there are many problems better solved by bitcoin than classical solutions. one example is as a bank account in a low trust society with high inflation (there are many such countries). creating a bitcoin wallet is extraordinarily easy and once you've acquired the bitcoin it's uncensorable and unconfiscatable. this is better than the classical solution, right?

Confiscation is good when executed through a legal process so I would argue it’s strictly worse. If the government is confiscating your money through unlawful means you’ve got much bigger problems. For instance, an unlawful government can easily confiscate your coins by means of a rubber hose and some pliers. Further a sufficiently motivated unlawful government can just turn off the internet.

The US government literally just confiscated a billion dollar wallet just a few days ago.

The permissionless nature does enable some use cases where the overhead associated with the classical solutions makes them impractical.

With Bitcoin, anyone can start a cash-to-bitcoin/bitcoin-to-cash office. All you need is a phone with Internet.

Could Western Union solve the same problem? In theory, yes, in practice, the overhead cost of joining the network means the guy with a phone in some remote village isn't going to do it.

This is obviously mostly relevant where the classic solutions aren't already ubiquitous. Want to wire money from Germany to France? Just use SEPA. Want to wire money from Germany to the US? You're probably better off with some traditional money transfer service like TransferWise or (for bigger amounts) a Forex/brokerage account.

Want to "wire" money from a remote village in Africa to a remote village in Asia? That's where you might benefit from your neighbor having set up a physical crypto exchange.

The remote African Village use case is already solved by mobile money solutions like M-Pesa, which are cheap and easy to use via SMS or low-end feature phones. The cost of buying a smartphone with data plan to use a BTC wallet is prohibitively expensive for most people in developing countries.

Naturally you don't verify the blockchain yourself, but use a light wallet that uses very little data.

And you don't use BTC as the fees are way too expensive.

This is what people are doing in Venezuela for example.

OK but are there any secure BTC or alt coin wallets (even light wallets) that will work on feature phones or SMS? Very few people in in remote villages can afford even the most basic Android smartphone. What incentive would they have to switch from M-PESA (or Alipay/wechatpay in Asia) that is already secure, cheap and widely accepted.

Cryptocurrency is a fascinating technology and social experiment but so far has no unique use case other than speculation.

Not that I know of.

The real use-case is transferring to and from places that you cannot normally do. Smartphones are prevalent in Venezuela for example, but it's basically impossible to send money in or out unless you use cryptocurrencies.

The charity eatBCH uses this to give food to Venezuelans for example: https://eatbch.org/. I think that's a pretty unique use case.

You can already send money from US to Venezuela using Moneygram and several other services cheaply. There are relatively few countries where sanctions prohibit Americans from sending money, and cryptocurrency would not make this legal.

You cannot send USD to Venezuela, only Bolivars, which isn't so good as hyperinflation will kill most of the value instantly.

One of the point of cryptocurrencies is that some countries may think certain things are illegal, but that doesn't make them wrong. To me helping to feed starving Venezuelans by sending them help directly is morally right, even if it was illegal.

I agree that the hyperinflation in VZ is a problem, but is that solved by Crypto? BTC's prices is highly volatile as well. In a bear market, there can be significant price slippage even while the recipient is waiting for a BTC transaction to confirm.

Highly volatile, absolutely.

Yet it's nothing compared to hyperinflation. In May 2019 prices in Venezuela doubled in only two days... every day.

While Bitcoin is volatile it's relatively stable compared to what Venezuela and Lebanon are going through today.

allowing millions of people to actually own something for the first time ever.

The link has many such examples...

The problem of exchanging value between parties without intermediary or third-parties.

> than by a classical solution

cash

Is fine in person, but not digitally.

Yeah that’s not a problem though, it’s a feature.

Tell that to the Iranians or to the people in Venezuela. Countries can be mis managed, currencies can be mis managed, people can be targeted (financial sanctions), traditional financial services are just not available in a lot of places.

To top it off, It's Gold vs BTC for store of value and Gold has many, many downsides as well that we just chose to ignore because it's a shiny metal and has been in use longer.

This is another classic misunderstanding.

The problem those folks have isn’t bad currency it’s bad government. You can’t solve that by allowing people to violate sanctions suddenly.

Remember, sanctions are what’s preventing these folks from trading internationally and sanctions are what’s preventing these folks from using USD. That doesn’t go away in a Bitcoin world. Amazon isn’t going to deploy stealth C-130s to airdrop in their prime packages if they pay with Bitcoin.

When the government has failed your currency is the least of your problems, and once you change the government your currency returns to normalcy.

Allowing the transfer of value in violation of sanctions has allowed North Korea to accumulate billions of dollars of crypto to fund their nuclear weapons programs. The livelihood of the average citizen changes not at all, but the largesse of the rogue state increases.