> I borrow dollar mortgage to buy a dollar house. Yeah, this is currently my main reason for thinking the existing cryptocurrencies will not compete with norma

> I borrow dollar mortgage to buy a dollar house. Yeah, this is currently my main reason for thinking the existing cryptocurrencies will not compete with normal currencies. You can't do fractional reserve banking. I know a lot of people think that's a good thing, but I'm not so sure. I like to consider borrowing with a fractional reserve banking system as borrowing from your future self. Mostly, the only barrier to getting a loan is your own ability to make regular payments. With a cryptocurrency, it feels like you're gonna have to find some old rich dude willing to lend you some money (possibly through a bank, but still..). I have a suspicion that this will lead to many people not being able to buy their own home anymore.. if you have a lot of money, why put it in savings in a bank to be lent out to others to buy homes? Why not buy property and rent it out instead? You'll probably have a higher ROI. In my view BTC is basically acting like a distributed pyramid scheme. A lot of the money going into it is people "investing" in the currency, and these people will try their best to recruit more people to invest even more money into the scheme so that the first guys can increase the value of the BTCs, and possibly sell out for a profit later. The only difference from an actual pyramid scheme is you don't get money directly from the people you recruit. BTC kind of shuffles the contributions. But once you're bought into BTC you still have very high incentives to hype it up as much as possible, regardless of the actual value of cryptocurrency to society. I think cryptocurrencies and blockchains in general is incredibly cool. I played around with mining Bitcoin very early on, and I do like the concept. But like many others I've yet to see a single usecase where there's no better alternative to using a blockchain, as long as you have a functioning legal system. If you're doing crime, or living in a failed/corrupt state, or doing something like international bank transfers ... sure. But those cases should hopefully be niche.