[leppr]

It's money not controlled by any single government or entity. It can be exchanged almost as easily as cash. If you don't see the use in that, then good for you, your needs must be met by the existing financial services.

Personally, I used it to buy electronics in Japan, worked well. Also used it to sell my VR headset in person, because Paypal and our banks didn't allow the transfer. I use it to tip and donate to various online creators with no fuss. It's really quite simple, no need to overthink it.

Sure, maybe one day the price will crash or the peg fail, but for most intents and purposes it works fine. Monitoring crypto prices and fundamentals is not so bad compared with traditional finance folks having to read through hundreds of all-caps tweets to know how much value the USD will lose this month, or sifting through reddit WSB troll posts to know which stock to buy.

[bigbubba]

I've bought things with BTC (I believe I am rare insofar as I have never bought BTC but have spent them...) and having frequently used cash, I can assure you that spending BTC is not even remotely as easy as spending cash.

[troquerre]

Digital gold is a better analogy for BTC than digital cash. As a value reserve BTC has a lot of desirable properties over gold (try moving $10m of gold around...). The fact that it's fairly easy to spend BTC is an additional positive point.

[K0balt]

Yeah, but ever tried to spend (actual) cash online? Any way you try, you're going to need 2 banks and a payment processor involved. The buyer bank, the seller bank, and Visa, PayPal, or somebody.

In the end, something like 3-5 percent of what you spend is going to be redirected. These are real costs you pay.

[gamblor956]

Monitoring crypto prices and fundamentals is not so bad compared with traditional finance folks having to read through hundreds of all-caps tweets to know how much value the USD will lose this month,

No, you just have to worry about how much your crypto will change in value each day. Bitcoin's value changed by over 7% in just the past month, and in the past year has dropped in value by over 20% twice. That's so much better than worrying about the fraction of a percent in the monthly deltas for USD over the past several decades.

[MichaelBurge]

If you're worried about price fluctuations, sell Bitcoin futures against your holdings dated for when you need the USD?

You have the exact same problem with gold, which has increased 30% over the last few months.

[floatboth]

It's "money" controlled by a few large electricity-wasting pools.

[aeternum]

Still more efficient than the alternatives.

USD is controlled by an entity which spends $680 billion / year along with countless lives and 270k barrels of oil a day in order to defend it.

Gold dug out of the ground, then put in high tech vaults which must be similarly actively defended.

[beervirus]

It's "money" that's not meaningfully exchangeable for goods or services. I can't buy a sandwich with it, or pay my taxes with it, or get my salary in it. Its only utility is that it can (for now) be turned into a large amount of fiat currency. Its only value proposition is that maybe that large amount will be an even larger amount in the future.

[leppr]

To put your argument in other words: it doesn't have enough adoption to be more useful than the current alternatives.

That has always been a caveat of new network-effect dependent technologies.

In the early days, the internet wasn't useful to communicate with other people. It was way easier to just call the person on their phone instead of hoping they had a particular messaging application installed on their PC and had it turned on when you were hoping to talk. Its only value propositions were downloading porn for free or finding communities of geeks, trolls and conspiracy theorists. It served those niches well though, and from there slowly grew to attract more and more people and usecases.

[throwaway2048]

Every single one of those things is easier with the existing money system.

[leppr]

Except no, the exact reason I do/did these things with crypto is that I couldn't as easily do it with the existing infrastructure.

Buying at a Bitpay PoS in Japan is just scanning a QR code, instant confirmation (Wechat easy but even foreigners can use it). A P2P sale for a non-insignificant amount of money (~$1.5k): rejected by Paypal, inter-bank transfer would take days to go through. BTC was 5 minutes to wait for a confirmation. Donations through Patreon or other require you to sign-up, go through convoluted systems that sometimes require sending your identity documents, crypto is just copy an address/scan a QR code and confirm in your usual, familiar wallet.

[VBprogrammer]

> inter-bank transfer would take days to go through

In the UK bank transfers are practically instantaneous. It's nuts that the US is so far behind on this.

[flotzam]

Good luck paying an Iranian mail-order shoemaker... It's not hypothetical: https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-iranian-shoe-store-trade-sa...

(EDIT) Sorry for my rude reply. Your point about intra-national transfers stands.

[leppr]

There are fast bank transfers in my country too, but for some reason my buyer's bank application was buggy and would only allow a traditional transfer. And of course, you can't use an alternative, non-buggy, app with your bank account...

[cultus]

Each bitcoin transaction costs about $50 now. They're quite a bit more onerous to use than cash, thus people use "exchanges" which are controlled by for-profit private interests.

[flotzam]

> Each bitcoin transaction costs about $50 now.

That's off by a factor of 18 even if you want it to be fast, according to https://bitcoinfees.earn.com

"The fastest and cheapest transaction fee is currently 110 satoshis/byte, shown in green at the top. For the median transaction size of 224 bytes, this results in a fee of 24,640 satoshis." = .0002464 BTC = $2.81

[Wheaties466]

I just processed a bitcoin transaction and paid ~1.52 in fees. That was this morning.