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Can you really not find a single use for bitcoin? Here is the most obvious one - true sovereignty over your capital. When you have bitcoin, you have have physi

Can you really not find a single use for bitcoin? Here is the most obvious one - true sovereignty over your capital. When you have bitcoin, you have have physical ownership of a digitally transferable asset. Not legal ownership where a custodian ultimately decides whether you can access it. In theory nothing prevents individuals from carrying entire national budgets as seed words in their heads. You can argue ethics, legality but surely you have to acknowledge the power it gives individuals.

nmfisher 6y ago
> Here is the most obvious one - true sovereignty over your capital. When you have bitcoin, you have have physical ownership of a digitally transferable asset. Not legal ownership where a custodian ultimately decides whether you can access it. This isn't really true though. At the end of the day, you're always subject to the powers that be who will come knocking on your door with guns if you stop paying your taxes. If they criminalize BTC, stick you in jail, it won't really matter that you have "physical ownership of a digitally transferable asset". Ultimately there's always a custodian who decides whether you can access it. It might currently have some small benefits over traditional currency (in terms of not needing to operate via the banking system) but that doesn't mean it's somehow outside the boundaries of traditional society.
kungito 6y ago
Well, the owner of 51% of processing decides. It also has no use if both parties aren't connected to the internet. Also, you are in the truest sense not the owner of the bitcoins. You are using the "ownership service" of the network. If the network goes down, you lose access to the network (goverment internet filtering) or the network gets taken over, you lose everything. It's strictly worse than gold. The only downside of gold compared to this is that gold has to be physically stored somewhere
- wickoff 6y ago
  If the owner of Bitcoin's 51% hashrate decides to take anyone's coins, then Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general is over. They all go to 0. If that happens, then all of the critics will be proven right. Hasn't happened so far though because Bitcoin disincentivizes this sort of behavior.

nmfisher 6y ago

> Here is the most obvious one - true sovereignty over your capital. When you have bitcoin, you have have physical ownership of a digitally transferable asset. Not legal ownership where a custodian ultimately decides whether you can access it. This isn't really true though. At the end of the day, you're always subject to the powers that be who will come knocking on your door with guns if you stop paying your taxes. If they criminalize BTC, stick you in jail, it won't really matter that you have "physical ownership of a digitally transferable asset". Ultimately there's always a custodian who decides whether you can access it. It might currently have some small benefits over traditional currency (in terms of not needing to operate via the banking system) but that doesn't mean it's somehow outside the boundaries of traditional society.

kungito 6y ago

Well, the owner of 51% of processing decides. It also has no use if both parties aren't connected to the internet. Also, you are in the truest sense not the owner of the bitcoins. You are using the "ownership service" of the network. If the network goes down, you lose access to the network (goverment internet filtering) or the network gets taken over, you lose everything. It's strictly worse than gold. The only downside of gold compared to this is that gold has to be physically stored somewhere

wickoff 6y ago
If the owner of Bitcoin's 51% hashrate decides to take anyone's coins, then Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general is over. They all go to 0. If that happens, then all of the critics will be proven right. Hasn't happened so far though because Bitcoin disincentivizes this sort of behavior.