It keeps chugging, but it's not terribly useful for a typical person. Close to $20 for a transaction that takes an hour or so to complete is kinda rough.
It's digital currency without counterparty risk and no inflation risk. Similar to why gold is useful as a store of value. You can hide it, and if nobody knows it exists nobody can take it from you. The downside is if people know you have it you can be robbed.
If you are a normal person in a stable country it's not terribly useful. If you are a normal person in a not so stable place, it can be very useful to you.
Look, I'm not talking about it as a speculative asset, I'm just stating why it can be useful. And by inflation risk I meant risk of being devalued due to artificial increases in supply.
The thing is, users don’t care why the currency lost value, just that it did. Fixing one reason for that is only a start.
Inelastic supply means the price depends entirely on demand, so it will shoot up and down when demand changes. This is a speculator’s playground.
But another word for the situation causing a price increase is a shortage. Stability comes from elastic supply that responds to demand. Algorithmic stablecoins are snake oil, but they do appear to have more stable prices until they collapse.
To prevent that, there needs to be someone willing to buy back the currency when demand collapses (losing a lot of money in the process) rather than running away like everyone else.
Does Bitcoin have enough die-hard believers to do that? So far they’ve been able to stave off complete collapse and come back stronger, but in the future, who knows. When investors get spooked and sell off Bitcoin ETF’s, what happens?
> It's digital currency without counterparty risk and no inflation risk. Similar to why gold is useful as a store of value.
Not being able to reverse transactions is itself a risk, and a deflationary currency that is susceptible to hoarding isn't a great idea IMHO. And given gold's fluctuating value (though better than BTC's), I'm not sure I'd consider it a good store of value; it certainly isn't a good inflation hedge:
> Andre Sharon, head of the international research department at Drexel Burnham, Inc., notes, “the value of gold essentially derives from its capacity to preserve real capital and purchasing power.”† I select this particular quotation because of the prestige of the organization and the position of the spokesman, but statements in this vein can be found in great numbers. They can be traced back for generations and in many countries. How can this proposition so contrary to statistical fact become so widely believed and quoted? Possibly because gold has preserved capital in cataclysmic cases it is easy to infer that it can be trusted to do the same in less severe circumstances. To extrapolate from gold’s protection in singular catastrophes to its use as a strategy against cyclical infation is an example of faulty inductive reasoning.
I'm not arguing for the US to replace it's currency with bitcoin. I'm saying why it can be useful and it's not purely a scam. I would never advocate for someone to put all their money into bitcoin but if you reach a level of wealth in your life (that does not have to be that high) maybe you start to think about what happens if your country suddenly becomes a dictatorship and it makes sense to store a very small percentage of your wealth so that if the worst does happen your family can be protected.
I send wire transfers via Wise for about $4. I can receive ACH payments for free. I do both with PortableApps.com. The transaction fees for Bitcoin are so high, most of our users stopped using it for donations and things.
Back in 2013, we'd get a BTC donation every week or two. Now we get one maybe every 3 months. In 2013, the average BTC transaction fee was about 3 cents. Today, the average fee was $19.76.
Not complaining about moderation but it’s interesting to note that something factual and easily verifiable is being downvoted. It’s very much the ‘my bags’ crypto culture.
And here comes the argument about the lightning network that I literally have been hearing since 2017.
For as "inevitable" as it's supporters claim it to be, it sure is taking a long time for anyone to care about it, outside of bitcoin maxi twitter influencers.
The rest of the crypto industry has moved on. It simply took to long for bitcoin to be used for anything outside of speculation. And other chains have taken up the actual transactions usecase.
...which themselves are unique projects that might as well separate from the L1 chain entirely if they intend to actually solve the transaction bottleneck issue. Stuff like Lightning is cute on paper, but it really only stands to make you realize how horribly doomed the main currency is conceptually.
L2 chains are where I stopped being interested in crypto. It's like reading the plaque of Ozymandias and thinking to yourself "Ah, the desert. What a lovely place to build my next palace."
I mean I think that bitcoin is a dumb project, but layer 2s clearly make sense and are an inevitability - another chain has custody and keeps track of its own state and lets you do custom things there.