[thenewnewguy]

> Except for light financial crime (ransomware, money laundering, gambling, theft, etc), it has no demonstrated advantage over alternative technologies.

Slight nitpick: Cryptocurrencies have demonstrable advantages over existing solutions (pseudo-anonymity, decentralization, inflation-proof, etc) but consumers don't care about these advantages enough to make the switch.

[wpietri]

If an advantage falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it truly make a sound?

I'll grant those can be characteristics of cryptocurrencies, but they're only advantages to people who need those things. And they're only advantages on net if what goes with those characteristics ends up being net beneficial to somebody. E.g., the "inflation-proof" bit is a nice line, but most of the world had good reason for getting rid of fixed currencies after the collapse of Bretton Woods. And being "inflation-proof" implies a degree of value stability that Bitcoin most certainly does not have in practice.

I'll also grant that pseudo-anonymity and decentralization are useful to a very small set of people, but I think that's pretty well covered under the first part of my sentence. There are also some people who like those things for theoretical, quasi-religious reasons, but I don't think satisfying that counts as any sort of practical advantage.

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

> but consumers don't care about these advantages enough to make the switch.

And, more importantly, governments see those attributes as a downside, and would no doubt clamp down hard on crypto on-ramps in the event that they ever started getting significant uptake.

[etrabroline]

Your view of government is highly authoritarian. If Bitcoin becomes legitimately popular, no government that needs the support of the people to rule can ban it.

Uber broke every taxi law on the books until popular support made those monopolistic laws unenforceable. The political actors working against Bitcoin own quite similar and quite unpopular state-backed monopolies of their own.

[wpietri]

Bitcoin at this point will never become "legitimately popular". It's had about as long as Uber, and it has only grown less relevant to people's lives for the last few years. M-Pesa, which only operates in a few countries, has something like 100x the transaction volume.

Further, the downsides to the rise of ridesharing were very modest for governments. Increased congestion, regulatory uncertainty, and the eventual need for new laws and regulations. But governments have a very strong interest in preventing money laundering because a) tax evasion means less money for the government, and b) serious, sustained crime requires money laundering to survive.

So even if Bitcoin were to become more popular, governments would still crack down on it, and people would happily go back to using things like Visa, Paypal, Venmo, etc.