4 ms·

> After a decade of use the tech hasn't found many real world uses The use case was found over a decade ago: "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System"[0]. I don'

• mindslight 3y ago
  To answer your question plainly: because Bitcoin addressed the value question by just letting it float, meaning that its value and the stability of that value are directly tied to its uses that drive demand (as with all currencies). This also led to the ecosystem being dominated by speculation, giving exchanges outsized importance - and simplistically implemented exchanges are a great setup for exit scams. Contrast with say Hashcash where anybody can make more for a fixed amount of computation, so there would be little point in speculating on Hashcash tokens. One also has to wonder how much Bitcoin's asymptotically limited supply directly caused the blooming of thousands of shitcoins [0] to satisfy the demand for monetary units. If newcomers could have just straightforwardly minted their own like Hashcash, would there have been as much of an incentive to go create competing currencies? (I'm not some Hashcash maximalist or something. It's just an example of a system with a different paradigm of monetary creation, regardless of its other flaws) [0] (not that Bitcoin itself isn't a shitcoin, being non-fungible and all)