For Bitcoin:
> 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.
> 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.