I thought the #1 use case for crypto was ransomware, followed by shitcoin rug-pulls, and the ability to commit theft without recourse.
Sending money to Iran is just a minor edge case.
Sending money to Iran is just a minor edge case.
2. Fully live the concept of buying something physical from a virtual money I got by mining some now defunct coins.
Shitcoins and Shitstocks(some SPACs) do allow of a legal way to "give" others money through the transfer of value in a way that is technically legal. This again is not crypto specific though.
Which IMHO is a positive - no private transactions means corruption gets much harder, and that's always been a core selling point of the technology to me.
Undeniably yes, given the number of fraud and money laundering convictions achieved over the years.
> cases of gold bars [...] are actually MUCH less tracable.
Laughably false, given the difficulty of liquidating such things without detection. If you have to store your ill-gotten gains in your own home you've lost the opsec battle already.
I think you're just saying gold bars aren't digital information so don't a priori show up in a query somewhere. But the question that actually needs to be asked is "Did Menendez get caught with gold bars in his home?"
Yeah, he did. Ergo, they aren't very "untraceable" in practice.
For him, it was something like a ~$30m pizza at peak. We're asked not to bring it up.
Moreover, the chances are the reason Binance nixed the investigation of bitcoin going to Iran is because so much of the bitcoin economy is driven by entities like Iran (google AI say they have 4.5% of global mining plus random search link [1]).
Edit: Iran also wants bitcoin sent to it because bitcoin isn't actually untraceable so getting clean money for dirty matters.
[1] https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/iranian-crypto-activity-geo...
If you say something the Chinese government does not agree with they can choose to take all your money and control of your company instantly. Not just oligarchs although those are the bigger targets due to the high value.
Even a small business owner could THEORETICALLY have their assets and equity seized for saying something which goes against the current ruling party, and this is not specific to China it could happen in any modern country.
Crypto allow someone to distribute their wealth in a way where they can be free to speak their mind and still protected even if the country which their business is based out of decides to take action against them.
Transferring money between people internationally has been around for centuries:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala
You transfer X units of value from you to someone else in the network locally, and an equivalent amount is transferred to you in a remote location.
As far as I know, nowhere in the Bitcoin white paper or the original code base. Does it say anything about what you seem to think it's use cases are.
Bitcoin has one main use, digital cash, that can be sent instantly and for free or a very low fee.
Edit: I would agree though, that anything other than that is probably a scam.
This applies to a great deal, not just bitcoin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality
"We must take the world as it is and not as we would like it to be." - Maurice Allais
Fees have historically gone up above $100 per transaction. They've since added hacks on top of the original Bitcoin protocol to get the price back down again, but the original design was not good for low fees.
And transactions can take 30 minutes or more to settle, that's hardly instant. If you accept a transaction instantly, it's relatively easy for someone to scam you by double spending.
So, no, Bitcoin doesn't make a great digital cash. Maybe a better wire transfer. But the biggest benefit of it is to be unblockable and unrefundable, which makes it great for scames and illegal activity, plus the speculative nature of the pricing, which is great for gambling on.
There are any number of other popular coins out there that have the same or better liquidity as BTC that charge tiny fractions of the fees. And also settle in seconds.
You're saying Bitcoin like BTC, but the parent commenter was probably referring to the giant ecosystem of coins, that happens to include BTC, but also many other much faster and cheaper options, that are used to globally remit payments every day.
What it's replacing, by the way, Western Union, Wise and the like, is also pretty unblockable and unrefundable.
And yeah, the thing is, payment systems that work approximately as well as BTC exist without being cryptocurrency and using up so much electricity on mining. The main difference is that they don't operate in some areas where BTC still can (like evading sanctions, like this), and the speculative nature of BTC (which is actually a net negative on using it as a cash).
If payment systems that aren’t shitcoin based are working just as well, then why are these coins absolutely destroying the incumbent players like Western Union in the remittance space? If the existing solutions are good enough you wouldn’t expect incumbents to be taking such a beating here right? The systems are equivalent enough? WU does for instance 100B ish a year currently, which is around 12% of the global market. A fat share of that global remittance market is… checks notes… crypto based remittances.
I’m all for trashing the next shitcoin. Don’t mistake me for some crypto apologist. I personally don’t own or use them outside of narrow use cases where they are a transient thing that gets liquidated into actual fiat as soon as possible. It’s a world ripe for fraud and abuse and the whole concept of shitcoins is probably not great for society. But to take some poorly thought out implementation that was, mind you, the first attempt at actually doing this in the real world, and try to extract it to some general conclusion that the technology is not useful 15 years later is just patently false. If the alternatives you mention are so great, why are they not winning on mindshare worldwide? Certainly seems like crypto is winning in the remittance space.
So it's cheaper to use Paypal ?
So now it's back to being cheaper than Paypal, but yeah, there was a time when there were $100+ transaction fees. And it may hit that again if transaction numbers go up enough to fill up blocks with the new implementation.
Only question is, if Elizabeth Stark knows it's unworkable slop why does she keep raising money for it???
The original theory of Bitcoin was, as described in the paper, decentralized digital cash. But in practice it was never optimized for what normal people use cash for. As system like that would be something like M-PESA.
Even at the time, cash was declining in usage. In the 18 years since, it has declined a lot more. And for good reason, because what most people want for most things isn't digital cash, but digital money. E.g., debit cards and Venmo.
So pretty naturally Bitcoin has value only for a few niche use cases that are not well served by more effective systems. Various sorts of crime, mostly. Digital cash, sure, but the kind that's transferred in unmarked envelopes slid quietly across the table. The kind that is delivered in a briefcase.
As a side note, it also failed in its goal of being decentralized. The mining power is very concentrated. Much more so than the banking industry, for example. And most users keep their Bitcoin on deposit in centralized services. So it's again basically banking but worse.
Look at china where if you have a large company and take a stand against the government all your equity will be wiped out and you will be either imprisoned or banished to another country.
Cash in a government bank account is the same way, you can wake up one day and all your assets will be seized, your credit cards will stop working.
Bitcoin works because you can technically have your wealth memorized. You can memorize a string of charcters that allow you to bring money with you no matter where you go. NO government or other human can steal it from you (except through torture) but you can also easily not memorize it and instead distribute the keys throughout the world in opposing countries meaning even if you are attacked by one country you still have some wealth kept in another.
A store of wealth is what bitcion allows. True freedom from governments stealing your money because you have ideas which they do not agree with.
This in my mind is the main usage of bitcoin.
Other coins like stablecoins, or the btc lightning network have high value because they make transactions much cheaper as traditional banking systems are complex, error prone, and costly.
Pretty much everyone I know who talks shit about bitcoin is wealthy and privileged.
For some definition of "actually", given how much it has dropped recently. When he was still a just a candidate, the current Opposition leader in Canada was very excited about Bitcoin:
> As Poilievre campaigned for the Tory leadership on the way to a landslide victory, he spoke positively about decentralized finance and cryptocurrency. At one point, he argued that crypto would allow Canadians to "opt-out" of inflation, which was soaring at the time. And he famously used Bitcoin to purchase a shawarma at a London, Ont., restaurant in March 2022.
* Nov 2023: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/cryptocurrency-political-co...
> In 2022, when Pierre Poilievre was a Conservative leadership candidate, he said he’d make Canada the crypto capital of the world. According to him, the Bank of Canada was “ruining” the Canadian dollar, printing money and ramping up inflation to fund COVID-19 relief. His solution? Give Canadians crypto as an alternative currency.
* Apr 2025: https://macleans.ca/politics/who-stands-to-win-in-poilievres...
Given the noise that was made about inflation at the time and the (alleged) devaluation of the CAD, I'm curious to know what the inflation rate equivalent would be now (Feb 2026) if Bitcoin is used as the monetary base.
It's also terrible at that. Bitcoin is down by something like half off its peak. The odds of me losing money to "government intervention" if I'm not actively criming, are quite low. Certainly well under 50%.
> Bitcoin works because you can technically have your wealth memorized.
If you are having to reach for increasingly absurd fantasy scenarios to justify something that was supposed to have thoroughly quotidian users, maybe you should take that as a sign?
> because you have ideas which they do not agree with
Oh, that's who's using bitcoin the most? Philosophers and the like? I had no idea.
Bitcoin CAN be used as a store of wealth and the slowness actually makes it better as the slowness is part of the same process that makes it safer, harder to hack/takeover, and gives it value.
You should not look at all crypto as one thing.