There have been dozens of projects claiming that dating back as far as 10 years ago, they often end up disappearing before having any real impact. I actually knew one that did an ICO when it was still a thing, that’s where they stopped. From About – Bitcoin Ekasi it looks like they started using BTC in 2021, so somewhat recently? I guess we’ll see where this goes, but at the very least it’s too early to tell that it’ll go anywhere. The only info I can find are from pro-BTC sources and even on their website
Even then, an interesting limitation with this kind of projects is that’s a niche that’s bound to disappear. Africa is moving forward and will have less and less people with no access to financial services, just like there are less and less people without electricity or undernourished. So even if BTC worked for this (and again that remains to be seen), it’s unlikely be relevant in the longer-term.
99% of the wider population still needs a trusted middle man because they either:
don’t hold their own key, which seems to be an unsolvable usability problem (namely, how can I make sure I and only I have access to my money, i.e. nobody can steal from me but I can’t lose access either). So they end up trusting e.g. a cryptocurrency exchange that acts like a bank with way less legal protections.
need to exchange their cryptocurrency for actual spendable currency because in most places it’s not possible to buy much with e.g. BTC alone.
buy some good in exchange of the cryptocurrency they send (because they’re not donating their money, so it’s not a one-way transaction) which will have to go through this trusted middle man
and probably other reasons I’m forgetting. In practice, “trustless” means little when it’s actually “trustless as long as you remain within a blockchain”; you can basically buy NFTs in a trustless manner, buying anything else (so outside of a blockchain) will require some trust somewhere.
I could easily summarize the Internet now by saying it speeds up information transfers, just like the telephone did before it. Maybe you meant that this advantage was not clear from the beginning, but from ARPANET - Wikipedia it looks like there were several advantages of designing such a network even before they did it.
And yet the whole crypto world is highly correlated, you can just open https://coinmarketcap.com/ and look at the graphs. So the market seems to disagree with this assessment.
As pointed out above, it has parallels in at least most of the other cryptocurrencies out there which can do the same. I think nobody has pointed out yet that Dogecoin is up 40.27% over the last 7 days as I write this, while BTC is “only” up 19.67%, according to https://coinmarketcap.com/ (that’s also why I don’t really believe that money flowing into ETFs is the reason for BTC going higher these days).
That’s the thing though, Bitcoin is a purely technical solution that so far has failed to solve social / political problems such as that of the unbanked.
I don’t know if that’s what you mean by “value”, but the sole use-case I’ve managed to come up with is that of illegal money. Cryptocurrency proponents will mention oppressive regimes and I guess that’s fair, you can get out of a country without taking suitcases of bank notes, you can just have a private key with you that’s easy to smuggle… Provided you found a way to trade all your money for cryptocurrencies.
That’s the only use-case that’s been there since the beginning and has kept increasing in importance, while the rest remains “work in progress” (vaporware) with new projects constantly replacing older failed ones.
Afaik ransomware type attacks have scaled massively and I don’t think they could have without cryptocurrency.
(With KYC etc it’s much harder to scale, you need to compromise many more people to forward the money and those people will be easily caught/punished).
Anchoring bias in full display, it takes time but you will get there too at some points.
I’m not doing anything illegal with it, so I don’t even understand what you are talking about… Btc is pseudo anonymous, really not a currency you want to use for anything illegal.
And dollar still has a solid 99%+ market share in illegal activities. Just look at the $40b total fines of JP Morgan, maybe we should ban bank after all, what do you think?
For me it’s a store of value, it works amazingly well, nothing to complain about. 10/10 would recommend
BTW I am surprised that all the angry people who are replying to this thread don’t want to take up on our offers to do a transaction. It takes 5min max and maybe you will learn something (it is not illegal, I promise)
I have a question about LN. Is it correct that: If you are a leaf or a not very well connected node, your capacity in the LN looks up the BTC of your peers.
Let’s say you Y open a channel with 1 BTC (yours) to a well connected node A (e.g. a big exchange). You send your BTC over the LN to some far away node B (maybe another exchange). The channel Y-A now has 1 BTC in favor of A. But the only ways for A to use it in any form are:
If you receive some payment over LN → might be few and infrequent
They tear down the channel → costs fees
To be a usable node you have to be connected to the internet and sign LN transactions on request. I’m not sure, but you probably don’t need your layer 1 key for that. But you will certainly need some form of secret for layer 2. This makes all the BTC hot (at least on the connections you want to have active).
This doesn’t seem to be very safe or doable for the average consumer (but theoretically could be made to be by dedicated equipment, e.g. tamper proof, verified, and connected).
Not quite sure why you assume angry people, and I did some transactions over a decade ago… (and was pretty familiar with it in 2010/2011 time range, at the time it was already well popularized at CCC camp/congress).
(and my concerns about negative externalities indeed grew over time)
My beef is that I don’t consider using energy for the sake of using energy as a productive way to move forward* (and have remained silent in this thread lately because my concerns have been efficiently voiced by others) so making a transaction for the sake of making a transaction won’t make it for me. I guess others are thinking in the same way.
*On that topic: mining bitcoin doesn’t release energy (other than heat) at any point, that is, it isn’t an energy storage solution, it is, at best, an encouragement to develop more energy producing facilities with the hope/expectation that low consumption hours will still have demand wanting to be met. I’m all for energy storage solutions but way less so for solutions that would increase demand during low consumption hours without decreasing it during the peak consumption ones.
A personal ethics question was met with storytelling along the lines of “Actually, tobacco is a net positive to the world because some farmers farm it organically where nothing else that generates a profit will grow and they can make a living off it, so I see no problem with it on a global scale, in fact support Marlboro for making this world a better place.”
Well at least now we know you did not read or watch anything we sent your way.
A transaction does not use energy.
Not sure about the point you are trying to make either
Channel management for LN is very advanced to be fair, I suggest using a wallet that is fully capable of doing it for you, so already connected to a network of channels so you don’t have to manage your own. I lost some sats trying it myself
I don’t think people buying BTC today care very much whether there are use cases or environmental impacts. They are buying because they believe the price will keep going up. Which causes the price to go up etc.
feels a lot like people looking for reasons to excuse themselves not buying bitcoin at 100$… at 1k… at 16k…
or next bear market at lows probably above 100k.
Agree with @SwissTeslaBull : take a side and be happy. I am.
Who says some of us considering crypto to be total trash haven’t bought any? No FOMO or sour grapes here. Just waiting to get rid of it, been waiting since June 2022, looking pretty good these last few months.
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