What needs and wants is it fulfilling for you?
Once you realize that banks are very fragile and abusive, just having this alternative is important.
Banks can deny you access to your money on a whim. Compliance, glitch, failure, whatever. You can't use your money. You can't buy food. You can't pay rent. You can't buy tickets. You can't hire a lawyer.
It's nice to have something which is based on completely different principles.
If people no longer "need" to convert BTC to fiat, this would no longer be a point of a control, but until then, governments can already and will continue to grow how much they can control BTC flow.
Some of it is currently very ham-fisted, but there's a clear intent to devalue off-exchange wallets: https://www.coincenter.org/new-crypto-tax-reporting-obligati...
When a user receives a payment in Cash App or Strike over the lightning network there is no way to track where that bitcoin came from. I haven't really tested that out yet, but I find the idea that bitcoin can be the rails of transferring value pretty compelling. Most people can still transact in fiat but with trustless interoperability between banks and service providers. And of course if people are happy transacting in units of bitcoin it can all be done in a trust-minimized way (with tradeoffs available for convenience, etc...).
But to your point, the government could crack down on the app stores and service providers to not support this kinda stuff.
The question is more like: Are OK with government control?
Reminder - regulators reviewed SVB reports and found them adequate. Then apparently people found it's insolvent. Does it look adequate?
Do you like a system if bank can become insolvent if people withdraw their money?
That's presumably one of most competent countries in the world.
I simply doubt that my opinion, or even that of the majority of the public, would change the outcome of what the government decides to do. They seem to be on a pro-KYC/AML/FINRA/IRS path regardless of public opinion.
But, not all people, and many such regimes have crumbled.
Somehow you found energy to spread FUD on this forum, but you don't have energy to form an opinion and defend it. Sad.
https://news.bitcoin.com/industry-execs-freshly-minted-virgi...
It might surprise you, but it's way easier to open an exchange account than a bank account.
I swear I saw some super highly upvoted comments that read as normal + level-headed in r/CryptoCurrnecy that was like "if it goes from $45k -> $100k this year it isn't even that much"
Do you ever hear Warren Buffet saying "122% yearly returns are meh"?
The whole Bitcoin 'manifesto' and sticking it to the man is just a ruse.
It's not just that it's in the cloud, it's the only form of wealth you can keep digitally AND only you have access and control over it.
Maybe that's fine because you're a good citizen who follows the rules, but some people are born into places where they don't get the privilege of a fair financial system, or the system changes on them.
Going on GitHub and downloading core code and deploying a new coin based on Bitcoin or some other crypto.
I'll call it HackerNewsCoin.
Didn't know it was that simple to create "wealth".
What a foolishness to think that something that has no intrinsic value can constitute wealth. Don't confuse price with value.
It really is true crypto combines all that people don't understand about economy with all that people don't understand about technology.
Not sure if you see that it's your understanding of the world that's off here.
Currencies are not wealth, none of them, cryptocurrencies even less.
Money is worthless, rich people don't have money. They have art, companies, land, bonds, cars, boats, airplanes, but very little money.
The financial illiteracy of crypto cultists really has no end.
Honestly, I am also amazed that humans make something like that happen. But we do. Otherwise gold wouldn't have so much value.
Also, can't be forked, cloned or replaced by some gold 2.0 with smart contracts or bigger block size.
Seriously, imagine comparing a currency, let alone a cryptocurrency to gold.
Foolishness never ends.
That is absolutely FALSE.
Good "money" requires a tiny bit of inflation, otherwise there's no incentive into spending, but hoarding.
When people start hoarding money, rather than spending or investing it, economy starts freezing.
Cryptocurrencies are a living example of that: there is absolutely NO incentive into using them to trade, only to hoard them. Why use them today if price goes up? Non sense. Indeed nobody uses them to trade, ever. There's less people spending Bitcoin for goods today, than there was in 2016 when the amount of people in the sector was a magnitude lower.
In fact, even the narrative on websites like Bitcoin's have long moved from the "currency" to the "store of value" argument.
You're compounding many wrong and false information and building an absolutely distorted idea of how money and finance works.
At the end of the day, that's history repeating itself. As wealthy people accumulate real wealth, poor people chase pieces of paper or ridiculous blockchain hashes.
If you're happy, why stop you.
The only incentive to spending should be your own needs in relation to opportunity costs, not government's mood.
But if you want to give your government that prerogative over your life, feel free to keep using fiat money.
There are all sorts of scarce things that we don't use for jewellery or see as particularly valuable. Gold has physical properties that make it specifically useful for jewellery (easy to work, doesn't tarnish, shiny, etc.).
I agree 100% with this but it is describing you.
Fortunately for most bitcoiners who got in early, it's been variable in a positive direction... But not for everyone.