Countries have tried and were pretty successful? China banned it, and now it's pretty difficult to trade crypto in China. The US can pass legislation tomorrow saying no crypto no more, and it will be effectively banned from the US. How are you going to trade crypto when nobody wants to touch it?
If you don't comply, your bank will shut down your accounts, the people running the exchanges will get arrested, their websites will get seized, etc. The US financial system is pretty good at keeping track of where USD goes after all, it'll get pushed into the shadow financial sector where all the other crime lives, and that seems pretty much the end for all the new crypto projects.
Same way they can't really, with 100% precision, stop people from buying or selling fentanyl. But I don't think that says much here, does it?
No one uses it. Its literally a few thousand people left on-chain.
The DAUs of OpenSea is down to a couple of thousand.
All that hype, all that money just to serve two thousand people…
Frankly, its also completely unusable. Gas cost shot up to $50/transaction on Eth mainnet because every idiot was buying memecoins named PEPE and CHAD. Even L2 solutions like Arbitrum were up to $2/transaction. ZkSync mainnet was $15-20/transaction.
And that’s when there are only a few thousand active users. Imagine what happens if millions actually do come onchain.
The “future of finance” is being held hostage by idiots trading shitcoins.
The market cap of btc says otherwise…
You and I have very different dictionaries it seems
> They’ve exchanged their money for it.
A thousand people trading magical tokens they pretend cost trillions of dollars doesn't make it: a) worth trillions of dollars and b) any significant usage
I start a company: SquidSoft, LLC. I sell you equity: 0.000000001% of SquidSoft, LLC for $1. Bam, SquidSoft, LLC’s market cap is $1T even though only $1 has traded hands.
https://twitter.com/whale_alert/status/1649159592520085507?s...
This is clearly false and I welcome you to try and prove otherwise.
1. NFT platforms usage volume. OS is down below 5,000 users [0]
2. Arbitrum airdrop to 625k wallets. Most users have multiple wallets. I got airdrops on 3 different wallets. Some friends sybilled this to over 100 wallets. Actual unique wallets not more than 100k. Even free money can't entice people to use this. [1]
3. $PEPE total holders: 35,000. Exclude bots and multiple wallets and that's not more than 15k actual users. Hottest memecoin that shit up to $150M mcap in four days. [2]
4. USDT daily unique senders/receivers - under 80,000. This doesn't exclude bots, exchanges, smart contracts, and users with multiple wallets (I have 8 wallets). You also can't go more mainstream or "utility" than this coin. Real unique daily users are probably under 30k. [3]
Exchange users are immaterial. They're just traders and investors buying the next cycle of trash. Actual usage metrics are on-chain users.
This is being pitched as the next Visa but in reality, the network slows to a crawl even when it has to serve 10-20k real users. Meanwhile, Visa is able to serve literally hundreds of millions of users every month.
0. https://dune.com/queries/1622348/2688962?utm_source=mintorsk...
1. https://dune.com/blockworks_research/arb-airdrop
2. https://etherscan.io/token/0x6982508145454Ce325dDbE47a25d4ec...
3. https://etherscan.io/token/0xdac17f958d2ee523a2206206994597c...
Ethereum: around 3,000,000,000 USD transacted yesterday on-chain (not counting off-chain)[1].
[0] https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/estimated-transac...
[1] https://www.theblock.co/data/on-chain-metrics/ethereum/ether...
The best we can do are surveys. According to this one[0], there are around 34 million Americans that have a cryptocurrency wallet. I suppose the world wide number of users is a lot higher.
[0] https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/us-adults-crypt...
Anyone who has ever created an account on a crypto exchange has a crypto address. I have accounts at Binance, WazirX, Kraken, Crypto.com, Gate.io, Mexc, ByBit, and probably 2-3 more exchanges I can't remember. That means I have 10+ addresses.
But that's not real users. Any money I've sent to exchanges is just for trading/investing. I'm not actually using the tech.
On-chain usage is the only real usage. The rest is just banking with more hurdles and scams.
I think we're in agreement here? On-chain data is more or less useless for counting actual users. That's why I was sharing survey data, which is the best approximation we can get.
For actual users using the tech, it's also difficult to know but we can see that the on-chain transaction volume is quite significant (multi billion dollar daily).
I assume anyone who owns crypto but hasn't made any on-chain trasaction to not be a real user but just a speculator. Ergo, immaterial if you're talking about the viability of the network to scale.
The entire point is that crypto adoption is abysmally low for a tech that almost every tech literate person in the world has heard about now, and that this tech falls apart even for this limited user base.
That's incorrect. The number of daily active addresses for Bitcoin is around 1 million[0].
> The entire point is that crypto adoption is abysmally low for a tech that almost every tech literate person in the world has heard about now, and that this tech falls apart even for this limited user base.
To me, that's super impressive given that many people on HN initially dismissed. I personally never thought it would grow beyond the initial group of cryptography/p2p nerds. I was super shocked when Bitcoin was mentioned on TV for the first time. Has any non-governmental money ever made it that far? I don't think so. It's come a long way, but I understand the numbers are a bit disappointing to those who were expecting Bitcoin to completely displace fiat. And in the end, it's a matter of perspective and there's no right or wrong answer.
[0] https://studio.glassnode.com/metrics?a=BTC&category=Addresse...
I mostly just buy crypto once a month and every once in awhile make a purchase with it when it makes sense (usually either towards a new computer or some place I don't want getting my credit card info).
If crypto became the default (which I'd be fine with), I'd use it all the time. But there's enough fees converting from USD to crypto and then making a purchase on top of that, as well as hassle with taxes each year (since I do report crypto transactions on my taxes) that trying to use it for all transactions, currently, isn't worth it for me.
So on most days I wouldn't even show up in that 80,000 DAU (well, especially since I don't touch USDT at all, keep in mind there's quite a few coins out there, not everyone interacts with all, or even more than a few of them).
And yet I keep up with crypto news, read crypto forums, watch videos about crypto, on an almost daily basis. Personally, I'd consider myself a user of crypto, and find it to be a useful tool. But just like my drill or my hammer, I don't use it every single day, just when the situation calls for it.
The simple observation that one runs* into the same several dozen people over, and over, and over again at every crypto congregation whether online or in person, should be a strong indication that this is an extremely inbred space and the sock puppetry amplification from principal to agent is conservatively inflating usage metrics by a factor of 100 if not more.
* edit: okay this is somewhat dated information, maybe today it's a couple hundred instead of several dozen.
Indeed, on-chain address data is more or less useless for counting users, I mentioned this in my comments. The survey I shared wasn't based on on-chain data.
[0] https://studio.glassnode.com/metrics?a=BTC&category=Addresse...
[1] https://studio.glassnode.com/metrics?a=BTC&m=addresses.Activ...
One of these whales has a bot farm sybiling every protocol imaginable 24x7. Got an Arbitrum airdrop of over 1,000,000 tokens across more than 800 wallets.
I have about 10 addresses in my main Metamask account, and I have iirc 4-5 Metamask accounts, each with minimum 2-3 addresses.
Crypto has been positioned as the decentralized alternative to Visa and SWIFT. Their real human users number in the tens of millions daily.
The point remains that if the tech falls apart even with 10-20k real daily users, how does it ever scale to 10-20M daily users?
Also, Bitcoin transaction volume peaked in 2018 and has been trending down for a while :)
I'm not sure why you say transaction volume peaked in 2018, it didn't. You can zoom out from the graph I linked to and chose the "All" timeframe. There's a lot of variance but 2018 wasn't the peak.
> The point remains that if the tech falls apart even with 10-20k real daily users, how does it ever scale to 10-20M daily users?
Second layer systems like the Liquid network.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactions.ht...
I also shared unique transacting addresses for USDT yesterday. That's surely not a memecoin, and that was under 80,000 addresses yesterday.
I trade crypto and its very profitable, but don't waste your time buying the hopium of this scam.
I think the Lightning Network has the potential to onboard millions of people today, and billions in the future. Check out how to run you're own node, be your own bank with Bitcoin and ignore the unscalable and scammy side "crypto" projects
All of this assuming that the routing problem has been solved and the big hubs (I'd call them banks) are able to serve the transactions from their initial funding and don't have to wait to open channels with more funds.
LN is something that works well in a lab but collapses when used by more people than just a few nerds.
About the whole routing problem and "big hubs" thing – remember, the LN is all about being decentralized. As more users and businesses join in, routing gets better and better, so you won't have to rely on any single big player. Plus, with the LN's atomic multipath payments (AMP), payments can take different paths, making it even easier to send Satoshis around the world. You can run your own node with a 10 year old Thinkpad you can buy on Ebay for $100.
Also anyone with Cash App can send Bitcoin over LN, today. I don't think you would call everyone with that app a nerd, would you? There are farmers, grandmothers and people in the developing world using Bitcoin to survive today, those aren't nerds to me.
Btw it's pretty funny calling other people nerds when you lurk on HN. If you haven't noticed, nerds have been running the world for a while now.
I get the idea and appreciate it. But it's too cluttered with scammers, fraud, and plain money laundering to fulfill its original mission.
I would be happy if it goes down because if it does succeed in its mission, it pretty much means some truly awful human beings will have disproportionate power in our new financial system.
I'd rather not live in a world where Justin Sun owns a large % of my currency supply.
Pick one, it can't be empty and cluttered at the same time
> I would be happy if it goes down because if it does succeed in its mission, it pretty much means some truly awful human beings will have disproportionate power in our new financial system.
Typical HN cope
> I'd rather not live in a world where Justin Sun owns a large % of my currency supply.
It doesn't matter if he owned more than Satoshi, no individual has the power to change the rules of Bitcoin, that is what makes it so powerful
Remind me again what the original mission of Bitcoin was again? It's in the first few lines of the whitepaper if you forgot
But I do not see it as anything other than that.
My process goes like this.
I buy the crypto I need to send, I send it, I am left with 2 or 3 us dollars I didn't use in a wallet until I need to use it again.
Better and easier than PayPal, but there are risks such as it isn't secured or backed up and I am ok with those risks.
That’s the narrative the crypto influencers want you to believe, but it’s not true.
Web3 / crypto projects are having a huge difficulty recruiting, even in this market. Few people want to go work in crypto because the writing is on the wall.
If you want to look at the past of money, there is the Chiemgauer which is the most successful complementary currency in Germany and even that one only did 7 million € worth of actual consumer/business transactions in 2015 (there are no updated statistics but it is ongoing and growing).
People keep using the national currency because it reduces transaction costs.
LOL
No one is going to use a company's token as money in any meaningful way at scale.
Only Bitcoin will be used as money the way we understand money now because it's an open and neutral protocol. An internet-native money.
I can understand why you would dismiss it if you haven't taken the time to really understand it, or just been fed a stream of anti-Bitcoin propaganda to fool you into thinking you're "informed" about it.
But it's going to be foundational technology to the future of the Internet, online commerce, energy, and the wider global economy.
Learn why, or miss one of the biggest opportunities in your life. Your loss if you choose to ignore it.
That reason alone is why it will never happen.
I would work on saving for that ticket to Mars with Elon, there is more chance of starting a new crypto-bro society there than Bitcoin going to the moon on earth.
It's very likely that those funds are lost forever, but there's no way to ever confirm.
> I would work on saving for that ticket to Mars with Elon, there is more chance of starting a new crypto-bro society there than Bitcoin going to the moon on earth.
I'll take that bet.
How much of that "real cash" is there right now? No one really knows.
How much of that "real cash" will there be in the future? No one knows.
What happens to the value of something when you can digitally create an infinite amount of it in a database at a central bank, controlled by a handful of bureaucrats?
Try to answer those questions with the smallest amount of intellectual honesty and I'll think you'll find the value of your "real cash" isn't based on very much.
Forget about Bitcoin and just answer those questions about fiat money.
Real cash is something that you can buy real goods and services with. Something that I can pay my bills with. You guys have a problem with central governments seemingly creating money out of thin air because you think it devalues your money. Your whole concept of money is wrong. You confuse money (a medium of exchange/short term store of value) with security (long term storage of value).
You know what gives money any value even if it is printed out of thin air? Trust. I trust that I can exchange that money for food, for a house, for clothes, a movie ticket, anything that I want. Where does that trust come from? That trust comes from the stability of the government, the law and order systems, the ability of the sovereign to protect its land and people with those guns and tanks. What gives Bitcoin a value? Nothing. If I cannot find a bigger fool to sell my Bitcoin, it's worthless.
Bitcoin is neither money (deflationary), nor a security (no inherent utility). This is plain truth. Other than a handful of crypto suckers everyone understands it. Hope you get this simple truth one day.
The limited supply just makes it better money.
> (artificially since it's essentially a variable defined in the code)
Sure, anyone is free to change the necessary variables. It's open source code. Good luck getting everyone else to run nodes that use the changed code. That's the point of distributed consensus. You can change the rules all you want, but other nodes in the existing network will ignore you, creating a separate network. This kind of thing has already been tested with various hardforks and the blocksize war.
> Anything deflationary in nature can't be money. I won't explain basic economics to you. Go find out why.
There's nothing to say money has to be inflationary, except the 'rules' and theories that people have made up, like MMT. The current system is built around inflationary money, but that doesn't mean it had to be that way. It's just one way to operate an economy.
> But then you act like Bitcoin is a security, a speculative asset because it's value will only go up in future (again thanks to limited supply).
Currencies are speculative assets. That's what forex markets are for. People trade them against each other. Bitcoin is no different. It can be money and a speculative asset.
Also, your definition of a security is unclear. As far as the SEC is concerned it doesn't apply to Bitcoin as Gary Gensler has stated numerous times.
> Real cash is something that you can buy real goods and services with. Something that I can pay my bills with.
You can pay for real goods and services with Bitcoin, albeit in a limited capacity at the moment, but we're only 14 years into this experiement (less for the Lightning Network), which is VERY early for a new form of money... adoption and trust will take time i.e. decades.
> You guys have a problem with central governments seemingly creating money out of thin air because you think it devalues your money.
It does devalue your money. This is a fact. You can't deny that.
You can argue the virtues of inflationary money all you want, you could argue there are legitimate uses for that that type of money, but it comes at the cost of devaluing people's savings in cash. This entrenches generational poverty.
> Your whole concept of money is wrong. You confuse money (a medium of exchange/short term store of value) with security (long term storage of value).
No, I understand those concepts well.
> You know what gives money any value even if it is printed out of thin air? Trust.
This is literally Bitcoin 101.
"The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust."
https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/p2pfoundation/1/
"Trust" is mentioned by Satoshi 13 times in his short whitepaper.
> I trust that I can exchange that money for food, for a house, for clothes, a movie ticket, anything that I want. Where does that trust come from? That trust comes from the stability of the government, the law and order systems, the ability of the sovereign to protect its land and people with those guns and tanks.
You talk as though you think money requires government to exist. Money has spontaneously emerged in various societies throughout human history that didn't require a top-down central authority to enforce its use, the best of which was gold for thousands of years. Governments minted coins from gold, but people only used it because they trusted the underlying asset as something that would hold its value, regardless of who was in power.
> What gives Bitcoin a value?
It's digital money with credible scarcity that's global, permissionless, neutral, and open to everyone to use.
> If I cannot find a bigger fool to sell my Bitcoin, it's worthless.
Not looking to sell my Bitcoin, only spend it. There's a difference.
> Bitcoin is neither money (deflationary)
False.
> nor a security (no inherent utility)
You have no idea what you're talking about.
> This is plain truth
I guess if you say so it must be true. I guess I'll just have to... trust you?
> Hope you get this simple truth one day.
I will be fine thanks. Hope you see the simple truth I've seen.
What are you planning to buy when a BTC hits a million worthless USD?