bitreality

It's not purely hypothetical. The foundation is there. It's been running for 9+ years. People have shown a willingness to assign real value to digital assets. What you're complaining about is the technology as it exists today.

The technology can improved. The money being invested into the space is an incentive and a validation for people who wish to work on improving the technology. Money attracts talent. There's also some very genuine reasons why blockchain technology can serve the greater good.

So you're saying that with all the investment into crypto-currency development, and a techonology that did not exist in any form 10 years ago, that it is impossible to scale?

You are saying it is impossible to create an improved form of crypto currency that solves scaling? Even with 10's of billions of dollars being invested this year into their development? People are throwing a lot of money at this technology. The stakes are incredibly high. If someone does find a solution and creates a form of crypto currency which can operate at scale and do so for cheap fees, they'll become at least a billionaire.

On top of becoming a billionaire, a crypto currency that was able to transact at scale, securely, for pennies in TX costs would fundamentally change the world.

It would be very difficult for a kid to rack up a huge bill on his parents credit card buying virtual items. The majority of websites which offer these items will have purchase limits in place. The limits will gradually increase over time depending on purchase frequency and monthly volume.

There would be no way for a kid to just show up with a credit card and make an out-of-character purchase of $1k+. This is especially true for games with tradeable items. This is true for the same reason that you can't just show up and buy BTC with a Credit Card. Fraud would be rampant.

Fixed supply, instantly audit-able, open source, decentralized. In many ways, you know a lot more about what you're buying with Bitcoin than with equities.

Right. Your collection of infinitely reproducible picture files is comparable to the first truly decentralized value transfer and storage system.

It's clear you have no intention of understanding what makes Bitcoin interesting or valuable.

Crypto is a legitimate investment. It's an entirely new asset class. If you think it's going away anytime soon you're delusional. 5 years ago you could buy 1 BTC for $100 USD. And at that point it wasn't even new. 1 year ago you could buy 1 ETH for about $50.

The average person would struggle very hard to find any investment that goes 80X in 5 years, or 12X in one year. With Bitcoin and crypto, lots of regular people have made returns they could never dream of on the stock market.

I think right now the easy money is all in ICO's. Talented developers have much more incentive to just create a new coin than develop a dAPP on Ethereum. Eventually, this ICO craze should slow down, and it will make more financial sense to develop on top of existing coins.

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http://www.ais.co.th/fibre/en/

You can see some of the services available there.

At the time Bitfinex was hacked, they automatically converted the "hacked" BTC balance to USD. It was around $650 I believe at the time of the hack. It would be unfair to measure the hack in today's BTC value because they converted the liability in customers' accounts in USD.

Crypto simply levels the playing field for people in all types of economies. Many countries force you into using the national currency. Often they create artificial exchange rates which do not match up with market rates (Argentina, Venezuela).

Other countries impose capital controls which force their populations to hold devaluing currencies or restrict how they can spend their money. Think India, China. No surprise that China is one of the world leaders in Crypto right now.

Currency is used as a form of control by governments. It is never in control of the people. Look at what happened in Cyprus, and what almost spread across Europe. Banks went bankrupt, people's hard earned money was taken away, simply due to mismanagement at the highest levels.

Properly used cryptocurrency cannot just be taken away. You are in control of your money. Your government does not control its value. Bitcoin as an entity cannot take out loans which its holders are on the hook to repay. Governments can't freeze your wallet with the flick of a switch.

Money is power, and when people are in complete control of their own money, they take back some of the power that has been consistently taken away from them.