Transacting with it is one thing, withdrawing into fiat is quite another. Let's not pretend that most people holding BTC are holding it to buy goods and services rather than as a speculative vehicle.

Sure. many of those speculators will be forced to wait for Binance to resume BTC orders, or use another centralized exchange, or use a bridge to swap BTC to another crypto asset..

Edit: swapping BTC needs a centralized bridge as child commenter notes

Unfortunately there is no decentralized exchange for BTC. There is no smart contracts on BTC so you have to somehow bridge it to something like Ethereum before you can swap it. And to bridge it you have to rely on some centralized party, such as WBTC. (I know renBTC but it's unclear who their validators are so I'd just assume it's centralized)

> Unfortunately there is no decentralized exchange for BTC

Localbitcoins, localmonero... Two of many.

Bisq is a P2P Decentralized exchange for Bitcoin: https://bisq.network

>There is no smart contracts on BTC

Not true, BTC does have smart contracts. They called it op-code and most people don't use it anymore, but me and my friends built a poker game and we play every Thursday.

The original wallet download also had a poker game, but they decided to take it out after a while to ensure btc wasn't labeled as "Gambling"

Oh sorry I repeated you!

There is a very real calculation to be done here:

Leave it on an exchange and have access to customer support, etc in the event you get locked out of your account or whatever.

-OR-

Be the next news story of the person who messed up the transfer, forget their seed, etc. The entire blockchain ecosystem is still so incredibly difficult to use with bad UI/UX on top of it that this is the more likely outcome for the vast majority of people.

Making you dig through a garbage dump is what I consider bad UI/UX.

Richard & Gilfoyle At Landfill Site Talking ICO Crypto currency Idea To Russ:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrEjaZw95kI

From memory (didn't watch the clip):

"THUMB DRIVE, that's a thumb"

"Again, Richard: The math is sound." - brilliant.

If all the exchanges lock users out, you can “transact” with BTC But can you convert it into US dollars? Where does one spend BTC these days, buy some furniture off overstock?

there will always be some method of exchange. one exchange goes down, another will take its place.

Where does one spend gold these days?

Pawn shop? Or maybe at a supervillain's lair, where sellers are known to accept briefcases full of gold.

Usually you need to convert your gold to a legal tender currency in order to be able to spend it. You normally lose money on the conversion at a retail volume, though.

I wonder if that's even a majority of bitcoin owners. I use the term owners loosely.

Does it even matter? What is interesting and actually-important is that it is even possible. Just because most people do something dumb doesn't mean we should throw up our hands in defeat and build systems where it isn't even possible to do something smart.

It matters very much who the owner is of the currency you are saying can be transacted. If a large chunk of bitcoin adopters don't own the currency, can't transact, and can't withdraw into fiat, what do you have exactly? Just a theory that this could work if just everyone played by a very specific set of rules.

I honestly don't understand how you can possibly come to that conclusion, and in all honesty that people like you exist is part of why tech is so demoralizing these days. If a large chunk of Bitcoin adopters--or smart phone adopters or Internet users or ANYTHING--don't know how the technology they are using works and put themselves in a bad situation with it, it simply doesn't mean that the technology doesn't work... it just doesn't; and it certainly doesn't mean we should just give up and re-centralize everything. If you build something that can't be used wrong--or hell: that most people who aren't trained don't use wrong--you probably built something evil :/.

The fact that you don't understand means that you are looking at this through some very rosey glasses. The principle of blockchain and decentralization is fine, but we've come full circle where the easiest way to access and track the only marginally useful implementation of blockchain is through a centralized service. So far, the biggest headlines from blockchain and bitcoin have been fraud.

The biggest adoption came when people saw that money (fiat) could be made off of "investing". Bitcoin is a clown show. Blockchain, while probably useful, just doesn't seem to have any truly great applications yet.

This is the greatest comment I've read on HN in years.

amount of BTC on exchanges is something like < 14% of its total circulating supply.

I read somewhere that a not so insignificant sum is held by accounts that just hold.