[wpietri]

They do not have the same utility. I can walk out of my house and find people deriving value from wearing jewelry. Trustless, distributed ledgers, on the other hand, not so much.

At the moment, Bitcoin's primary non-speculative use case is light financial crime: money laundering, capital control evasion, ransomware, buying various illegal stuff, ponzi schemes, etc. I agree that it's possible that one day trustless, distributed ledgers will deliver enormous amounts of value. But it's important to distinguish between delivered value and potential value.

[actsasbuffoon]

The only developments in cryptocurrency that I've personally found interesting have been smart contracts. Even then, there's no reason that couldn't be done by a traditional financial institution using fiat currency. The fact that smart contracts were first implemented with cryptocurrency is an implementation detail, not a fundamental requirement.

Frankly, I'd probably rather use smart contracts with regular currency. If there was some kind of scam or theft then the financial institution might be able to reverse some of the charges.

Most of the advantages of cryptocurrency don't really sound like advantages to me.

[wpietri]

Exactly. Reversability by a trusted party when things go wrong can be a huge benefit.

Even financial markets will do it as needed. I used to write trading software. Some of our traders were trading on the DTB; being German, they were sticklers for rules. One day our traders jumped on something and made a lot of money. But it turned out that somebody at another company had fat-fingered an order at a very low price for a very large quantity. Large enough that it would have destroyed their company.

The exchange decided there was no point in that, so they unwound all the trades. I thought our guys would be mad. They were a little disappointed to lose the expected profit, but they were otherwise fine with it. They didn't see any sense in that kind of destruction just for a short-term gain.