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Do pro-bitcoin people still talk about goals of bitcoin being a currency that people use daily? I don't follow it closely, but that idea seems to have faded an

• desumeku 2y ago
  For daily usage, Bitcoin is simply inferior to Ethereum and other blockchains.
  • block_dagger 2y ago
    That opinion is not shared by those who think Proof of Stake and no ceiling to supply are bugs vs features.
    • desumeku 2y ago
      Those issues are not really relevant when it comes to factors like transaction speeds and the diversity of assets available to transact with, such as stablecoins, as well as DeFi platforms to actually use those assets on.
      • verdverm 2y ago
        When most people hear daily usage, they think groceries, bills and paycheck, not day trading on an exchange, defi or centralized. In this regard, crypto currency is not really a currency that people can use for their daily lives without worry and risk from volatility
        • whimsicalism 2y ago
          yes it is, just use stables. frankly it is a much more convenient way to move money if the other person has it as well e: and i’m no crypto obsessive really, i don’t think it was usable even 3 years ago but it’s pretty handy now, can easily send $20 in usdc on base or use it to purchase carbon offsets or use it on election/sports betting or use it to purchase deepseek r1 credits…
          • verdverm 2y ago
            I was emailing rent to my roommate 6+ years ago for zero fees with GPay, it's hard to see it being easier than that.
            • whimsicalism 2y ago
              well, it is. for instance, for my rent rebalancing i have to pay more than $2500 and gpay doesn’t allow that. the fees would be fractional cents. in fact short of wiring i have not found any service allowing me to send more than that in a day and certainly not with instant deposit gpay takes 1-5 days to appear in account, i can spend the money i transfer here immediately
              • verdverm 2y ago
                Too many malicious actors in crypto for it to become mainstream, sorry, not sorry The community needs to self police and remove this problem if they ever want me to give it a third chance. There are several other fundamental issues in crypto, so not sure this will be enough on its own to reach mainstream adoption For example, I don't want my transaction history on a public ledger, encrypted or not
                • desumeku 2y ago
                  "Crypto needs to self-police and remove malicious actors" and "Crypto needs to stop having a public ledger" are two contradictory actions where achieving one would make the other impossible.
                  • verdverm 2y ago
                    How so? Plenty of private system are fully capable of removing bad actors, if anything they become easier together
          • verdverm 2y ago
            I already have stable digital dollars in my bank account, why do I need another one that costs me more money to use?
      • bloatedGoat 2y ago
        If all you care about are transaction speeds then use the lightning network. Instant settlement of bitcoin and much lower fees. There are protocols like Cashu [1] that allow you to transact offline anonymously for no fees and settle on the lightning network. Why do you need "diversity of assets to transact with"? Go to any store in almost any country and they usually accept a single currency. Maybe in some they take local + USD. You're arguing for something the market doesn't seem to care about outside of speculative trading for fiat gains. And even if you really want stablecoins they've been added to bitcoin via the lightning network and taproot assets. Tether for example can be used via bitcoin [2]. There's a reason Bitcoin makes up well over 50% of the total crypto market. ---- 1. https://cashu.space/ https://cashu.space/ 2. https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/01/30/tether-brings-its-usd140b-usdt-stablecoin-to-bitcoin-and-lightning-networks https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/01/30/tether-brings-i...
        • desumeku 2y ago
          You "can" do all these things on BTC. Almost nobody does. All of Tether & USDC usage takes place on other blockchains. The lightning network is notoriously tricky to use and isn't trustless. A diversity of assets enables things like PAXG, an ERC-20 token backed fully by real-world gold, as well as things like tokenized stocks, bonds, and t-bills, the last already existing, and the former surely coming in the near future. Additionally BTC isn't "over 50% of the market", it's over 50% of the market capitalization, which is a huge difference. BTC doesn't have the raw TX speed to make up 50% of actual market activity.
    • tim333 2y ago
      Proof of Stake etc are a bit irrelevant for daily use. If you want to do something like make a bet on polymarket the newer chains are faster, easier and cheaper than bitcoin or ethereum on the whole. Polymarket uses polygon for example which is a fork off ethereum but it doesn't matter much which such network you use and the bets are denominated in US$. Bitcoin lightning is ok but more awkward to use than polygon et al. Proof of Stake and no ceiling to supply are important if you are going to hold the thing for decades which is a different issue.
  • LAMike 2y ago
    You don't really believe that do you? The market disagrees as well
• block_dagger 2y ago
  Those who continue to invest in and use the Lightning (layer 2) network think it will be used as currency but most see it as a long term storage of value, at least until infrastructure supporting layers 2 and 3 mature. As for “magically,” there’s nothing magic about its increase in value as it replaces legacy technology, chiefly gold as a store of value.
  • derriz 2y ago
    Except it has none of the properties of gold as an asset. The value of bitcoin is highly correlated with equities and anti-correlated with gold. It’s the opposite of what you want to be holding as a hedge against a stock market crash.
    • LAMike 2y ago
      It is more rare than gold and getting more rare every 4 years. What is the current supply of gold and what will it be in 2050?
      • nadermx 2y ago
        Gold has a utility, used in a large swath of electronics. Can always be sold to make something. Bitcoin can only be sold if there is a fiat currency trading in it
        • desumeku 2y ago
          Electronics didn't exist for the thousands of years that gold was used as currency. The fact is, it only has most of the value that it does because it was rare, malleable, particularly shiny, and because metallism was simply the easiest way (or at least one of the easiest ways) to invent the concept of currency and a monetary system.
          • nadermx 2y ago
            Even then it had a utility as jewlery. Bitcoin fails on that.
• sporkydistance 2y ago
  Why would anyone spend a single BTC/sat. if they know it could be worth 10x more in a few weeks/years?
  • hackernudes 2y ago
    Because they need toilet paper today.
    • sporkydistance 2y ago
      Selling a speculative investment for a necessity screams: "I don't understand personal finance."
    • jdiff 2y ago
      I've got good news for those people, you can't buy toilet paper with bitcoin today. And they aren't getting paid in bitcoin today, either. And if they tried to exchange bitcoin for fiat to buy toilet paper, they'd be subject to incredible fees that would make such a transaction pointless.
    • cg5280 2y ago
      While people will always need to buy the essentials, I do buy that a deflationary currency could discourage discretionary spending. Maybe people are slightly less likely to splurge on a big purchase or a nice dinner. I don't know what the delta would be in GDP growth compared to now; it certainly could be negligible.
  • __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    It's like those people who collect action figures and never take them out of the box. I'm not trying to knock it, but I don't think I'll ever understand it.
  • sahila 2y ago
    Because if you/they knew that, then they'd be buying more bitcoin. On a much smaller scale, your dollar goes up by 5% every year but you still use it everyday because all your monies are in dollars. If all your monies are in btc, you'd have to sell to buy things.
• ptero 2y ago
  It is not an asset that goes up forever. It is permissionless, very liquid asset that the governments cannot dilute. For many people this is a very big deal. A significant part of the world population lives under regimes where the governments control the money flow, heavily dilute savings in the single local fiat currency and can confiscate savings under a guise of money reform. While not nearly as bad, most democratic, developed countries dilute their fiat to the tune of 5-7% a year. Would I buy bitcoin if I have an easy access to a convenient currency with no (or at least significantly under the average GDP growth) debasement? Hell no! Otherwise, I will (together with gold, income-generating stocks, real estate, etc.) as an insurance against government spending run amok. My 2c.
  • Turskarama 2y ago
    It's false safety. If the government can't get their drop of blood by diluting their fiat, they will simply do it another, more direct way. At best it will work as long as few enough people are doing it that the government doesn't care.
    • cylemons 2y ago
      Sure they can criminalize bitcoin possession or use their police force and state apparatus to serveil and track all bitcoin usage. But that is way more effort than simply turning on the money printer.
      • Turskarama 2y ago
        It's much simpler than that, they simply make selling bitcoin a capital gain event (which it is) and tax it. They could even make a separate special rate for cryptocurrency pretty easily. Now maybe you think this is easy to avoid, in which case I would ask why you aren't already committing tax fraud.
        • cylemons 2y ago
          The reason tax evasion with regular currency is so difficult is because pretty much all banks/financial institutions report your income to the state. But with crypto, especially anonymized ones like monero, the decentralized nature makes it almost impossible to track income and who it belongs to.
• zmgsabst 2y ago
  Around the time of SegWit, the “digital gold” camp won over the “digital money” camp — who moved on to ETH, SOL, etc.
  • jgord 2y ago
    Many of us in the BC is digital money camp argued the case that more transactions and a lower transaction fee could be most easily implemented, within the spirit of the founders intent, if we simply increased the size of the transaction buffer, mitigating an obvious bottleneck. We argued against the complexity of SegWit and Lightning Network. I think greed and politics won rather than engineering or economics good sense - people didnt want cheaper transactions, it now costs around $15 USD per BTC transaction. Despite the proliferation of alt-coins using essentially the same code-base, with shorter block-times and larger buffers.. and more programmability - ultimately proof-of-stake might be a better implementation of the block minting process, than proof-of-work.
    • bloatedGoat 2y ago
      Transaction fees have been about as low as they can possibly be for months. It costs roughly $0.15 to move a UTXO right now. The people who argued for increasing the block size were making a tradeoff between decentralization and "low" transaction fees. Increasing the block size makes the chain grow faster which causes several problems: the time to sync new blocks goes up, initial chain download time goes way up, and block verification takes more CPU. The parameters were initially set so that anyone could run a full node for as many years as possible which is the most important part of the ecosystem by far. If you make it harder for the average person to run a node it doesn't matter how cheap the transactions are if ultimately a small group of people are capable of running it. You could argue that doubling or quadrupling the block size doesn't hurt decentralization, and maybe you're right, but that also doesn't move the needle much for transaction throughput either at least not enough to make a difference for adoption. Bitcoin can and should be scaled in layers. The detractors are just impatient.
      • desumeku 2y ago
• wyager 2y ago
  I think people mostly realized that the more immediate priority is establishing Bitcoin as an international reserve commodity. Its usage as a currency, either directly or via intermediary layers, is kind of secondary to that. Bitcoin is making pretty good progress in that regard.
• LAMike 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • 7j67j67j76j6 2y ago
    Yeah the rest of us can continue geeking out over layered network protocol design and technologies like Lightning or Liquid. There is so much going on under the hood but it is so much easier to take the piss and learn nothing. That is no surprise, with the current state of the world.
• georgeecollins 2y ago
  It doesn't have to be "magic" that causes it to go up forever. People need a way to put large amounts of money in places that are difficult for governments to get to and /or easy to move across jurisdictional borders. Think: money launderers, people that are worried their corrupt government will seize their assets, people hiding money from someone they owe like a spouse in a divorce. These all seem to me to be reasonable use cases for bitcoin. All the things that make bitcoin a pain to buy a pizza are irrelevant if your goal is to hide $100m in your shoe. Nothing can do that better than bitcoin and there is a demonstrated need. If you assume the reason to use bitcoin isn't going away and the wealth of the world goes up-- while the supply of bitcoin is pretty constant-- it can keep going up without magic.
  • skybrian 2y ago
    But that doesn't distinguish Bitcoin from other cryptocurrencies. The thing that distinguishes Bitcoin is fame, pure and simple. Everyone has heard of it.
    • kragen 2y ago
      Also nobody can premine it, no coalition of big stakeholders can lock you out of your coins, a 51% attack is less likely feasible than for any other PoW coin, the bandwidth needed for its blockchain is smaller than most alternatives, and it's less likely to conceal unknown cryptographic weaknesses. It's kind of shitty in some other ways, though.
      • postalrat 2y ago
        And eventually the math will be solved and every bitcoin will be worth zero.
        • kragen 2y ago
          While that's conceivable, Merkle-graph systems like Bitcoin are surprisingly resilient. It's been almost 20 years since MD5 was thoroughly broken, but still nobody has published a second preimage attack. For SHA2 and SHA3 nobody has even published a collision attack. And SHA-256 (what Bitcoin uses) is post-quantum-safe (Grover's algorithm still needs 2¹²⁸ time) though AFAIK there isn't yet a post-quantum cryptosystem deployed for signing transactions, which will require a hard fork. Presumably if quantum computers (or better DLP algorithms on classical computers) start breaking keys, that will become a priority. So I think there's an excellent chance that even if the math is solved Bitcoins will retain their value. Perhaps even without many of them getting stolen in the process. This is a big difference from many other uses of cryptography; if someone breaks IDEA 20 years from now, they can decrypt your PGP messages from the 20th century, and there's nothing you can do now to prevent that.
• toomim 2y ago
  I do.
• golergka 2y ago
  I literally use USDT daily. Use it to pay for food delivery, for a massage or a manicure, or exchange it for cash delivered to my home. Literally 90% of my spending goes through it.
  • lawn 2y ago
    USDT isn't Bitcoin.
    • golergka 2y ago
      That's true. The claim that Bitcoin is useless for everyday transactions is obviously correct. It's more like digital gold. However, I find time and time again that HN crows is absolutely unaware of how useful crypto can be in everyday life, so I offer my perspective.
• lawn 2y ago
  Yes, some Bitcoin people still hold on to the idea that somehow layer 2 or layer 3 systems will somehow make Bitcoin practical for regular payments again. But largely that's been abandoned for the "store of value"/"number go up" speculative use-case which is easily 99.99% of the point of Bitcoin today.
• bbbbq 2y ago
  [flagged]