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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

It’s an interesting technical problem to solve. But after 15y still has no meaningful benefits for our societies. Other than gambling/speculation/illegal stuff. The transformative cryptocurrency shift didn’t happen

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No meaningful benefit? Tell that to the people in emerging economies who now have access to digital US dollars.

Bitso processes 10% of US-MX remittances. 12% of people in Argentina use stablecoins. The shift is happening in real time.

Some people think communication mechanisms shouldn't enforce policy. They don't want their phones automatically disconnecting if they talk to a friend about illegal or immoral things. They don't want their TVs shutting off if they watch stuff that's politically unacceptable. So it follows that they don't want their money throwing an exception if they try spending on an transaction too unsavory for Stripe or your bank.

Free speech is for all the stuff you personally detest and personally choose to avoid. In a free country you hold your nose and allow others to engage in it.

If money is speech, then having a kind of money that doesn't pass through policy gates is an essential component of a free society.

Is that something we want though? Why would it be beneficial to let money be used for anything without restrictions? Society has always relied on interdependence, not complete individual freedom. You have to make the case for it.

Respectfully, I disagree that anyone has to make the case for it. That's exactly what freedom is: if society fails to "make the case" for prohibiting something, it defaults to legal. There's no general law requiring people to be good people, or to have common sense, which would be the same as defaulting to illegal. I presume you wouldn't like that, or the surveillance state that would be required to enforce it.

Complete individual freedom as a concept is not a human right. There has never been a society oriented on it and it is not self evident why it would be beneficial for society as a whole to allow an individual to do whatever they like. If you want the benefits of a society, you must reciprocate; otherwise you can go live in the woods by yourself.

You seem to be earnestly and repeatedly attacking this strawman of "complete individual freedom" as antithetical to society, but I'd prefer that you not conflate it with the position I've taken in this discussion.

Happy to continue discussing if you'd like to reply to what I wrote.

When the USA collapses it could become the new global reserve currency (it won't but it could)

Point is, it's a currency you can use right now independently from the increasingly unstable-looking US dollar.

You could also use euros, yuan, rupees, or Australian dollars but it's really hard to get an account in those currencies if you don't live in those countries. Crypto is much easier to get access to.

We can create various use case scenarios, that‘s what has been done since 2009, but there is no signs that’s something we are moving towards and so far the only use cases that stuck are the ones I mentioned. For a global currency you would need something stable and while the US is declining, in comparison cryptocurrencies (ignoring stablecoins) are a nightmare of instability

We are very far from 2140, the year the last bitcoin will be mined. 15 years is nothing, this is a very long term paradigm shift.

Is 2140 how far we're moving the goal posts now? All these resources burned will totally be worth it in over a hundred years?

No, Bitcoin is absolutely a waste by every measure. It was a prototype that never should have continued after all of its flaws became apparent.

You seem confused. The claim has never been that the paradigm will shift when all bitcoins have been mined. When all bitcoins are mined BTC will be even more deflationary and miners won’t get rewards from mining. But that has nothing to do with bitcoin being useful for society. And it should be pretty obvious that a deflationary currency is a terrible currency. If it is actually useful as a currency in 2140 it is also way more likely that it will be forked to postpone that deadline, but that’s beside the point.

We are 15y in and there is still no trace of a meaningful use case outside of the ones I mentioned. I don’t think it’s a failure of bitcoin itself (it’s a neat proof of concept), I see it more as a complete delusion of people pushing cryptocurrencies

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