It is very relevant, it wouldn't be if I was arguing that this will revolutionize everything, but you specifically said it has no real world business utility whatsoever, and the fact that people are using it, in business, right now, so much so that they pay outrageous prices to do so, that is very relevant.

Built on crypto? By definition you can't name a single business that isn't an exchange built on it. That's like naming a business built on stock trading that isn't a stock exchange or investment fund. But ones that use crypto in some way? I can name a few, not counting black market businesses, overstock.com is one.

Please name one business that is successful thanks to the value created by cryptocurrency that is not a crypto exchange or related MSB.

Overstock doesn’t use crypto, they use Coinbase who gives overstock good old American greenbacks. Like most of the world accepting crypto they don’t actually - it would be impossible due to the massive forex risk. They rely on third party MSBs like Coinbase and Bitpay to liquidate incoming crypto.

I’m thinking of the crowd with a list as long as their arm of ideas including replacing Ticketmaster, supply chain management, voting, all the other broad ideas.

"Nobody uses credit cards except for payment processors." If I accept British Pounds at my online store but only receive dollars to my business account by way of a processor, does that mean I did not use British Pounds in the transaction?

I've never once claimed cryptocurrency would be useful for anything other than money, so I'd be the wrong person to argue with about that. I'm not a web3 evangelist.

Oh ok, well, there's tons of reasons its bad money. Hard money is no longer the law of the land because it was bad at being money. A fixed supply cannot respond to population changes, cannot respond to shocks, external stimuli. A low, predictable rate of inflation is broadly regarded as a good thing - it incentivizes investment and productive allocation of capital. All of the worst periods in history have been characterized as deflationary.

Of course, the sheer inefficiency of the system makes it practically useless as money due to the transaction times, costs and volume capacity.

It's bad at being money too.

The philosophy behind it is a widely debunked model (Austrian economics) which isn't taken serious by ... anyone outside a fringe group of libertarians.

Also it's critical to note: it's market cap is not the quantity of value 'stored.' It's simply most recent price times supply. You couldn't get a fraction of a fraction of that back out without zeroing out the entire thing. Proof of work relies on wasting as much of the world's limited resources as you can within the budget allotted, and proof of stake is simply a perpetual wealth machine for the already wealthy.

Then of course the ability to reverse transactions is huge value-add for customers, the ability to block transactions to sanctioned countries is a huge value-add for the world.

We can talk about the utility of a tool and decide whether it should exist or not, or we can just let people use the tools that work for them and not use them if they don't work for us. I'd prefer the latter. If it sucks so bad then people won't use it. If it sucks at it's stated purpose but is good for something else, people can use it for that instead. If people are using it for something then it's good for something and not really my business if they use it or not.

The philosophy behind "it" is a pretty complex thing. You can design a currency using the tools used to make bitcoin and have any sort of economic philosophy as your guide. It isn't limited to Austrian economics. You can have a linear, predictable supply increase, a finite supply, a logarithmic debasement rate (percentage of supply increase rate), a complex algorithm to determine it, a democratic process, or even just some guy calling the shots if you want. It's a general purpose tool.

I'm aware of the huge flaw in the "market cap" metric and it's relative uselessness.

If reversible transactions are a value add, people will use currencies with that option, and where it's not, people won't.

I don't think bitcoin makes good money. But I do think you can make good money with the technology, I think it is good that this thing is driving people to make technology with which you can make potentially better money, I think we are finding the utility of this stuff by just letting people do what they want with it, and I personally find it useful in my life.

> We can talk about the utility of a tool and decide whether it should exist or not, or we can just let people use the tools that work for them and not use them if they don't work for us. I'd prefer the latter. If it sucks so bad then people won't use it.

Disagree. You should do whatever you want so long as it doesn't negatively impact society more broadly. As I demonstrated in the Albanian example there is a real chance that allowing people to do as they please can lead to a complete implosion of the economy - and even war. Everything we do as a group is about balancing individual freedoms against their impacts on others. This is the "your right to swing your arms around wildly ends where my face begins" argument.

> You can design a currency using the tools used to make bitcoin and have any sort of economic philosophy as your guide. It isn't limited to Austrian economics. You can have a linear, predictable supply increase, a finite supply, a logarithmic debasement rate (percentage of supply increase rate), a complex algorithm to determine it, a democratic process, or even just some guy calling the shots if you want. It's a general purpose tool.

None of that is useful without the ability to step in and actively manage it during situations that weren't baked into the original design. Think the DAO.

> I'm aware of the huge flaw in the "market cap" metric and it's relative uselessness.

The argument I was responding to initially was your assertion that "surely there's something there because the number is so up! Check out that market cap!"

> If reversible transactions are a value add, people will use currencies with that option, and where it's not, people won't.

They do, everyone uses dollars.

> But I do think you can make good money with the technology.

I disagree fundamentally because it cannot handle edge cases and the edge cases are the only thing that really matters in the end.

The internet connected mainly CS researchers for the first 5 to 10 years of its existence.

The internet however had to overcome and deploy worldwide physical infrastructure to succeed. Crypto does not. Roll-out isn’t even remotely comparable due to relative barriers to entry.

Everyone who wants crypto can have it, now. And could have had it on day one.