national parks, to lotteries, to pension/retirements get stripped under the guise of austerity to re-settle things; it's pretty wash and repeat.
The fat that you cannot find 'financial statements' underscores the very premise of my argument.
https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-global-crypto-adop...
Let's say I'm some sort of Ion Trașcă from Moldova.
My country's in shambles, I need to buy and pay for stuff using crypto.
How can I do that? Are there simple to use apps to set things up from the start and then use crypto? UI/fully visual, I don't want to touch ANY scary command line. How do I or who manages my keys?
I am not that familiar with the 'end use ' of paying for stuff directly, maybe you can't in Moldova.
Even if you can't pay for things directly, there are plenty of relevant uses. Simply using USDC can be a great store of value for people if their currency is collapsing. See lebanon, turkey, egypt, sri lanka etc.
Then if things get really bad, having some crypto could be very useful again if/when you have to flee the country. There are so many stories of Russians and Ukranians that left and were not able to take any of their currency. Here is just one example: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/ukrainian-flees-to-poland-wi...
Pointing out these real use cases is not 'harping on', in some cases this tech has saved people from terrible situations.
For now I'm against cryptocurrencies because every plus I've seen is outweighed by the con (pun intended).
And this is actually the second time in a cryptocurrency topic that I ask this and nobody answers.
Let's say I'm in Extremistan or Extremistia. How do I use cryptocurrency? Is it just a store of value? Can I use it for payments?
I want a guide, I'm new to this. How do I use it?
If your government tries to stop you from doing that, it is of course much harder, but not impossible, since decentralized exchanges such as Bisq would be an option, as well as LocalMonero or regular old black markets, assuming that you have coins that someone is willing to pay for.
Really? So EU, UK, USA, China, Australia, with stable currencies, are a small minority..?
Sorry but countries with wild instability are the minority and frankly gold would seem to be a better store of value if that's anyone's concern. Crypto remains speculation i.e. a gamble not a store of value.
In 2013 the government of Cyprus decided to seize money directly from people's bank accounts. I would not call that stable.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/everyth...
> China
In 2022, when some Chinese banks decided to freeze depositors accounts for shady reasons and debitors planned to protest the issue, authorities used Covid codes to block them from accessing the banks. That also does not seem stable to me.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-bank-protest-stopp...
https://money.cnn.com/2017/05/08/investing/china-eb5-visa-tr...
https://www.propublica.org/article/operation-fox-hunt-how-ch...
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/china-ui...
Getting locked out of your own crypto wallet is a much more significant threat than government seizure for 99% of the global population.
Because all those major currencies are backed by huge economies and militaries and whatever's needed to prevent those people from starving.
As usual, it's great to have diversified assets, but that's not really a viable option for the average person that can barely pay their rent.
Also over the course of 2022, BTC lost more than half its purchasing power, meaning that anybody in the UK or EU that used it as a hedge against inflation got severely burned...
UK for example did indeed see a few weeks of high volatility, which mostly stabilised and indeed recovered in large part once the right wing nutjobs were duly defenestrated.
The fundamental problem with your position is that cryptocurrency does not offer a stable store of value and so while there may be short term examples where people have found value by using a non-government currency, these examples are often short lived. Just look at platforms like the YC-backed Stablegains, which are a great alternative to government-backed currencies… until they blow up and financially-insecure people are thrown into a dire situation.
Crypto adoption is indeed high, much more than the western world but people are not in it to protect themselves from a volatile exchange rates but because they are desperate for a side hustle to make the ends meet. Those who are interested in preserving value simply buy USD, EUR or gold.
The "unbanked" concept is also complete BS, in those 3.rd world countries the banking systems and the fintech infrastructure is much more advanced than the ones in the west. There are indeed millions of "unbanked" people but they are unbanked due to political reasons and as a result they use alternatives payment processors which are not banks(or just use cash). When Europe was introduced to easy to use mobile banking with things like Monzo or Revolut and USA was adopting contactless payments or Chip&Pin these were already the norm. Before the iPhone&Android proliferation, people were able to do much of this stuff through the ATMs and payments systems integrated with the SIM cards. People from 3rd world visiting EU or the USA are often shocked when see how primitive retail banking and payment systems are.
I guess the rhetoric of "banking the unbanked in the poor countries" comes from the idea that "if we the rich have so many troubles with payments, surely it must be much worse in the poor countries". I assure you, this is not the case, the west is the one with primitive fintech.
The value of crypto came from the ability to speculate. Everyone younger than 30 was in it and some people made good money. These days everyone is in the stock market, anyone can buy and sell stocks from their banking app and all taxes and fees are handled so its easy as buying and selling candies.
So you got untouchable by the banks because you participated in a political uprising that failed? You think that crypto will save you? Think again because it's only matter of time before the government makes it illegal to accept payments from that alternative payment method or from you directly.
The only thing that works is hard cash. The electronic stuff don't work because they by design work by bookkeeping(remember the ledger on the blockchain) and when there is a bookkeeping there are ways to trace and prevent. Oh you will use a coin tumbler? Money that went through it automatically becomes unusable. You will use somethingprivacy oriented like Monero? If the origin is untraceable its illegal.
Laundering money is getting harder every day. It doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with the motives, if you live in a society that agreed on how the society should work and they decided that certain activities are legal and certain taxes must be paid you will squeezed out. The wealthy are still finding ways but the wealthy are not unbanked, they set up shell corporations, move cash with private jets etc. Crypto was another opportunity but once it become large enough it got noticed.
The argument was never that crypto is some kind of magic shield against bullets. It's simply a tool. It raises the cost of certain kinds of abuses for the state. In the balance between the individual and the state, it shifts the power, ever so slightly, to the former.
Cash, unlike crypto, is hard to trace. The best can do is to use chemical markers.
Government making cash illegal doesn’t mean much as it is pure p2p with no integrated bookkeeping or remote sensing.
I've always noticed this hole said by cryptobros, and 4/5 of them who says this are Americans who never have interacted even with SEPA or (Canadian) Interac. It seems that this disconnect that "since American banks are already worse imagine what banks these people do have" without realising that the US has one of the worst domestic interbanking systems in developed countries - actually, delete developed as you correctly pointed out that developing countries have way better interbanking systems than the US. (To be fair, some of the hurdles apparently have legal concerns, but most of them can be explained by "(US) banks don't care about new technology".)
Edit: I have actually explained years ago why the unbanked are usually unbanked: it's not really solvable by technology.
- Wars. Most people in warzones don't want to hold a bank account because it is very unreliable. Cryptocurrency won't solve that problem, in fact it will exacerbate the problem because of your phone or computer is damaged it's game over*. Also, how do you even transact when you don't have any form of communication?
- Actually don't have anything to bank on. Their money is just enough to survive, so they can't even bank, regardless of its form. Giving cryptocurrency is often a proposed solution, while forgetting that regular currency works fine too in these situations.
- Cultural differences. Most, to be honest, don't want to depart their money to someone they don't know. They were introduced to money just a generation or two ago, so they are relatively new here. Good luck convincing that cryptocurrency is trustworthy in a way that can be easily understand.
* I mean you could write them on paper, but that's really stretching it, mainly because you need a computer to execute transactions.
Smart people are generally[1] better at seeing through scams and dishonest deals.
[1] Not always, of course, and hype can infect everyone, for a while at least.