Utility is subjective. If you don't find utility in something, don't use it. Compare these voluntary relationships to the coercive government solutions, like the CBDCs favored by the author.

You mean the answering machine didn't take off until after the wars and great depression ended, suburban life started becoming the default for large groups of people, and they were starting to be away from home for long periods of time, and that before then it saw only limited use by the fairly small numbers of people who were away from their home for long periods of time?

Well now I'm convinced. Guess I better buy tickets to El Salvador because clearly crypto is going to the mooooon.

To be fair, the answering machine was suppressed by Bell Labs, even though magnetic tape recording was invented in the 1930s.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3106703

You're on HN. Crypto isnt liked because it might steal jobs/shake up the status quo. More threads will be posted as user adoption continues and especially when price rises.

Last temper tantrum was like 6 months ago so its probably about that time.

Crypto in general isn't liked because it generally is BS propped up by holders to others to help their position like an MLM coworker. It isn't green (in it's current form for most). It doesn't solve real world problems(in it's current form for most). And it has effectively no avenue to ever being supported by major governments because lol, shocker, they would rather regulate money.

The thing about it all is that it has use, but 98% of all who are pro-crypto are just trying to get in on the gold rush rather than actually make it useful. Diamond hands is good for your position but awful for making it an actual currency.

I'm sure I'll get some five paragraph long response to this pin pointing little bits here and there that might make it possible but the fact of the matter is that as it currently exists and is being propped up, it is just burning our planet for a potential goldrush.

Ok. While you're in denial - its being adopted by social media platforms (twitter), ecommerce platforms (Amazon), its on corporate balance sheets (tesla, spacex, microstrategy, some others), all major payment vendors, banks (JMP), and something like 70 million americans, hundreds of millions globally own it and disagree with you.

Its useful to have a money system that isnt abused by central banks, destroying what you've worked for your whole life. The problem is accelerating and people seem to have found a solution. And energy "waste" is 1) an opinion of its utility and 2) more a function of grid structure. If the energy grid globally was all green then btc would be all green. It also less than 1% of global energy usage and does not scale with usage. It scales with price discovery which eventually maxes out long term.

You dont need to participate if you dont want to but sweeping it under the rug as all a scam is head in sand behavior.

JPM? If Jamie getting into it it can’t be too bad, but I looked just now and find this,

“I'm not a bitcoin supporter,” Dimon said during The Wall Street Journal CEO Council summit on Tuesday. “I don't care about bitcoin. I have no interest in it.”

Edit: sorry, I got the wrong bank (jpm vs jmp). Thanks for clarifying below.

Yeah I didnt say anything about Jamie Dimons opinion on bitcoin (the CEO of a bank). I said JMP is supporting bitcoin. All private clients have access to bitcoin funds (announced recently) and they bank coinbase.

not to mention millions of dollars are being loaned out and moved around platforms like yearn and aave right now.

There was also a crypto-downturn in their years of operation and these two protocols didn't need "bailouts" to survive.

Even if it functioned as a perfect replacement for all existing currency[0], it wouldn’t steal or create jobs, merely change some titles while the tasks (and likely the employers) remain the same. And the point of this website is to shake up the status quo specifically where tech meets business and finance, so we’d like it better if it actually did that.

[0] which it can’t partly for the same reason the U.K. dropped out of the ERM, partly because inflation is economically useful, partly because it replaces one-man-one-vote with one-computational-resource-one-vote and therefore is explicitly plutocratic instead of democratic, partly because no sane government would expose itself to the risk a different nation that chose not to use crypto would perform a 51% attack against it and the only defence against that is an arms race to control more than half of humanity’s compute resources even if that means a von Neumann manufactured Dyson swarm, partly because the transaction rate means that scale can only be achieved with intermediary layers that end up looking indistinguishable from the existing banking sector

"inflation is economically useful" is not proven (and at high levels is destructive and demotivating - look at socialist countries that blow up from hyperinflation and have no productivity) - its just the status quo. The idea that people dont spend in a stagnant/deflationary monetary environment is nonsense. People still want above average returns (investment) and will still spend on necessities and non necessities.

Im not sure of the rant you're going on. There is no argument that the govt is adopting bitcoin over the dollar. Its a private value store that can be transacted with as they wish.

-- Posting my response to below here since I hit a max:

Thats a perception and its not econ 101. If you take the feds balance sheet and divide it by the SPY, its flat over the past 10 years. Inflation does not drive growth. Production in the US is not up. Only the numbers are. Zimbabwe stock market is a top performer. Their production is trash.

You could make the argument were in the drowning phase as deficits widen relentlessly and asset prices are going parabolic.

I have heard basically nobody suggest the US govt is going to adopt bitcoin as the standard currency. Value store is the dominant narrative.

"inflation is economically useful" is not merely proven, it’s 101 econ, so fundamental is it that even people like me know about it. Trying to criticise it by comparison to hyperinflation is only a tiny bit worse than saying “water isn’t needed for life because people can overdose on it”.

> There is no argument that the govt is adopting bitcoin over the dollar.

On the contrary, roughly 75% of the time this topic comes up I see bitcoin supporters absolutely advocate for that.

Response to edit alone: Cryptocurrencies also suck as a value store, way too volatile.

If you’re going to argue with multiple nobel laureates about their own field of expertise WRT evidence for inflation being useful, we’re done here.