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Bitcoin is more like gold or diamonds. Expensive to mine. Interesting as an investment and to store wealth outside normal currencies. But nobody pays in the st
by Kaotique 8y ago
Bitcoin is more like gold or diamonds. Expensive to mine. Interesting as an investment and to store wealth outside normal currencies.
But nobody pays in the store with diamonds or gold. It's not practical.
- vortico 8y agoGreat analogy, I'll remember that one. BTC is only really useful to me when other payment methods surpass ~$100 of effort. For example, when paying contractors tens of thousands of $ internationally, it's impossible to avoid $50-300 fees from bank wires, TransferWise, or Xoom. So if both parties are fine with sitting down and figuring out how to send/receive BTC on their computer, only then it is worth my time.
- pjc50 8y agoI'm reminded of the guy who lost $400k by trying to do an international transfer of his own money through Quadriga at the point they collapsed.
- sparkie 8y agoIf only he was using a trustless cryptocurrency rather than a "trusted" custodial entity, he would never have had that problem.
- tim333 8y agoMy friend lost trustless cryptocurrency that would be worth well over $400k today by forgetting about it and formatting his hard drive.
- sparkie 8y agoHe clearly didn't value it highly enough at the time. You're implying that if he didn't accidentally lose his private keys, he would've had the nerve to hodl it till now and wouldn't have cashed out when it was valued less on the USD markets. Some banks will shut your account after a long enough period of activity. There are statutes of limitations which may prevent you from claiming any assets you had lodged in the bank if you suddenly remembered you had the bank account N years later. There are pros and cons to both Bitcoin and the traditional banking system. With Bitcoin, you can at least chose for yourself, whereas the decisions are made for you when you use custodians.
- tim333 8y agoHe minded it on his mac back in 2010 or so when it wasn't really worth anything much and then forgot it was there when the machine malfunctioned. Easy come easy go I guess and it wasn't worth much at the time but would be now.