Weak old arguments that are easily refutable: > Venmo is a free service to transfer dollars, and bitcoin transfers are not free. Credit cards, payment gateway

Weak old arguments that are easily refutable: > Venmo is a free service to transfer dollars, and bitcoin transfers are not free. Credit cards, payment gateways et al, are not free, they just obfuscate costs that are eventually passed back to consumers - when you include fraud it is estimated that society pays a hidden 5% tax on all goods and services just for payment processing. > no single person in existence who had a problem they wanted to solve Illicit purchases at minimum? Silk Road, etc.? Whether this is good or not, no need to think of other examples, the statement is simply not true. > but once the vendor has your money they don’t have any incentive to deliver There are many interesting solutions to this like automatic escrow, reputation, mutual burn, etc. Additionally using a trust-based system for small meaningless purchases while storing and transacting your actual wealth in crypto is not incompatible with the goals and vision of the space. > Auditing software is hard! The most-heavily scrutinized smart contract in history had a small bug that nobody noticed Sure is, yet the world runs on software now, it's doable. Additionally of course the contract was the most heavily scrutinized, it was one of the first ever. > yet is your Afghan villager going to download the blockchain from a broadcast node and decrypt the Merkle root from his Linux command line to independently verify that his vote has been counted An afghan villager (or even a sophisticated engineer in the valley) isn't going to read and check every line of code of all software ever written, and will end up trusting to some degree - but that's very different than having to trust every transaction, every build, and having to ask for permission for every use of the system. I didn't check the linux code, but I still trust it much more than a closed source alternative. There are degrees of trust, nothing is absolute, and here it is minimized. And if you somehow don't trust, then you are free to verify, you have the choice. This is valuable. > These sound like stupid examples Agreed > in less than a decade, three successive top bitcoin exchanges have been hacked, another is accused of insider trading, the demonstration-project DAO smart contract got drained, crypto price swings are ten times What does insider trading have to do with blockchain technology? What do hacked exchanges have to do with blockchain? What do price swings have to do with blockchain? Bitcoin itself has never been hacked. This is fud nonsense. > A person who sprayed pesticides on a mango can still enter onto a blockchain system that the mangoes were organic. Yes and we can trace it with certainty and punish the infringer who had to sign their name - rather than have the organization invent confusion and doubt until everyone forgets and moves on. > Projects based on the elimination of trust have failed to capture customers’ interest because trust is actually so damn valuable Trust is fine to grease the wheels, maybe the last mile will be trust-related, but having the underlying final infrastructure not reliant on the good graces of others when push comes to shove is valuable.