You say that as though it makes it all but useless, despite the value it provides to people in those countries... that's very telling in itself.
But as I said there are many use cases, I just pointed out a few that I thought were most important on a global scale... because, you know, it's not all about people in wealthy developed nations.
But outside of those types of countries, and in countries like the US, the self-serving use case is a hedge against inflation. If inflation doesn't worry you, that's ok, but the recent money printing in trillions of dollars worries lots of other people. In 20 years I've seen the purchasing power of my money halved. I'm much happier to store my money in an asset that, so far, is seeing its purchasing power increase year on year.
From a technical standpoint the other use case, over the lightning network (and other layers and sidechains), is that it allows for instant micro-payments not possible with the legacy financial system. People are building products like podcast platforms which stream satoshis to content creators for every minute someone listens to their podcast. Others are building systems where every API call can be instantly billed. Or content distribution systems (think Bittorrent) where seeders can be compensated for service.
There are plenty of technical uses cases for a digital native money on the internet.
If you don't understand why it has utility I don't think there's anything more I can say to convince you. Sorry.
I guess it should be possible to trade bitcoin via the stellar network (according to their intro page[1], any currency can be), but I could well be wrong.
I got some given to me in the Keybase drop so I read up on them, but that's the limit of my knowledge in this area. I'd love to find a way to use them but articles like this talking about ponzi schemes etc tend to put me off bothering.
The problem is that the Bitcoin fee is also payable on all domestic transfers too, which of course are free in traditional banking.
You are also going to paying exchange fees each way and those fees are likely to be quite large in authoritarian countries (as any illegal activity is generally more expensive).
When people say this, do they mean $5/$20 per bitcoin or per any transaction whatever size?
Transaction fees are per kb of data so more complex transactions pay more. The amount transfered is irrelevant.
It costs $5 to spend any amount of Bitcoin?
Is that for real? (I genuinely don't know, that just sounds so high)
If you don’t pay enough it can take hours for your coffee to be paid for.
So every time you buy a coffee with Bitcoin the transaction fee is different and sometimes will cost more than the coffee itself.
In addition to that, there's always the Lightning Network as well wherein you can transact for fractions of pennies.
You should fund a LN channel for more than one transaction because you cannot change the channel funds after creation, so you better make sure enough is in it. This makes it unsuitable for things that require more than a tiny fraction of your monthly income, e.g. rent.
LN channels also need to be constantly monitored to not get scammed, which the LN whitepaper suggests you to pay third parties for.
The LN whitepaper completely obmits the routing problem, too. It more or less says "we don't want to think about that now". A network whitepaper that doesn't think about routing, imagine that.
Yes, that makes it a closed system, but it was never realistic to have every single person on earth access bitcoin via on-chain transactions.
Gold has been used to store value for thousands of years, while Bitcoin is a new and experimental technology. It's absurd to say that you would use an experimental technology to store long-term wealth. Maybe once it's tried and proven, fine. But right now it's inefficient, volatile, has high fees, and has got the problem with mining I talked about above.
For clarity: My comments above are directly relevant to the comment above about inflation. Guarding against inflation is about holding onto your wealth for the long term. I was comparing Bitcoin to gold for that purpose -- which is entirely valid.
Nope, you're laboring under a misapprehension. Even if all new compute power stopped being manufactured miners will run their existing equipment. The mining difficulty will plateau and overtime gently decrease as equipment breaks.
Older and less efficient (at computing double SHA-256) equipment can be profitably brought online where the price of electricity to do so is available and other more valuable uses of that energy in that locale are not possible.
You can ride this all the way back down the years and generations of ASICs then GPUs to CPUs. Once humanity is out of CPUs, well, we'll have more pressing issues. We'll talk again then, or not.
Yes, mining and securing the network nevermind transmitting transactions would be difficult with ink, paper, and abacus technology alone. I'd expect gold to hold some value here despite difficulty in securing and assaying it restricting its useble value to technical specialists and institutions. Nonperishable food, water filters, consumable entertaining substances, etc. would be a better bet if you're prepping against a Mad Max level of collapse.
The average transaction fee during slow periods is about $5 and it jumps to $20 whenever there is load on the network.
And the lightning network is a poor solution to this because the LN requires a lot of capital to fund channels, something poor people explicitly don't have.
Finally, the fact that Bitcoin proponents have to point to poor authoritarian countries to find legitimate usecases is telling in and of itself. It's basically a blunt admission that the technology is mostly useless in the US.