[etrabroline]

Great response. Thank you for taking the time to write it. I'm curious why did you get interested in Bitcoin to begin with? If credit cards and fiat currencies are just fine, gold is still a pretty good store of value, why work on crypto at all?

[nullc]

Being just fine for a vast majority of transactions isn't "just fine": Being able to transact privately and without unaccountable private companies randomly censoring your transactions is critical to human rights. The capriciousness of institutional choke points deprives people of due process and makes it impossible or unreasonably complex to make automated systems that transact autonomously without constant human supervision and intervention.

But these are all issues of exceptional cases, where additional complexity, costs, or risks (e.g. from fraud due to irreversibility, key management liability, or loss due to exchange rate volatility) are acceptable costs of doing business. The vast majority of payments -- even by some hypothetical outlaw-freedom-fighter-bandit -- are extremely boring, low risk, and not likely to be subject to censorship. The value of being able to pay in Bitcoin primarily is that it exists if and when you need it. But on a daily basis for most boring non-international payments it isn't a big win.

I don't agree that gold is a good store of value at all. It's most commonly used form is a totally unauditable fractional-reserve (rehypothicated) censorship prone IOU. In physical form it is extremely expensive to secure, transport and transact with. It is easily seized both by state authorities and bandits. It's essentially unusable for international payments due to transport risks, which Bitcoin is extremely useful for international payments. It is easily forged in ways that are difficult and costly to detect (gold coated tungsten requires special instruments and potentially destructive tests to detect). There have been single incidents involving well over 2 billion dollars of fake gold at a time ( https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/Mystery-of-2bn-of-l... ). And if we ever figure out how to mine asteroids Gold will be no more valuable than the cost of dropping rocks from the sky. And as icing on top: Gold has even more disadvantageous tax treatment in the US than Bitcoin does!

Even if you use Bitcoin in a custodial way-- which essentially gives it all the positive properties of a centralized system, along with many of the negative one-- it still retains extremely powerful audit abilities, custodial Bitcoin can cheaply prove it isn't fractional reserve in an unforgable way, and it's still immune to central bank monetary policy whims. [Not that I advocate that-- I think custodial Bitcoin misses the point, but for applications that don't need Bitcoin's other properties it can be a reasonable alternative.]

If you're interested in my history with Bitcoin I did an interview on Bitcointalk a month ago: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5262967.msg55722022#...