| >Finally, the fact that Bitcoin proponents have to point to poor authoritarian countries to find legitimate usecases is telling in and of itself. It's basically a blunt admission that the technology is mostly useless in the US. You say that as though it makes it all but useless, despite the value it provides to people in those countries... that's very telling in itself. But as I said there are many use cases, I just pointed out a few that I thought were most important on a global scale... because, you know, it's not all about people in wealthy developed nations. But outside of those types of countries, and in countries like the US, the self-serving use case is a hedge against inflation. If inflation doesn't worry you, that's ok, but the recent money printing in trillions of dollars worries lots of other people. In 20 years I've seen the purchasing power of my money halved. I'm much happier to store my money in an asset that, so far, is seeing its purchasing power increase year on year. From a technical standpoint the other use case, over the lightning network (and other layers and sidechains), is that it allows for instant micro-payments not possible with the legacy financial system. People are building products like podcast platforms which stream satoshis to content creators for every minute someone listens to their podcast. Others are building systems where every API call can be instantly billed. Or content distribution systems (think Bittorrent) where seeders can be compensated for service. There are plenty of technical uses cases for a digital native money on the internet. If you don't understand why it has utility I don't think there's anything more I can say to convince you. Sorry. |