Maybe in edge cases, e.g., Ukraine where the money conversion is not a primary concern. But for any real use case beyond "illegitimate" businesses, like Scams, it seems that the censorship and confiscation is not really stoppable.

This starts and ends with the conversion from regional currency <> crypto where, e.g., a country may coerce exchanges to blacklist your wallet(s). This even has precedent in the US with wallets containing stolen assets being blacklisted from major exchanges making them hard to use at best.

If you're using an exchange, you're missing the point ;)

So it’s a fungible store of value that cannot be turned into useful currency.

Lovely.

So everyone just needs to buy enough bitcoin until every business randomly decides to start accepting bitcoin?

Can you provide any examples in history of a similar non-government currency having to wait for such a circumstance? Or a government one that wasn’t just waiting for a predetermined switch over date?

Why do you need to turn it into dollars or euros for it to be useful currency? Just transact directly.

not instantaneously, and with outrageously big fees (which will only increase due to the limited supply). And no recourse if someone manages to steal stuff? No, that is the opposite of protection.

Lightning transfers are instantaneous and low fee. No recourse is the complement of self sovereignty. It is a tradeoff to be made.

Right. That’s why the FDIC and police exists.

Society decided this 100 years ago. We don’t like the Wild West and scams. We like safety.

> transfer funds internationally

ttc fees increased since lightning became a thing.

It gains speed by compromising security. Lightning enables whole new classes of attacks. You also need to have a server or something constantly online, or trust someone to do it for you. Trust, for a supposedly trustless system.

A better way to phrase this: why has it had no real impact on the market if those claims are true? Companies like PayPal and Western Union don’t seem worried, people never suggest it for in-country transactions, etc. suggest that the marketing isn’t true and the high transaction costs and lack of security matter more.

Because it’s happening slowly and people aren’t paying attention.

If a decade and a half with many billions invested is getting such slow adoption, why do we think that’ll change?

You have oddly fast timelines for adoption. These things take time.

None of the competitors needed anything like decades. Companies like PayPal, Venmo, Square, etc. had far more usage with a year or two of launch, and nothing like the high percentage of companies who started using them and removed the option because the fraud / benefit ratio was dismal.

The iPhone came out the year before crypto.

One of them literally changed the entire world.

The other caused totally unnecessary climate change and a bunch of people lost all their money.

So, I’ll ask the question that I seem to have to ask in every thread. It’s been 15 years. How long do we have to wait? 30? 50? 100?

I got involved with bitcoin in 2010. I never expected it to take off (price-wise) so soon. I thought maybe 2050, and I still think that's a reasonable guess. Overturning the global financial system from the bottom-up takes time.

ARPANet started in 1969. The internet as we know it today didn't take off until the late 90's, and wasn't a profitable world-changing sector until the 00's.