[ubersync]

The Bitcoin "bubble" has "burst" at least 6 times now. Which one were you refering to? Every time it recovers and reaches another all time high in a couple of years. Being the nascent but potentially world changing technology, it might take a few years to realize its true market cap. And along the way, we will see a few pumps and dumps. Its just normal.

[googlemike]

I've yet to see a single legal use case for bitcoin.

[mikekchar]

Bic Camera in Japan at one point used it as their "point" system. Unfortunately you had to have one of their wallets, but essentially if you bought stuff with them and you had registered for the bitcoin rewards, they would give you some bitcoins. You could also transfer your own bitcoins into the wallet. You could then buy stuff at the store with it at some nominal rate. I thought about buying a computer with bitcoins because when you could still mine with CPUs, I heated my apartment mining bitcoins (then I lost interest ;-) ). Honestly, this is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping bitcoin would turn into. When Japan outlawed crypto currencies, the Bic Camera thing disappeared (or it's possible it disappeared earlier... I wasn't paying much attention).

[michaelscott]

An alternative form of payment in countries with hyperinflated currencies, a means to make fast international payments (far faster than Swift), an investment (debatable) vehicle that exists outside the control of the finance sector, certainly an upward social mobility tool for many miners in developing countries, and a general store of wealth vehicle (in no way different to gold in this regard).

[kspp]

How is all of this possible when the network is barely able to support half dozen transactions a second? It's not even enough to cover one shopping mall, let alone some "countries" or the whole planet.

[michaelscott]

I didn't say it could run a country's currency supply. I said it was an alternative to a country's hyperinflated currency, and it would be one of many. What normally happens on the ground in such a situation is that the average person will use an array of different currencies that are accepted in their environment in order to make up for the country's standard (so in Zimbabwe for example, people will use a mix of the USD, ZAR and a number of other currencies in their day-to-day lives).

Bitcoin is just another alternative. Yes you're not buying a loaf of bread at the corner store with it, but it's definitely useable (and is used) for other types of payments.

[aidanlister]

FYI Swift v4 is in trial and has realtime payments.

[stuffbyspencer]

I'm referring to the most recent one that I believe most are familiar with: when Bitcoin reached ATH of $20,000 and then plummeted to $4,000 [ I think that was the lowest... ]

I'm not against BTC, and I'm not saying it's dead, I'm just pointing out the obvious crash that recently happened :^)