Ask HN: 15 years later, does anyone use Bitcoin?

[stat_outlier]

For the sake of discussion, let's extend the question to cryptocurrency/blockchains in general.

I can't say I actually know anyone who uses it, is there a use case I don't yet know about?

As far as I can tell, it's useless tech for the sake of tech.

[npoc]

Yes, I use it to store my life savings/pension. It's the best asset for storing large amounts of value that mankind has ever seen - a perfectly scarce, digitally native, bearer asset, and the price fluctuations as it grows from 0 to infinity are just the market slowly figuring this out.

All other monies leak value fundamentally (through increasing supply or maintenance costs or risk or lack of liquidity etc.) whereas bitcoin's supply is hard limited by mathematics/logic, there's no maintenance costs, there's almost no risk (once you understand it) and I can exchange it directly with anyone, 24hrs, 365 days/year for hardly any cost (remember that the base layer network is optimised for large amounts of value)

It's money boiled down to it's purest, most ideal form, but to appreciate that takes 1000hrs of hours of learning both what money is, and how bitcoin works. Few people know either one, and far fewer both.

[latchkey]

Not bitcoin directly, but WBTC (the tokenized version of BTC on Ethereum and other chains), can be used in DeFi to borrow any other token, against it.

It is a fantastic use case because now you can borrow up to your collateralized limit, without talking to anyone. Thus enabling you to make pet rocks work for you.

DeFi really is a great usecase. It is of course, early days, meaning that it can be high risk, but it can also be high reward.

Lastly, this is one of my favorite comments here on the subject of usecases: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410

[throwaway167]

My ex employer uses blockchain to puff out marketing material. I don't think they've delivered any product with it, at least didn't when I was there.

With an offshoot BPO wing, they've recently moved to claiming, via press releases, their entire HR function of 60 people has been reduced to just 2 and AI. Which I find hard to believe as I'm still in contact with 10+ of the HR doing the exact same jobs with the exact same broken spreadsheet workflow they always did.

[dezb]

nobody "uses it", the whole thing is a ponzi scheme scam and despite looking for years, I have yet to find a single instance of a bona fide retailer or market / market place that accepts bitcoin other than scammers, spam list sellers, and forums selling breached data dumps..

[neom]

I use some form of it to very occasionally buy stuff from TOR, that's about it.

[polski-g]

Lots of people use it:

1) intelligence agencies

2) child pornographers

3) ransomware operators