Every state I've lived in (13 so far) has an ID card that looks and acts exactly like a driver's license, with the only legal difference being that it is not valid for driving.
Unless you're not in America, in which case someone else can chime in.
I don't have any of that. But maybe you can appreciate that I don't want to have to jump through those hoops just to be able to send someone $100 digitally.
Surely you store fiat currency somewhere, and isn't there a "transfer money" button where you plug in an account number and institution and the money arrives shortly after?
The inability to make transfers immediately and without fees between accounts held at different banks is bizarre for those used to UK banking.
Isn't that trivial to do from a reporting point of view? Just export your wallet history and do a lookup on that day's price.
It's another reason why using a cryptocurrency is still a gigantic hassle in comparison to fiat.
But one of my points here is that, while I'm sure some people here are chomping at the bit to nail me with a gleeful "see? ironic!", I simply don't have to use Coinbase. I can, for example, exchange Bitcoin locally the same way I can trade USD for pesos with my roommate. I was SOL at one point when I was simultaneously banned from Paypal while my bank at the time spontaneously rejected further access to my own account, the two institutions I was depending on to operate abroad. It's what made me turn to Bitcoin, and I began considering how ridiculous the state of our financial status quo where I have precarious access to my own money.
I can appreciate that my outlier needs make it hard for people to relate to me the same way most people don't understand why an HNer cares about Linux when Windows works for them, but I think most people here are disappointingly eager to reject any possible upside of "digital cash". Even if its upsides are exceedingly niche for most people, that's not reason to dismiss them.
To me it's like reading an HN thread where everyone dismisses Purism's smartphone because Android and iPhone do the job for 99.9999% of people, and who the hell could possibly care about separating the CPU from cellular baseband? Or maybe they're claiming that only criminals would care about that. Well, that very few people are in a position to appreciate it has no basis on whether we deserve the option.
This is my last comment on this particular submission.
It is not difficult for most citizens in first world nations to keep and maintain a bank account.
Do you have a source for that?
It seems to me that asking for sources is a common technique for discrediting opinions on HN. It looks like a legitimate question but obviously if they had a source it would be a fact rather than an opinion.
If you are actually interested in how that opinion is formed ask a relevant question or point out what they are missing.
Personally I find that opinion entirely reasonable given that there are no problems I have that Bitcoin would solve better than the alternatives unless I was inclined to buy something online anonymously or to speculate on Bitcoin itself.
Just because a random guy barters bitcoins for goods/services, that by no means implies that bitcoin is anything close to money.
There is a very specific definition of what money is, and bitcoin's volatility alone rules it completely out.
It takes two to barter.
> treating it effectively like a foreign currency
They really aren't. They accept bitcoins in exchange for goods/services, just like we see in any barter system.
Calling bitcoins "foreign currency" is just a desperate attempt to hide the obvious consequences of it's volatility, which eliminates it's role as money, not only as a store of value but also as unit of account.
Each and every single random guy on the internet who wants to buy stuff with money cares about money, and the properties that allow something to work as money.
Specifically, properties like being stable in its value within the market, and reliable both as a means of deferred payments and meet debts.
Bitcoin, or any cryptocurrency, is nothing of the sort. Far from it.
For some random guys on the internet. yes. Some other guys are using it without waiting for it to be everything the previous system had. (deferred payments etc.).
No, it's not. It’s too volatile to be an efficient store of value or a useful unit of account for general purposes; it's got some use as a competitive medium of exchange for certain circumstances (but again not really with the generality of any major fiat currency.)
It's commodity that seems to (retrospectively, at least, and there is some reason to expect this to continue for the near future) have good investment performance if you are in a position to wait out down periods, which makes it nice as a component of an investment portfolio.
It's good at things that aren't the purpose of money, but mostly not good for things that are the purposes of money, except for a narrow subset of one of three major purposes of money.
Bitcoin is obviously not money, and among the many reasons the fact that it does not serve as a store of value nor a means to defer payments, which is a single requirement that comprised the very definition of money, is just one of them.
I've been banned from Paypal. I've run into many verification issues over the last decade with banks because I have no proof of residency once my driver's license expired.
Like physical cash, it doesn't need to be superior in all ways to be useful at all.