It’s a very interesting experiment in social engineering but I find it difficult to find a concrete example of bitcoin being useful. Making some people very rich at the cost of others is not sufficient justification. If anything fewer people are actually using bitcoin now for real transactions not involving speculation on prices than in 2015 say.

Are you sure? In fact it seems like quite a few people want that, as evidenced by the entire crypto space.

Hardly anyone is using these currencies to actually perform transactions or store value because they are awful in so many ways for that (volatility, treated and taxed like an asset, unpredictable fees, slow settlement, no fraud protection etc). All the transactions, all the new accounts flooding into exchanges are there for one reason - to strike it rich in the new gold rush.

Coins intended to be a valueless joke are worth SIX BILLION DOLLARS and nobody is actually using them as a currency or a consensus mechanism or anything useful - this is pure speculation on finding a greater fool later on when you want to sell, if you're even thinking about later on, because perhaps this will never end and it's different this time.

People are buying and selling cryptocurrencies as they did beanie babies or tulips...

https://theweek.com/articles/461977/great-beanie-baby-bubble

Wanting to get rich is an excellent incentive for anyone. Most other incentives (e.g. altruism) quickly become perverse as they devolve into status-seeking or coercion through force or in subsidisation and centralised planning.

In fact, without that desire to get rich (acquire resources), it's hard to imagine businesses being incentivised to provide value to the largest number of people in the most efficient way possible. The profit motive is the best incentive humans have encountered because, in a society that respects individual freedom and property rights, the profit motive forces us to innovate to provide others with value in order to receive value from them.

I like you was severely brainwashed to believe that inflation and debasement of a currency is great! My father's friend worked at the IMF and would dismiss my notions of deflation as childish. I studied Finance and Mathematics and never once was your view of money seriously questioned.

But it's a lie. In fact, if you think from first principles, you realise that saving, not spending, is the key to economic growth and individual prosperity.[0]

Think about what you were saying: you're effectively claiming that money should be worthless, in which case, why bother trying to earn it? You want to work for and to be paid something valuable not something worthless which you want to throw away as soon as you get it. You want your money to be good enough to save. Saving allows us to defer present consumption for future benefits.

The idea that people will never spend their bitcoin is absurd. Humans have needs that they can't get away from. They also have desires to indulge. They will buy stuff and at the same time they will be incentivised to be prudent if they adopt a Bitcoin Standard. We should want our communities to be prudent.

[0]: https://mises.org/wire/saving-not-spending-engine-economic-g...

I don't think bringing in "brainwashing" is helpful to discussion.

I'm sure you've travelled around the world. In underdeveloped countries, most people don't have bank accounts and they hold what little currency they can as cash savings. In developed countries, many individuals hold currency in bank accounts with a 0% real rate of interest. In aggregate this is a lot of depreciating money being held. Bitcoin has been appreciating at an average annual rate of 200% over the past decade and anyone can choose at any time, to begin saving their wealth in it.

> I don't think bringing in "brainwashing" is helpful to discussion.

I did not mean to insult you or claim it's your fault. Mea culpa. If you've had a typical western education, especially if you've been to business school or taken a business and economics course somewhere, or even read a modern economics textbook, then you've been brainwashed. We all were. The reason I use that word is to emphasise that we're indoctrinated to never question a system that keeps us in a rat race, wondering why we can't get ahead. I mean, my god, just look at the IMF twitter account https://twitter.com/imfnews/status/1297152792403103745 and the Bank of Jamaica twitter account https://twitter.com/centralbankja/status/1299127633364557826

Bitcoin, at minimum, provides us with a way to measure the value of our fiat currencies and the performance of other assets we might want.

You don't need to :)

Can someone define this term? Do we ignore P2P bootstrapping issues? Do we ignore the roll of IANA, RIRs, and other authorities that manage IP address and ASN assignments?

Or perhaps more to the point, why would it not work to have a consortium of banks set up and operate a distributed public ledger (thus avoiding the energy-intensive "mining" process)?

Yes, because Bitcoin doesn't have those issues. It follows the chain with the largest amount of PoW, it doesn't matter where it comes from.

But this only solves a problem specific to bitcoin that no one else has, because no one else keeps a centralised database with every transaction, so I'm not sure it counts as an advantage.