[killerstorm]

It provides an alternative to banks.

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.

[reaperman]

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.

Some of it is currently very ham-fisted, but there's a clear intent to devalue off-exchange wallets: https://www.coincenter.org/new-crypto-tax-reporting-obligati...

[hackernudes]

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.

[killerstorm]

Well, it's been 15 years.

The question is more like: Are OK with government control?

Reminder - regulators reviewed SVB reports and found them adequate. Then apparently people found it's insolvent. Does it look adequate?

Do you like a system if bank can become insolvent if people withdraw their money?

That's presumably one of most competent countries in the world.

[reaperman]

> 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.

[killerstorm]

People who lived under totalitarian/authoritarian regimes often thought their opinions do not matter and everything is already decided.

But, not all people, and many such regimes have crumbled.

Somehow you found energy to spread FUD on this forum, but you don't have energy to form an opinion and defend it. Sad.

[AlexandrB]

I remember seeing articles related to this from a few years ago. I wonder what's going on under the hood at places like Coinbase.

https://news.bitcoin.com/industry-execs-freshly-minted-virgi...

[aurareturn]

That’s a small fraction of BTC holders. The majority don’t care and leave their coins on exchanges, which act like banks but unregulated.

[killerstorm]

People can still choose different jurisdiction, or move when they want, etc, etc.

It might surprise you, but it's way easier to open an exchange account than a bank account.