[nmlnn]

If you're in Venezuela, Argentina, Lebanon, Turkey, Nigeria, etc. where your government is stealing your savings via massive inflation it's pretty useful.

It would definitely be better if the learning curve was shallower and the UI's easier, so that more people could be saved.

[amelius]

Couldn't the same be achieved without a currency that encourages mining?

[nmlnn]

If someone figures out a way to do it, then sure. Mining ensures that no one in the system is able to get a new monetary unit below the market price as well as making tampering with past transactions uneconomical. Ultimately it's a very elegant solution to what was a long-standing problem.

The system pays for itself via transaction fees, which are used to "lock" the transaction history in a completely decentralised way.

[amelius]

But do people in Venezuela etc. really need all the requirements of Bitcoin? E.g. having to deal with a central authority other than their own government could still be an option.

[madacol]

The most popular method in Venezuela right now is cash-dollars and then zelle transfers, and zelle is only available to those who have overseas bank accounts, everybody else is mostly screwed.

Bitcoin is very useful to those who understand it, but if it weren't so hard to understand to common people it would be an even greater success, it would be a practical option to those who have internet and smartphones, that's still a minority in the country, but not as much as zelle.

Despite that almost everyone have heard of bitcoin in venezuela, another big reason for the undeveloped potential of it is the black-mailing from local authorities to anyone they knew had bitcoins, mostly when price went up fast. There's fear in letting know authorities you have cryptocurrencies.

I'm not in Venezuela anymore, but I still use bitcoin on a monthly basis to send money across borders to my family.

And the security of it gives me a guarantee not offered by anything else, by far!!!. I won't get my money blocked, like it happened to me with a US bank account, for trying to spend all of my money at once (~2k$).

So theoretically a central authority should be able to offer all of that, but in practice, they're all made of human being's decisions, which rules change from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and susceptible to whims. In other words, unstable and not trustworthy. We have also lived what those central authorities can become

Once you've understand how truly secure money can be, it's hard to go back.

[nmlnn]

Maybe they do maybe they don't, it's impossible to tell other people what they need. The best you can do is educate them on the options you think could help, people will ultimately make their own decisions.

[alwillis]

Short answer: in theory. But in the world we live in, nothing else comes close to bitcoin’s $675 billion market capitalization.

It’s the only cryptocurrency that has institutional financial support.