People are cheering this crap because they hold coins and when ordinary people get burned they shrug and say "you shouldn't have done that". Ordinary banking systems have a number of brakes built in so that people do not lose their money in an instant -- at least not that easily.
As an example, more than one person made the mistake of typing in an Ethereum address instead of copy-pasting and losing their money in the process. Or when someone's account on an exchange get hacked and thieves walk away with the money the usual answers are "why you didnt have 2fa" or "why did you leave money in the exchange". If someone hacks my online account they can't do an outgoing transfer to a new address without verifying a code first -- that's 2FA -- and more likely than not, there'll be a daily/per transfer limit I can report to the police, contest the wire and so forth. There are remedies. If it's crypto"currency"? Sorry for your loss!
When I say, legit uses, and people say, VPN, I am like sure you want to do a public service of seeding Linux images and your evil ISP stops torrenting so you need to use a VPN. I get it. The fact that you are using an anonymous way to pay has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the traffic you run through this VPN is breaking the law. Surely No True Scotsman or in this case No True Hacker News Reader would do such a thing!
When I say, legit uses, and people say, various businesses accept Bitcoin, no, they absolutely don't, they integrate the separate sell your bitcoin step into the checkout, the moment Bitpay dropped Canadian dollars, Newegg Canada dropped Bitcoin without a second's hesitation. No business wants Bitcoin on their books, that's a horror bookkeeping / accounting wise.
I maintain: all there is illegal money transfer out of China and more than a little hype with the occassional Ponzi and other scams thrown in. Just because sometimes VCs are on top of a pyramid scheme it doesn't cease to be a pyramid.
(1) snark on HN about HN talking about something—that's incongruent and supercilious;
(2) paste earlier comments into new threads;
(3) rant in a flamewar fashion. It never persuades anyone and it damages the commons.