In what world do you think that "Bitcoin working" implies all centralized bad actors are washed out? All middleman are toast? This stuff takes time, and the existence of middlemen doesn't negate the premise that blocks keep being mined without censorship.
Your second is a strawman, the "entire global economy" need not moved to crypto for it to be useful.
The entire rest of your post is a stack of shallow, dismissive tropes that contribute nothing to the discussion.
I beg to differ. There's a reason actually paying with Bitcoin/ETH/crypto somewhere (anywhere) is celebrated on crypto twitter, /r/bitcoin, etc.
After 14 years it's still a novel and rare enough experience people feel the need to record videos of it and post them online to celebrate "adoption".
Imagine sending a tweet in 2020 (14 years after founding of Twitter) being noteworthy. Ridiculous, right? That's what crypto looks like to those of us not trapped in the bubble/echo chamber.
On that note, I once again point to crypto twitter, /r/bitcoin, etc where you see "what's your retirement plan with crypto?" posts constantly.
Source?
This is exceedingly poor-quality evidence for your claim.
Does your utility company take crypto? Mine certainly doesn't. Therefore, in order for me to use crypto as a currency, I need to be able to convert it to fiat. Point out where exactly this is incorrect, or in what way crypto can address it without making some dreamy assumption that the world shifts to using crypto as the global currency (which will simply never happen). Did I say nobody accepted crypto? Nope, never said that.
There are literally no services I use or products I buy that take bitcoin.
From weekly groceries to my car insurance or, well, anything... none take bitcoin. The overlap between businesses that accept bitcoin and the things 99.9999% of people need to live their lives on a daily basis would not be distinguishable to the human eye on a venn diagram.
I don't think that is a useful definition of utility.
Does gold not work if the exchange it's traded on is fraudulent? No, it can still be held and traded peer to peer, and it can still be used in manufacturing.
You're conflating the market with the actual network. The Bitcoin network works just fine.
They have long offered low trading fees, while heavily inflating on-chain withdrawal fees and duping users into accepting "wrapped bitcoin" instead (that is, a layer of misdirection and nonetheless custodial bitcoin, held by Binance or some other third party).
If what the SEC allege is proven, that they moved customer coins to a separate legal entity, I don't think it's a leap to assume the coins users think they're buying perhaps don't even exist - that the exchange have been selling paper coins banking on that users won't withdraw en masse.
This is what FTX were doing too - selling paper bitcoin; bitcoin that was not backed 1-to-1 (or anywhere close, they actually held a relatively small number), instead funneling customer money into the hundreds of other coins FTX had invested in.
This could reveal the apparent mass susceptibility for VC backed "cryptos" - that the masses are not so dumb after all, or at least not in the way you thought, that instead they've been fleeced.
Bitcoin may still suffer reputational damage in the short term, but surely the elimination of such schemes is, to use an overused phrase that seems very apt now, good for bitcoin?
It seems the issue with Binance was that it was running afoul of regulations. In what way is that "unregulated"?
“Blatant disregard of the federal securities laws and the investor and market protections these laws provide” means acting unregulated, even if one is properly subject to regulation [1].
[1] https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/complaints/2023/comp-pr...
If you can exchange crypto for goods and services then works. period; no need to move any goal posts.
Many fiat currencies pass the "exchange for goods and services" test you propose. Many crypto coins would fail them, depending on how broadly we want acceptance to be.
This category of claim baffles me. Is the hypothesis there weren't wars or recessions when the world was on the gold standard?
This is yet another example of the crypto boom going bust, which has been a series of unregulated and utterly opaque exchanges collapsing. Over and over again, the entire ecosystem has been snake oil salesmen, who are selling snake oil to other snake oil salesmen.
And the crypto purists will cry “oh, but Bitcoin, it would work if we all held dear to the purity of the concept and kept our relevant info in lockboxes in our panic rooms!” And the cynical, but also correct, among us will mutter “well that’s cool, but no normal human is going to do that, and the valuation of whole thing is based on mass uptake, and that’s contingent on having middlemen do a lot of the ugly gruntwork, because otherwise it’s far too difficult for normal users to ever bother with.” And those middlemen are, again, invariably, snake oil salemen who will cut and run.