No, it's not. The problem is clearly laid out in the Bitcoin whitepaper. The problem was known long before the solution.
The root problem is how to make functional and secure trustless money which doesn't rely on third parties. Decentralizing the control is the best solution known to date to remove trust from the system. This introduces the problem of ordering distributed events in a trustless environment. The solution to that is the timestamp server proposed in the Bitcoin whitepaper. That timestamp server is what has been rebranded "blockchain". It's useless for 99% of things it's proposed to solve, but it's the only known solution the original problem.
You may not need it, but I am thankful that it now exists.
You may be happy with centralized services such as banks and credit cards. But those institutions are vulnerable to intimidation and so proved unsuitable for pot growers in Colorado and for Wikileaks.
In the cases of Wikileaks and Colorado pot farmers, they angered a government, even if many other governments (and the state of Colorado) supported them. So it's not about being some bad-ass who fights all forms of government. It's about pushing the boundaries enough that somebody powerful may choose to intimidate your financial provider. Given the number of powerful entities in the world with conflicting world-views, if you're doing anything interesting, you may run afoul of one of them.
Even if you personally will never use trustless money, having it exist in the world is making you a little bit more free.
It does make the world a little more free, and I have some sympathy for some of those causes.
It also seems to come at a great price, in terms of pollution and energy waste. Your right to buy heroin, or child pornography, or organically grown cruelty-and-cartel free marijuana is great, but your externalities are horrific.
I really don't want to get into a global warming fapping session with you, on a thread that has nothing to do with that, but casually dropping the "horrific" bomb is difficult for me to ignore.
I will just remind you that there is a thing called a carbon cycle. Carbon is absorbed from the atmosphere. Carbon is not a poison, but is instead, a fundamental component of all life on earth. It does not accumulate forever, but instead, is reabsorbed back out of the atmosphere at some often debated rate. Climate scientists know this, but people who drop the "horrific" bomb, generally do not.
Please reserve the word "horrific" for things that actually are. I'm sure you'll find something that is legitimately horrific if you try.
> I will just remind you that there is a thing called a carbon cycle. Carbon is absorbed from the atmosphere. Carbon is not a poison, but is instead, a fundamental component of all life on earth. It does not accumulate forever, but instead, is reabsorbed back out of the atmosphere at some often debated rate. Climate scientists know this, but people who drop the "horrific" bomb, generally do not.
That's not only patronising, it's completely irrelevant when we are currently producing more carbon dioxide than can be absorbed by all of the world's carbon sinks, and so additional carbon dioxide being produced means more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
> to buy heroin, or child pornography, or organically grown cruelty-and-cartel free marijuana
All of those existed and were traded before bitcoin was created.
> energy waste
I'd really love to see an analysis of the carbon emissions attributable to Bitcoin mining vs emissions which were funded by the extravagant salaries of wealthy-elite workers in the traditional finance/banking system. I fully accept the premise that there is some amount of CO2 emitted for maintaining the Bitcoin network, but wonder what the true cost to the climate is for rent-seeking behavior in the financial industry.
If nothing changed, what's the value of BTC, then?
You can't have it both ways. You can't credit it for enabling good illegal transactions, but disavow yourself from all the bad illegal transactions (because they would have happened anyways!) It's an agnostic protocol, you get the bad with the good.
This video does a very good job explaining what exact problems you would face if you tried to create a decentralized payment system and how bitcoin solved these problems. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBC-nXj3Ng4&vl=en
The root problem is how to make functional and secure trustless money which doesn't rely on third parties. Decentralizing the control is the best solution known to date to remove trust from the system. This introduces the problem of ordering distributed events in a trustless environment. The solution to that is the timestamp server proposed in the Bitcoin whitepaper. That timestamp server is what has been rebranded "blockchain". It's useless for 99% of things it's proposed to solve, but it's the only known solution the original problem.