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by aliakhtar 3707 days ago
People don't use cars because they have a hard on for internal combustion engines. They use cars to go from one place to another, i.e their utility. The utility of bitcoin is its TPS rate.
2 comments

The utility of bitcoin is censorship-resistant transactions. You don't need a high on-chain transaction rate for that.
But you need the person n the other end to be set up with bitcoin. With the current transaction limit, the likelyhood that the other person is set up to accept bitcoin stays low.
We can cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now Bitcoin usage is orders of magnitude less efficient than it could be.
You mean illegal transactions.
As with the 2nd amendment, arguing for the right to bear arms is not in and of itself an argument for their use. In this case, bitcoin represents by which civil disobedience could be practiced. As long as it is maintained as a real alternative (meaning first and foremost it operates outside the constraints of authority) then a reasonable argument can be made that regulators in democracies will compromise in allowing greater user rights in the official alternatives. Napster and bittorrent did change the music industry, in the end.

But even without game theoretic arguments involving civil disobedience, Bitcoin is still interesting. It offers cryptographic protections that have never existed before in real fintech applications (e.g. programmable signatures), and radical transparency and configurable trust that can patch the sort of vulnerabilities that led to the 2007 financial crisis.

Like getting your money out of Venezuela, Argentina, Cypress or Greece before its gone or you can't get to it? Those are all illegal. Legality and morality are not the same thing and not all of world lives in cozy security.
How would converting all your money into magic beans help in that situation? How would you pay for your groceries in magic beans in that country?
> Like getting your money out of ...

If you re read my comment you can see I explicitly said getting money out of those countries, which have been infamous for capital controls.

Also - Magic Beans - accepted at 48 locations in Athens https://coinmap.org/#/map/37.99873292/23.73853683/12

Look up the ideal properties of money and you might understand the big picture better, but it may mean challenging your deeply held beliefs and not everyone is ready for that.

Seems like you have an agenda here.
Bitcoin's utility is being a global currency.

Like I said, Bitcoin will scale like the internet scaled which is in direct proportion to demand. Blocks aren't often full and if you are in a hurry then you need to pay 10 or 20 cents to prioritize your transaction.

There is already a global currency which works great: USD. I live in Pakistan, and I regularly pay my AWS bill, IDE subscription, Netflix, VPN, and a lot of other things with USD.
The fee is currently 6 cents.

One interesting thing is there is an optimal fee based on the size of the block of transactions.

https://bitcoinfees.21.co/#delay

>Bitcoin's utility is being a global currency.

But it's hard to get and hard to use. It's useful for a pseudo-anonymous transfer for value.

Unless I'm doing something illegal, Visa is a better option.

That's very true, Bitcoin doesn't solve many problems for people with access to credit banking. However, billions of people don't have access to Visa or a bank account. They only need a phone to send payments internationally.
Those people don't have access to bitcoin either.
I use both. I use also MasterCard. And dollars and pesos and euros.

There's always one situation where one currency is more convenient than the others.

Is this attitude a remnant of the religious wars in Europe?

There can be only one?