Sure. I’ll bite as someone who was formerly “into” crypto.
> Bitcoin is essentially a permissionless (third world citizens, political outcasts, people governments don't like are still able to use it without the government being able to cut them off)
It is not substantially more useful than any other transferable assets for those that need to worry about governments. At the end of the day, those governments still have the ability to jail or kill you. Bitcoin won’t help. Ironically, the more accepted and “integrated” with the financial system in the West it becomes, the less this holds true.
> non-inflationary (inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon - the result of too many units of currency chasing too few goods and services, almost always a result of rampant currency debasement, not possible with bitcoin's hard-coded 21 million cap)
There’s been an infinite number of arguments written about inflation and why we moved to fiat currencies in the first place, I won’t rehash them. Instead I’ll put forth my pet definitions.
Money is the ability to get work done. A country’s money supply should grow with their ability to get work done, otherwise the pressure is deflationary as the economy becomes more efficient and capable. We know all the reasons deflationary currencies are bad.
> universal (every country can trust it because no one country can control it) currency.
As long as they can control you access to the internet, they can control your access to your crypto.
> currency
This is where we diverge most. Bitcoin isn’t a currency and the network will not support it becoming one. It is, as bitcoiners love to put it, a store of value. Which makes it like any other commodity, except it has no intrinsic value which makes it a purely speculative asset and it’s price is directly correlated not with usefulness but with capital seeking (higher risk) returns. This becomes more clear as institutional money goes into bitcoin, not for the purpose of transacting, but to seek gains/hedge other areas of the market.
Ironically, the more people invest in bitcoin, the worse it is as a currency, and the lower the value is to me.
> This enables a framework for the working class to start saving in ways government cannot steal back from them through inflation.
There are other assets for this.
> This enables trustless
This is the one that drives me nuts with crypto. Somewhere in a transaction, something has to happen in the real world. There is not interface between the blockchain and the real world that is truly trustless. You must depend on reality being correctly reported on.
In fact, almost all of the rent seeking in our existing system is built on adding buffers based on the amount of trust in the transaction.
Everything in the real world either depends on either trust (and the associated systems to manage risk) or power (where the whole government institution part of money comes in).
> It's worth acknowledging in good faith that these computational costs have electrical load costs, which often do have carbon emitting costs, too.
Kind of downplaying the sheer size of the carbon emitting costs here…