Once you realize that banks are very fragile and abusive, just having this alternative is important.
Banks can deny you access to your money on a whim. Compliance, glitch, failure, whatever. You can't use your money. You can't buy food. You can't pay rent. You can't buy tickets. You can't hire a lawyer.
It's nice to have something which is based on completely different principles.
I think you'll be amazed at the extent to which BTC will be able to be controlled by strong central governments. I'd be shocked if in ten years there's not granular control over which wallets contain "tainted" bitcoin and cannot be converted to fiat except through actual money laundering. There's been a lot of consolidation of the exchanges in USA, tons of KYC controls in place now, and old-school options like localbitcoins.com or craigslist have disappeared or been nerfed beyond recognizability.
If people no longer "need" to convert BTC to fiat, this would no longer be a point of a control, but until then, governments can already and will continue to grow how much they can control BTC flow.
What about the lightning network? Or Liquid sidechain? There are lots of people working on scaling bitcoin so that it can be used like cash (low fees and anonymous).
When a user receives a payment in Cash App or Strike over the lightning network there is no way to track where that bitcoin came from. I haven't really tested that out yet, but I find the idea that bitcoin can be the rails of transferring value pretty compelling. Most people can still transact in fiat but with trustless interoperability between banks and service providers. And of course if people are happy transacting in units of bitcoin it can all be done in a trust-minimized way (with tradeoffs available for convenience, etc...).
But to your point, the government could crack down on the app stores and service providers to not support this kinda stuff.
> The question is more like: Are OK with government control?
I simply doubt that my opinion, or even that of the majority of the public, would change the outcome of what the government decides to do. They seem to be on a pro-KYC/AML/FINRA/IRS path regardless of public opinion.
Many governments attempt to force their populations to keep their savings in the nation's currency, while aggressively devaluing the currency. The richer people in those countries tend to try to get out of it via other currency holdings in offshore accounts or real estate, but the poorer set don't generally have that option. The ability to opt out of that in a way that's harder to confiscate than eg physical gold/USD is very helpful to those people.
Me guessing (as somebody who is anti-crypto): they like how it returns ~50-100% year over year pretty much.
I swear I saw some super highly upvoted comments that read as normal + level-headed in r/CryptoCurrnecy that was like "if it goes from $45k -> $100k this year it isn't even that much"
Do you ever hear Warren Buffet saying "122% yearly returns are meh"?
Yep, crypto bros will get in bed with the same banks that screwed them over in 2008 if the end goal means that the price of their coin (ahem) bags.. go up.
The whole Bitcoin 'manifesto' and sticking it to the man is just a ruse.
Or the technologists that push these open source projects forward were abandoned by the very communities that used to celebrate disruptive technologies.
Bitcoin is wealth in the cloud. There's immense utility in being able to digitalize your wealth, including higher mobility and, since it is a decentralized network, assurance that it won't be inflated, confiscated and that you will have the freedom to transact it with whoever you want.
And yet if you were to visit Iran and attempt to access that wealth you'd quickly discover how little of that wealth is actually yours.
It's not just that it's in the cloud, it's the only form of wealth you can keep digitally AND only you have access and control over it.
Maybe that's fine because you're a good citizen who follows the rules, but some people are born into places where they don't get the privilege of a fair financial system, or the system changes on them.
But all this is circular logic. You can’t say something is valuable because it’s digital. Why is it wealth in the first place is the question. Wealth is something that represents concrete value.
Plenty of people have done that and captured some value. Bitcoin has the most secure network of its type and that has inherent value, it's also perceived to have value by millions of people around the world as opposed to your random fork.
Not sure if you see that it's your understanding of the world that's off here.
Money is a social construct. Other social constructs are countries and borders. They only exist due to social consensus and is a pure social construct. Social constructs do have real impact on your individual well-being though and should not be trivialized.
Gold was a currency and a store of wealth for a long time for multiple societies (even when most of those use cases you listed didn't exist). If only they had the knowledge and wisdom of epolanski from 2024 they wouldn't have made this mistake...
Pretty sure that every society that unilaterally adopted gold used it for jewellery first, and only started using it as a currency and store of wealth once its value had already been established.
BTC's value is the massive network securing it, and the trust in the brand's security and resistance to debasement. Its value lives in peoples' head, similar to many other assets.
These are some interesting points around its value, but it can absolutely be inflated, no? Given that most of our standards of value are tied to fiats, and that Bitcoin's exchange with said fiats is highly variable, the value of your crypto wealth can totally be out of your control.
Fortunately for most bitcoiners who got in early, it's been variable in a positive direction... But not for everyone.
Value fluctuation is not the same as asset inflation. The first relates to how much confidence people have on using BTC to represent their wealth in a given moment. The second is a decreasing of the asset's value keeping overall confidence constant.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410