I agree with you that Bitcoin was originally conceived to solve digital cash problems (like double spending). But I think the parent's point (which I also agree with) is that the actual utility of modern blockchains, regardless of original intentions, is in strong fault-tolerant systems.

By any reasonable standard, Bitcoin itself has not matured into a strong currency usable for day to day cash payments. It has extremely high volatility, slow transaction verification and very high transaction fees. I think it's good that it was developed (it inspired a lot of follow-up R&D), and you can make a case for it as a store of value, but it's not really suitable as a payments platform whatsoever. But that failure doesn't diminish its main contribution, which is thermodynamically guaranteed cryptographic resilience and fault tolerance.

To your comments re bitcoin, it sounds to me like somebody complaining that Internet is slow back in the 90s/00s.

EDIT:

I am not pontificating in favor of bitcoin. It's just that the technology is still immature but there is a lot of great and promising work happening today.

...Really? That's one application, sure, but I hardly think it compares to the generalizable usage of cryptographic fault-tolerance assurance in distributed systems. I would consider the elimination of trusted third parties in more well-established and widely used cryptographic protocols (like CAa) or improvements to e.g. NTP node fault-tolerance to be more presently and practically useful than decentralized payments (in particular, because blockchains are much more useful for the former examples than the latter in the present day).

> Many people don't care about it today but there are those who do. That's why cryptocurrency is the real killer app for blockchain, like it or not.

I don't have an emotional investment in what use case becomes the most successful for blockchains in perpetuity, so it isn't a matter of "liking" or "not liking" any particular application. Rather, I'm speaking in terms of present facts, and purposely not making any points about the future.

Sure, people could become passionate en masse about seizing control of their assets in a decentralized, trustless, permissionless, etc systems. I'm not discounting that possibility. But in the present case, blockchains exhibit far more utility for resolving hard problems in domains of computer science than they do for cryptocurrencies.

> To your comments re bitcoin, it sounds to me like somebody complaining that Internet is slow back in the 90s/00s.

I never considered the internet slow in either of those decades because it was all I knew. More to the point, I think you mistake me for someone who is bearish on cryptocurrencies or blockchains in general - I'm emphatically not. I just think that Bitcoin is not going to be the actual winner for that use case, and regardless of future innovations, it is pretty clearly not succeeding now, either, for the reasons I've already outlined.

To their point though, dial-up modems are (by and large) a relic of the past and have been replaced by better (i.e. faster) methods of internet access.

Definitely

> Slow transaction verification

Depends on your definition of slow. The fact that I can send hundreds of thousands of USD across the world in about an hour seems to beat any other method easily available to me.

> very high transaction fees

A month or two ago, sure - TX congestion had driven up fees to ridiculous levels. Now that the congestion has cleared, I can once again send hundreds of thousands of USD across the world for less than a dollar.

Congestion has only cleared because the transaction volume has fallen to a two-year low:

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-sma3.h...

The bubble is deflating, in case you haven't noticed.

The genesis block contains, among other data, a reference to the front page of the January 3rd 2009 edition of The Times;

The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

Whether this was simply to prove that the genesis block was mined no sooner than January 3rd 2009, or if additionally that date and that news paper was chosen for the headline of that day one cannot know but a lot of people choose to interpret it as a comment on the instability caused by fractional-reserve banking.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block

Edit: Between the time that I opened this tab and when I got around to writing my comment someone else already said it. Oh well.

Whoever Satoshi is, he's probably not a Keynesian.

http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/m/discussion?id=2003008%3ATopi...

>>The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.

https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg09...

>>Yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years.

>>Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own.

There is nothing wrong with a deflationary currency once the rate of supply side deflation becomes small. Worthy investments will still be worthy investments and it helps the wealth of technological progress be distributed to the working class. Federal Reserve Notes are themselves arguably deflationary in nature except that remittance payments to citizens are taxed at 100%.

Bitcoin has other problems though.

In my opinion, a future successful digital decentralised currency should find a way to prevent itself from being seen as an "investment opportunity". That is not what money is for. That attitude creates bubbles, and "get rich quick" types. You can't have functional money without price stability. The deflationary property of bitcoin works against that.

So IMO bitcoin appreciating in value and creating bubbles along the way is not a good thing for bitcoin itself. You shouldn't need to "invest" in a currency, you need to use it. It needs to be trusted and accepted.

Many people remember the million dollar pizza now. No one wants to be that guy. Even if BTC was universally accepted now, not many holders would dare to use it to buy things. Because in their mind, BTC is poised to appreciate in value whereas fiat will collapse, so they'd use their fiat instead. If you have $5 in one hand, and a lottery ticket with perceived high odds you bought for $5, and the store accepts both as payment, why would you use the lottery ticket to buy things?

But any new currency is going to offer the opportunity for capital gains as long as it's competition includes the U.S. Dollar, because almost by definition a better alternative to the dollar would be deflationary relative to the dollar.

My point is that small rates of deflation aren't bad in a currency and bitcoins fixed size is not really a problem as long as you can trade small enough increments. Also fixed size is not even deflationary, it's just fixed unless something beneficial happens on the demand side like manufacturing cars with less materials.

At the same time fixed size is not really a feature though either. You have the whole number line available why not use it?

Bitcoins real problem is that it's not a "victory against entropy" like gold coins were in ancient times or reserve notes which can appease Uncle Sam in the future are today. Bitcoin is quite the opposite in fact, because we are dissipaiting so much concentrated energy to maintain the system. It's ironic because bitcoins greatest success is making us imagine currencies that don't dissipate value.

I'm pessimistic that there is a distributed solution to this beside just electricity or energy itself, and we're obviously not quite at that point technologically yet.

I am not convinced that what is being transferred here is value. It's transferring data, but I am not convinced that it is valuable. If it was out only option, then I guess I'd see the value in that, but in the current landscape, I'm not convinced that it is an efficient and sensible way of doing what it is trying to do.

>also providing means to accept digital payments with little to no fees.

Fees are variable. In real world volume (which it can't touch or sustain yet), the network cannot sustain the volume and the fees are exorbitant. I know, you'll say "it will get better, infancy" etc. but I'm not convinced. I don't see the value of decentralisation here so the overhead looks massive to me. And in the end, if bitcoin takes off as a successful alternative for high volume low fee transactions, the centralised industry can compete and they have the upper hand: Centralised version has orders of magnitude less overhead so they can make the fees cheaper than BTC always if it came to that. So that advantage is moot.

>Also you invest in whatever your countries currency is via time, so buying BTC with fiat is no different.

No, it is different. When I earn money, I intend to use it or invest it. I don't see my money as an investment which will appreciate in value if I "hodl" it. Money itself is not an investment. You invest with it.

>Deflationary currencies also don’t contribute anymore to hoarding than high savings rates.

[Citation needed.] Deflation literally is economic crisis where people hoard and refuse to spend which brings economy to a halt. Central banks use their policy to encourage people to spend. Deflation is our "crisis" state.

>Bitcoins main issue here is that it’s not a country’s main currency.

It is an issue but IMO it is quite a bit far from being the main issue. Bitcoin is technologically incapable of being any country's currency right now, the throughput alone is not even close to enough.

Making incentives to not spend 'cash'.