No -- since the early days of the "World-Wide Web", there were plenty of uses: colleges all hopped onto it, entertainment websites popped up, the first version of IMDB was mind-blowing, Yahoo! v1.0, James Berardinelli's movie reviews site... the list goes on and on.

Anyone saying it was just porn and drugs would just be disingenuous.

But Bitcoin, I'm not sure I've encountered a single "Pay with Bitcoin" option in any online shopping I've done. So where are the legit use cases hiding?

I've seen it from time to time. For a while, Dell was accepting BitCoin transactions, so you could, say, purchase a laptop with BTC (they seem to have since shut it down)[1].

More recently (last year) I came across a VPS provider accepting BTC. I think there are VPN providers accepting BTC, but I'm not familiar with that market space.

That's just what I've stumbled across. Google searches seem to bring up more, but... yeah. Seems to me to be a pretty large chicken-and-egg problem. Something that could take off, but needs a substantial catalyst.

[1] https://blog.dell.com/en-us/we-re-now-accepting-bitcoin-on-d...

I sold a motorcycle over craigslist a couple years ago and I would have much preferred to have the buyer send me bitcoin instead of giving me stacks of 50s. I wasn't able to demand a cashiers check and I wanted to make sure the sale would go through that day. Cryptocurrencies are amazing for large (legit) p2p transactions.

What would have been better about BTC for that instead of cash? Just the PITA of having a giant pile of physical money to deal with?

Exactly 1) possibility of a miscount & time it takes to count all those bills 2) fear of forgery/fake bills 3) carrying the cash on my person to the atm while living in a sketchy neighborhood 4) no “proof” of how much he paid if it came down to a court/tax dispute

Cool, thanks for the reply

In Switzerland you can pay for transportation (mainly train) tickets with Bitcoin, if you fancy

You can pay on digitec.ch with Bitcoin as well. Also, if I remember correctly, one can pay with Bitcoin on Steam as well.

Sorry, I am not saying early WWW was for porn or drugs. I am saying that was what ordinary people thought of internet. Similar concept is happening for Bitcoin as well.