[jollybean]

Dropbox is a useful service. The comment about 'bit torrent' makes little sense. Having cloud storage 24/7 high availability has utility. (Yes, if the interent were designed a bit different, that config might be slightly different, but there'd be some value in Dropbox in there somehow).

Bitcoin has no utility.

It has the 'promise' of utility, which is the current utility it rests upon, making the underlying value quite difficult to determine.

If BTC were to dissapear, the world wouldn't skip a beat, and we would have no need to 'reinvent' BTC.

We would likely to continue to think about and experiment with other things, but as it stands so far, BTC isn't the solution to anything.

[yellowapple]

> If BTC were to dissapear, the world wouldn't skip a beat, and we would have no need to 'reinvent' BTC.

There would be no need to 'reinvent' Dropbox, either. People would do so for both regardless of necessity (and indeed have done so for both, ad nauseam) because they find them and the concepts thereof useful or interesting, contrary to what you or I might assert.

[jollybean]

This is so obviously wrong ... I don't know what to say.

Dropbox (Box, Google Drive, etc.) are imminently useful services, almost all of us use them.

If my cloud drive we vaporized, even if I had backups, I'd be livid, as would maybe more than a billion people would be as well.

People pay for cloud storage because it's immensely useful. I share documents with clients every day.

BTC is some surplus money changing hands, bouncing around between owners trading magic numbers, willy nilly. There's no need for it to exist. Even unproductive things like 'gambling' serve the purpose of entertainment at least.

[yellowapple]

> Dropbox (Box, Google Drive, etc.) are imminently useful services, almost all of us use them.

And meanwhile there are migrant workers, refugees, and the like who depend on cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin for basic economic participation. If Bitcoin vanished overnight, they'd be back to being at the mercy of a legacy financial system that shuns them at best and actively exploits them at worst.

[jollybean]

This is completely wrong/upside down.

There are no migrant groups workers who depend on Bitcoin as a means of banking, it's completely (ridiculously) unsuited to that purpose.

Migrant workers use of innumerable financial services offered to them by banks at home, in their country of work, or one of the myriad of financial services apps made available to them via app stores etc..

[yellowapple]

> There are no migrant groups workers who depend on Bitcoin as a means of banking,

There's more to economic participation than just banking (even assuming that what you wrote wasn't a blatant falsehood).

> Migrant workers use of innumerable financial services offered to them by banks at home, in their country of work, or one of the myriad of financial services apps made available to them via app stores etc..

Previously, yes, with predatory fees that make even Bitcoin (let alone any of the umpteen million iterations on its design) affordable by comparison. The working poor lack the bargaining power to meaningfully demand fair treatment from the legacy financial system; for them, a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin provides that fairness.