[this_user]

> Bitcoin could be hugely beneficial for fledgling financial systems, and robust financial systems can be hugely beneficial for billions of people.

The latter part is true, but BTC cannot provide that. It's nothing more than a nifty hack. It kind of works, which is impressive, but it is horrible inefficient and impossible to scale due to its inherent limitations. So far the only solutions that have been proposed were to tack on even more complexity. To make matters worse, all of these solutions have remained vapourware for quite some time.

> Numerous monetary crises could be addressed in serious ways by it, though.

How? It would have not prevented the Dotcom Bubble. It would have not prevented the Subprime Mortgage Crisis. It would have not kept Argentina or Greece from borrowing way too much money. It's a libertarian pipe dream that Bitcoin will magically solve all of the world's economic problems. In fact, it would make matters worse due to unpredictable volatility and its lack of scalability. It would only drag any country trying to adopt it into a deflationary death spiral. There is a reason why the gold standard has been abolished.

[onnoonno]

> The latter part is true, but BTC cannot provide that. It's nothing more than a nifty hack. It kind of works, which is impressive, but it is horrible inefficient and impossible to scale due to its inherent limitations. So far the only solutions that have been proposed were to tack on even more complexity. To make matters worse, all of these solutions have remained vapourware for quite some time.

It is not a given that Bitcoin cannot scale, even though a select few in the ecosystem repeat this as if it is a fundamental truth.

Bitcoin is proposed by many in the ecosystem to scale as it has been before: By scaling up transactions on the chain. See http://www.bitcoinclassic.com/