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You can buy tons of stuff with Bitcoin (not just drugs). You can transfer it around the world basically for free (transaction fees amount to the equivalent of pennies no matter how much you send). It's immutable. Basically it does the things it's supposed to do. It's gained widespread adoption, a whole economy, thousands of businesses.

It is, without a doubt, successful.




> You can buy tons of stuff with Bitcoin

You can also buy tons of stuff with USD. The only innovation of Bitcoin is that it allows you to do illegal stuff.

A more expensive and cumbersome way to do what you could already do with other tools is not “success”.

> You can transfer it around the world basically for free (transaction fees amount to the equivalent of pennies no matter how much you send).

This is also true of, for example, TransferWise.

> It’s immutable

This actually makes it worse than the existing financial system, because being able to reverse fraudulent transactions is a feature, not a bug.

> It’s gained widespread adoption, a while economy, thousands of businesses.

Also true of USD. You still haven’t demonstrated any advantage of Bitcoin other than illegal transactions.


>This is also true of, for example, TransferWise.

Not for small to large amounts for less than pennies

>A more expensive and cumbersome way to do what you could already do with other tools is not “success”.

You're vastly underestimating the amount of people trapped in regimes where they cannot spend their funds abroad or risk having them devalued at whim.


> or risk having them devalued at whim.

doesn't that describe a lot of cryptocurrencies? or are you suggesting the people in these regimes use cryptocurrencies as an intermediary to transfer their local currency into more stable foreign currency?


Bitcoin is the definition of getting devalued at whim


This reasoning is really strange and reeks of bitterness. Do you have anything backing up your claim BTC is used for mostly illegal activities? Please provide some very clear citations for that claim.


I never claimed that, and have no idea whether it’s true.


Much more illegal activity happens with USD than with Bitcoin.


There are very few things you can buy more easily using Bitcoin. And average fees to send money right now with Bitcoin are 2-3%. Which is not great, considering the current financial system offers lots of much cheaper options for sending money.


take a look at Bitcoins Lightning network sometime, you'd be surprised.


> It's gained widespread adoption, a whole economy, thousands of businesses.

What percent of those business denominate their prices in bitcoin?

What percent of those businesses do anything but immediately convert the bitcoin back into fiat the moment they take possession?


So because Bitcoin hasn't overtaken fiat currency as the de facto international standard means it's a failure? All of the critics in this thread sure have some narrow goalposts, don't they?


I think you’re missing the point that Bitcoin is at zero percent for this metric.




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