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Comment by RestlessMind | Hacker News Reader

This has come up so often that I have listed some interesting real world examples of Bitcoin usage here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095

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These all appear to be the same use case of "to transfer money, outside the control of governments".

The problem with that is, these transactions are now on an immutable ledger (which is the actual use case of block chains).

These transactions could have been made with any "thing" that enough people agree has some value.

> could have been made with any "thing"

"any" is going a lot of heavy lifting there.

Apart from people agreeing on value, that thing also has to be: 1. out of their governments' control (all the examples had governments gone bad), 2. easy to transfer/carry, 3. durable.

Can you please name a few alternatives if you think that's a simple problem?

Bitcoin fits the bill for those aspects. Can you name a few other "things"?

Gold. Shells. Anything that people have used as money over the years.

I do not disagree that blockchain tech has a good use case. It's just that it does one thing: a distributed ledger. That's it.

"That's it" fails to capture the fact that said tech still has a collective market cap of $984B[1], after it has had precipitous drop in value over the last 12 months. Maybe, a distributed ledger for digital goods is a massively valuable tool for humanity?

[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/

Thank you for this list.

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