How is me taking some bitcoin and purchasing something online instantly with near zero fees a scam? Please explain with precise language how that is a scam. That's a use case. Now tell me how it's a scam.

Not much of a use case unless you want to move large amounts.

https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f... - and current $1.76 is considered low compared to $50 per transaction craziness. So you have to go offchain

Again, I paid BTC for a laptop 9 years ago and it made sense for me then since it was mined BTC from 11 years ago.

In order to use BTC you need to obtain BTC and transaction fees kill any normal day to day use case.

This leaves BTC for less than legal uses where you do not care about fees.

So BTC itself might not qualify as a scam but as a mega enabler of scams and illegal activity.

EDIT: that $1.76 is just a on-chain fee for the network, most stores will charge you extra to use BTC since they do not care about BTC they want to cash out immediately so they use a 3rd party.

So unless you get paid in BTC you have very little reason to use BTC for payments.

If you’re using bitcoin you aren’t purchasing anything instantly. Transaction confirmation is currently taking ~7 minutes.

Rule of thumb is you have to wait ~20 minutes (two blocks) for the verification.

That's a long time to hold up the line at the grocery check out.

Even the most blatant scams, literal pyramids called MLMs often have some useful product to muddy the waters. I mean you can after all but that toothpaste and shampoo from Amway and use it!

Yes. The PC parts on bought on Newegg.com with Bitcoin sure are contributing to a crypto scam. How could I have not seen this?

They do because you give legitimacy to the scheme most people will lose money in once it collapses.

Tell me what you're buying.

My most recent PC build was created entirely from parts bought on Newegg.com. Newegg accepts bitcoin as payment. We're not in 2009 anymore where people only buy drugs with Bitcoin.

Does Newegg do anything with the Bitcoins or are they immediately converting them into Dollars?

IIRC Newegg is using Bitpay, which costs ~1% and settles to USD daily. It also means no refunds allowed (even in USD) to the customer using it, only store credit.

Which is an entirely pointless way to transact commerce for 99% of the population. I get my paycheck in USD and then buy goods and services with it. If it converts to BTC and then BTC back to USD then whats the point? It's just paying with a credit card with extra steps.

What's the use case here?

Oh I'm not defending it. It's a garbage way to pay considering the competitive alternatives they allow.

It's marketing to a specific niche of tech bro, which is probably a large enough segment of Newegg's customers to justify it.

I love having to file taxes documents for every transaction I make. Great currency

Setting aside other ways crypto can and is being used, the most interesting thing about DeFi IMO is its compositional (and decompositional) nature. This mostly results in reinventing things that already existed in Wall St and other areas of the finance world, but are now available for anyone to use.

Can you give specific examples of these 'things' though?

Becoming "your own" domain registrar without having to deal with ICANN was another interesting one to me (after checking into how all those .eth domains popped up).

It was exciting when I first looked at it and then I realized that this was actually not "democratizing" anything so much as ensuring a new class of folks would be able to create new centralized "everythings" in a new environment outside of the current system - without the benefit of the years of testing, regulation, and (sure) cruft that our current systems have because they're subject to political forces (which is actually a feature).

Maybe starting the wild west over again is a good thing? My money's on "not really" at the moment.

Becoming a market maker, liquidity pools, yield farming, flash loans (short term borrowing of lots of money)