Nobody could ever successfully explain to me the lawful utility of crypto at all.
If I want to send $10 to my cousin in Brazil or Madagascar, how do I do that exactly without crypto? Sending him $10 in litecoin takes a few minutes to process through the blockchain, and costs just a few cents in processing fees. What is the alternative, especially if he doesn't a bank account or ready access to a bank? Paying high fees to Moneygram or Western Union, waiting an extended period of time and undergoing an onerous KYC process that often ends up in your funds being returned or rejected from many foreign countries?
If you are wealthy, live in the United States, have a bank account, no interest in privacy, and are looking to send and/or receive money from other wealthy people from the United States who also have bank accounts and don't have any interest in privacy, then crypto holds no allure.
= "unlawful"
We're looking for lawful use cases that cant' be done with a regular database
It isn't illegal for me to send $10 in litecoin to my cousin in Brazil or Madagascar without the blessing, permission or fees charged by the government, the banks or fiat currency companies like Moneygram (as much as they would like to make it so).
Suggesting that sending $10 in litecoin to my cousin in another country cheaply and easily (which would otherwise be impossible in the traditional banking system) while at the same time arguing that crypto should be illegal because it has no utility is absurd on its face.
Why are you selecting litecoin as your example, out of curiosity? What's the difference?
If by, "regular database" you mean the traditional banking system, I've already laid it out for you. You can't send money from a bank to someone without a bank account. The cost to use a legacy payment system like Moneygram is prohibitive - you can't send $10. The regulatory hurdles to send and receive money from a legacy payment system, even if the cost wasn't prohibitive, often prevent you from doing so, even when everything is totally legal and legitimate.
>Why are you selecting litecoin as your example, out of curiosity? What's the difference?
The transaction costs are very low, and the blockchain transactions take place relatively quickly. Sending $10 to anyone in the world might cost you 10 or 15 cents and take 10-30 minutes. I am far from a crypto wizard, but was an early adopter for exactly the reasons detailed above.
> The regulatory hurdles to send and receive money from a legacy payment system ...
=> Become a policy maker and change the regulation. You're not allowed to just evade regulations with crypto tech just because it's your opinion that democratic law was improperly legislated. That's crazy talk.
Why do you think Moneygram is expensive? Ever thought maybe it's due to legal compliance? You're not allowed to evade that.
That’s not lawful.
There’s no use of crypto that isn’t gambling or the evasion of laws.
There’s probably a few unjust money transfer laws out there in the world. So you could make a case that the specific special use case of evading those is legitimate.
The rest is just crime.
Weird gatekeeping, bro.
If you trust institutions like banks, tax departments and reserve banks, and transacting with them is easy and cheap, the value of crypto as a medium of exchange is very low. This is how the majority of people feel in the developed world, though whether this is rational (given things like the fact a government can just unilaterally change the rules by printing, or burning, a bunch of money) is disputed. To the extent you don't trust these institutions, or they make transacting hard, the value of alternatives, like cash notes and coins, barter, or crypto increases.
This is not your original question -- you have smuggled the word "impossible" in there, hoping I wouldn't notice.
Plainly a thing can have value even if what it can do can be done in other ways. It might be more convenient than those other ways, or cheaper, or be more reliable. It might involve having to trust fewer commercial third parties like banks -- which, you'll notice, has no implications for lawfulness.
As I already stated, crypto can be used as a store of value like gold, or for exchange like cash or barter. Neither of these uses are necessarily illegal.
I'm done here.
The value of crypto has always been in its ability to take the power to control the financial freedom of individuals away from government and put it back in the hands of people.
Whether you agree that is a good thing or not, depends on your political views towards authoritarian governments.
>futile
How did these words get there?
IOW, you showed your hand.
2. Store of wealth for countries who do not want to keep their reserves in other countries fiat currencies. Gold is one alternative and Bitcoin is a good second option.
3. International settlements - if Pakistan wants to buy cheap oil from Iran, what currency do they transact it? Neither one wants to keep each other's currency on their hand because of a low level of trust. USD/EUR was one alternative but it is increasingly weaponized and anyway one cannot buy Iranian oil with it. That leaves only Gold, which is too hard to transport.
Happy to engage further if you want to discuss in good faith.
That's determined en masse by the citizens of those bad governments - regardless of your opinion. There is a reason why black markets thrive, societies decay and revolutions happen. Repeatedly.
"Legality" isn't a prerequisite to utility, even utility that can be good for the world?
I believe that the presence of "exchange of value outside of government control" is potentially a valuable thing even if it can be used for bad. I believe the same about free speech and encryption.
> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
But even setting those aside, what's the actual point? Why does a normal person care about making online payments without involving a bank?
If you accidentally run your credit card through a skimmer at the gas station, and the skimmer's owner tries to rack up a bunch of expenses with that card, you can dispute the charges. If your BTC wallet accidentally gets compromised... that's it. No recourse.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Today, you can not only easily trade BTC against other currencies but also spend them at many merchants. There's even a country (El Salvador) that has adopted it as legal tender. These days, the daily transaction volume is in the multibillion dollar range (and that's just counting transactions that are settled "on-chain").
Is your objection that since it is less commonly adopted than USD, it therefore has lower utility than USD? Or that its utility was higher in the past? I am not quite sure I understand your question or argument.
Billions per day is basically wash trading by quants. What % of that is actual merchant transactions for goods or services?? Almost 0%
> Billions per day is basically wash trading by quants.
Trading is done on centralized exchanges and doesn't show up in the figure I mentioned ("on chain" transactions). So close to 100% are for goods, services or value transfers.
> Everyone seems to hate bitcoin in el salvador
It's obviously not true that everyone hates Bitcoin in El Salvador. Perhaps some percentage of the population? But I've just seen several videos on the URL you linked that were quite positive. The president, Nayib Bukele, obviously doesn't hate Bitcoin and is still hugely popular in El Salvador[0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_the_Nayib_B...
It seems you've reached a conclusion based on a gut feeling, and are constructing arguments to back your viewpoint. This hints that you might not be interacting with this topic with the necessary objectivity and investigative spirit to truly understand it.
The utility of crypto is to enable a fair, functioning society. That is literally, the most important utility of all.
People should be able to have total confidence in the integrity of their monetary system to ensure that they are not unwittingly supporting actions that go against their morals. Blockchain would allow precisely that.
I can somewhat see the appeal of a system like the gold standard in that it tries to imposes a monetary straitjacket on government. Except that the course of history shows that, when faced with the choice of continuing their monetary policy or abiding the the straitjacket, the straitjacket loses very nearly every single time. This includes times where losing the straitjacket meant physical adulteration of the currency--it is, after all, the literal act behind the term 'debasement'.