Use it and you will find out.
What's the use for Bitcoin?
71–80 of 191 posts
Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?
#72"These make up a significant portion of transactions."
That's a bullshit statement. Prove it, or shut up.
Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?
#73OP needs to check out https://purse.io
Use case for consumers: discounts on Amazon.
Use case for earners (mostly unbanked): earn Amazon gift cards as payment and convert to fiat through bitcoin.
Blog showcasing counterargument: https://medium.com/@PurseIO/10-use-cases-for-bitcoin-c6b7182...
Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?
#74I'm a big fan of both Sidney and Scott and the great work they did building Helloblock, one of the better Bitcoin API providers. It's a shame that they couldn't find a market for their product.
What's a bigger shame is that they've both written articles disparaging Bitcoin technology now that they've decided to move on to other challenges.
We have a brand new data storage technology that allows for equal access read and write privileges on data that is permanent and shared equally across all nodes. It acts as a decentralized single point-of-truth. There has never been anything like this.
A simple ledger that operates as a type of currency is most basic thing that can be built.
Blockchain tech will disrupt almost every part of our industry. We won't need centralized identity providers like Facebook. We can start to treat digital media as property and build up a viable economic system. We can actually account for people's data use and the value of their contributions instead of this blind air gap between advertising and operation costs. We can create and transfer digital assets that represent all sorts of things.
Writers, photographers, musicians and anyone else who makes the content that fuels the advertising engines of Silicon Valley are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with how they publish work on the Internet. Putting something on a web page isn't publishing. Posting something on Facebook or Twitter isn't publishing. The act of publishing needs to be public and it needs to be permanent. Can you reliably quote from a blog or a tweet? No, you can't, because the content could change. You can reliably quote from the second printing of a physical text because it would be almost impossible for someone to go through and change every copy.
All of this on a unified platform that isn't controlled by anyone meaning there's no danger of a private entity limiting access to APIs and destroying the hard work of developers, which Twitter has been doing for years.
I really hate to call them out because they've been very nice and incredibly helpful over the last year, but guys, come on, there's no need to burn bridges. Just because you can't see the possibilities doesn't mean that they aren't there.
Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?
#75This is a broad generalization that it's used for illegal purposes.
My (very legal) business accepts Bitcoin. I don't have many customers using that form of payment, but chances are I may not have them if I didn't accept it.
I don't really care what form of payment you want to use.
Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect that the half of the word's population that is unable to get a bank account has a sizable overlap with the fraction that doesn't have internet or even text-messaging access.
I feel you suspect wrong, and your suspection with get wronger fast :) http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.CEL.SETS.P2?order=wba...
Nothing in your link actually speaks to the points under discussion.
Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?
#77Bitcoin's killer app is its function as a store of value. It's hard to see this when there are plenty of things that are storing value better at the moment, like traditional currencies and assets. But I don't think that will hold indefinitely (especially given our asset bubble), and that will lead people to look for ledgers with predictable supply, like gold and Bitcoin. Then again, maybe I'm crazy.
Isn't extreme volatility a very bad attribute for a store of value?
Not really. Bitcoin's value has gone up by thousands of percent the past few years. That's volatility.
Volatility isn't just up and down. It can be just up.
Now generally I'd agree you don't want massive volatility, but that's a function of its age. A market of 50 thousand users is easy to manipulate by one rich guy. A market by of 1m users is still easy but harder. A large 100m user market is really hard to manipulate. This means volatility should keep dropping as bitcoin grows.
Second, a market where most users are speculators is more volatile than one where most are users. As bitcoin becomes larger it'll only do so on the back of genuine consumer adoption. That, too, causes volatility to drop.
Does practice confirm the theory? Yes. Every single year bitcoin volatility has dropped since inception. It's always trending down. All the talk about volatility isn't so interesting to me as it's a function of its youth.
Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?
#78I don't understand why we even need to discuss the usefulness of Bitcoin beyond the fact that it's decentralized. Its decentralized nature, alone, is its most important attribute. Bitcoin cannot be stopped. Period. As long as multiple people can run a program on a set of computers that can connect to each other, Bitcoin can exist. If you want to receive it anonymously, you can perform services anonymously and take pa…
> Its decentralized nature, alone, is its most important attribute. Bitcoin cannot be stopped. Period. It's just as decentralized as tulip bulbs ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania ), and Bitcoin will be "stopped" when a) it is illegal to transmit or receive a blockchain (unlikely), or b) when people realize the only value Bitcoin has is in the belief that Bitcoin has value. All it takes for Bitcoin to be wort…
And thanks to their decentralized nature tulip bulbs still exist and people still pay for them. You cannot stop tulip bulbs.
Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?
#79This is the shittiest article I've read on HN to date. Remittance not useful because of currency exchange spreads? Well then no currencies are useful for remittance. As for the illegal part, are US dollars not useful for Drugs, Gambling, Tax Evasion and Escaping capital controls anymore? So then, when was the last time some one used US Dollars for any of the illegal activities above? The news didn't reach me.
I think the argument against the remittance case is that if you're going USD->BTC->EUR, you're probably better off just going USD->EUR because it doesn't expose you to the risk of BTC. I actually disagree with this; the remittance case can be quite useful when the government has an artificial exchange rate that disagrees with reality. Maybe that falls under the "illegal" category.
But as for illegal uses, the US dollar is useful for drugs, gambling, etc. specifically because it's very useful in legal transactions as well. There's a chicken and egg problem: most people don't engage in illegal activity, but right now if you use BTC it's a red flag that something illegal is going on. If you want BTC to be really useful for illegal transactions, it needs to be useful for legal ones and gain wider adoption.
That was my reading of it, anyway.
Re: What's the use for Bitcoin?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Its decentralized nature, alone, is its most important attribute. Bitcoin cannot be stopped. Period. It's just as decentralized as tulip bulbs ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania ), and Bitcoin will be "stopped" when a) it is illegal to transmit or receive a blockchain (unlikely), or b) when people realize the only value Bitcoin has is in the belief that Bitcoin has value. All it takes for Bitcoin to be wort…
>All it takes for Bitcoin to be worthless is the belief that Bitcoin is worthless. But that's true for almost any modern currency. If everyone believed that the US dollar is worthless it would become near worthless. There will always be some demand because US citizens have to pay their taxes in US dollars but that wouldn't be enough to keep the dollar at anywhere near it's current value.
Not at all. The US dollar has the economic and military might of the world's most powerful country behind it. What exactly does bitcoin have behind it again?