It’s attractive to fraud for the same reasons why it’s attractive to people who take issue with legacy finance. Your “account” (wallet) can’t really be shut down or frozen, you can transact quickly and easily with only an internet connection and a phone regardless of borders or capital controls, and the currency itself can be audited and resists inflation. All those things continue to be true, but unfortunately the current largest, visible use case is fraud.
The original use case for Bitcoin was right in the title of the white paper: P2P electronic cash. Unfortunately, that hasn’t taken off, and some governments like the US have done their best to kill it. See the IRS guidance for Bitcoin taxes from 2013 which made it practically impossible to use as cash in a legally compliant way. That was the first, and clearest, regulation of cryptocurrency I’m aware of. All other currencies are treated differently. Only Bitcoin/cryptocurrency was singled out for particularly onerous tax treatment.
Well, that's because Bitcoin is not a currency, by many reasonable definitions.
Bitcoin does not meet the desires laid out in the whitepaper, not even close. Bitcoin isn't even a currency by it's own standards.
A currency has to be widely accepted as a medium of exchange, and it has to have a relatively stable value. Bitcoin fails bitterly at both of these. And experiments with bitcoin payments in the mainstream quickly failed (Steam, Tesla).
I beg your pardon? Because we haven't heard of any Madoff or subprime loans lately, you are willing to say that with a straight face?
Noone who is ideologically consistent with the crypto ethos would expect that ideology overrides greed.
Bitcoin yo-yo’s between hyperinflation and hyperdeflation. Unchecked inflation is a problem. But a currency as volatile as Bitcoin is obviously not the solution.
[0] https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/volatility-index/
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-20/uk-pound-...
Measured against a basket of goods, Bitcoin’s value soars and free falls.
Using a 17th-century definition of inflation, which in modern parlance is called money supply, Bitcoin is simply inflationary, but that definition swap concedes that it is a curiosity, not a currency.
You are confusing inflation and debasement. When price levels rise, it's inflation. Even if the money supply shrinks.
This difference is meaningful because for a currency user, stability in value is more important than stability in the number of imaginary things. In 2008, U.S. dollar broad money supply crashed while central bank money surged. That is less meaningful to a currency user, or even financial market participant, than the amount of goods and services each dollar today buys compared with yesterday and tomorrow.