However, I agree that almost all ICOs are cash-grabs. In my opinion we already have coins for all verticals that matter.
That's the type of fluff I keep hearing coming from the bitcoin enthusiasts but I have yet to read a compelling argument about what it'll enable and how exactly.
"Bitcoin will kill the banks", "bitcoin will prevent the evil government from stealing your money", "bitcoin will cure cancer and polio". How it'll do any of that and why it's a good thing, that's left as an exercise to the reader.
In effect if we look at how bitcoin is effectively used today then the parent is fairly objective I think. There's speculation, more speculation, money laundering, black market stuff, gambling. Oh and did I mention speculation?
There aren't many legit use cases where bitcoin beats fiat nowadays, except maybe sending money to a foreign country (and even then it's not certain, what with the high fees and huge variation in the price of late).
I still don't understand how people expect it to become maistream. "It's like Visa, but if you make a mistake you may lose all your money with no hope of ever getting it back, it's not accepted everywhere and you have to wait for about an hour to get a confirmation. But hey, you can send money to Burundi super easily with it!"
I know, I know, there's SegWit coming, which might address some of these issues. In particular I hear that it'll cure the rabies too. To the moon!
I wouldn't bet against cryptocurrencies doing the same thing, that's not to say I know how they're going to do it.
Nobody could tell you what to do with an mp3, nobody could tell you what you could or couldn't put in it or what you could play it on (licensing I know... but you take my point). Mp3 gave everyone the ability to experiment with audio and distribute it in a way that was incredibly difficult before.
Crypto currencies do the same I think for money, they are an internet native version of something and that "internet nativeness" implies a level of creativity, flexibility and speed of iteration/evolution that can't be matched by offline equivalents.
I understand the questions you're asking and really I have no answers, but I think the "internet nativeness" of something like crypto currencies is not to be underestimated and I think it's why there's so much interest in the area.
I'll give an additional hint to reader: who benefits from encryption that even law enforcement cannot break?
Who benefits from TOR?
People who live in countries with regressive regimes where law enforcement can be legitimately dangerous?
Who benefits from a financial transaction system that law enforcement cannot censor?
It's still only really useful for relatively rich people who want to get money out or in, I doubt the average Venezuelian bothers with Bitcoin. And Bitcoin requires a widely available "free" internet connection to work correctly which would be trivial for an authoritarian government to disrupt. Turkey doesn't hesitate to block Wikipedia and Twitter, I doubt they'd have any problem blocking the bitcoin exchanges and the bitcoin peer-to-peer protocol if they felt the need to do it. Sure you can work around this and smuggle the blockchain somehow, but it becomes a lot less practical, especially if want something that you can easily spend for your day-to-day purchases like food and toilet paper.
I know there's a lot of defiance towards our governments all around the world and there are some good reasons for that. However I feel like we're having the bad engineer reflex, trying to find a technical solution to a societal issue and we might end up making things worse. I want to be able to trust the government that I democratically elect and I want this government to be able to gather taxes and even control the currency to some extent.
Instead Bitcoin will make it trivial to evade taxes, smuggle money overseas and makes bribery easier than ever. You can't seize it, you can't freeze it, you can launder it super easily etc...
At least when people open an illegal account in some tax haven it leaves some paper trail, there are intermediaries in the loop, you take some risks, you have to figure out a way to smuggle the money over there while keeping the books clean. With Bitcoin you click on "generate a new receiving address" and you're done. If the point is to make governments less corrupt and more accountable I don't see how that'll work. You can't have the Panama Papers or the Swiss Leaks if there's no paper to begin with.
The fact that it wastes an ungodly amount of energy to secure its ledger is just the icing on the crap cake as far as I'm concerned. And it's not even super successful because as far as I understand the majority of the hash power is currently in mainland China, so if the Chinese government wanted to take over they'd just send a dozen of military types in each datacenter and that'd be the end of it. Then you make a few double-spend attacks to make people lose all trust in the coin, the value collapses, nobody mines it anymore, game over, thanks for playing.
Same is said for encryption.
My perspective is that tools empowering individuals is the solution to societal problems. Cryptography does that, whether applied to communication or applied to value transfer.
Monetary transactions are already pretty well protected, which makes it hard for somebody to steal my credit card and use it without my consent. It's arguably even safer than Bitcoin since the bank and regulations offer me some protection if something goes wrong.
So bitcoin isn't about making secure transactions the way HTTPS is, it's about hiding my transactions from the bank and, transitively, from the government. It's about creating a completely free libertarian market.
Maybe you actually want that but I wish there were more discussions in the bitcoin world about what model of society people really want. I have a hard time believing that all the bitcoin enthusiasts are die-hard objectivists. I feel like many people saw the "get rich quick" scheme and didn't stop to think about the consequences.
To borrow some progressive terminology: check your privilege.
Also let's not forget
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
https://wikileaks.org/MasterCard-breaks-ranks-in.html
Civil asset forfeiture
etc.
Well here is your mistake. Why would you ever trust a government, or anyone for that matter? Sure, we hope that people are good, but 99% of people operate based on an incentive structure. The incentives in bitcoin for the miners and the participants are well defined.
Depending on who you are, one could argue the United States is one such country. If it can apply to the US - it can likely apply everywhere.
For people in nations with stable governments and currencies, access to credit, and nothing to hide, there's no compelling to use cryptocurrencies day to day.
What happened to the outrage at the bailouts in the 2008 crisis? How have we completely forgotten that? Opinions differ as to the underlying causes of the 2008 crisis: was it reckless bankers and insurers, was it criminal bankers and insurers, was it the repeal of Glass-Steagall? Many people, myself included, place the blame squarely in the hands of central bankers. The crisis was created by them, and then glossed over by them by throwing money at the people who took the most advantage of their manipulations.
The problem is not that someone else should be in charge of central banking, it's that _nobody_ should be in charge of central banking -- the central banking, really, and the notion of a "lender of last resort" should simply not exist. Part and parcel of that is that we need a new currency -- one that cannot be created on a whim based on some "understanding" of macroeconomics that is completely incorrect. The goal here is so absurdly ambitious that people have stopped talking about it -- replacing Visa is nothing; Visa can exist and spend Bitcoins, just as Visa can (and does) exist and spend Euros and Yen and whatever the hell you want. But Bitcoin is the first serious attempt to make a currency that is independent of central bank manipulation (second, I guess, if you count gold).
> There aren't many legit use cases where bitcoin beats fiat nowadays
So here's the use case -- the US government cannot literally quadruple the amount of bitcoins in existence in order to pay off a bunch of bankers who lost their shirts, and a bunch of auto manufacturers that lost their ability to compete. I get it, this is not going to make it easier to buy your coffee, or whatever "mainstream" means to you. And there's a good chance that Bitcoin will not topple the Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank, or whatever, but it's an avenue to start opting out of a financial system that is increasingly dependent on massive government actions, and supporting the massive covert and overt international economic warfare being waged in our name, supporting the contemptible level of corporate welfare that threatens to undermine those aspects of our government that are essential to a free society, and resisting the attempts to use inflation as a hidden form of super-duper-regressive taxation to punish those who try to save money.
The current value of BTC comes from trust. It's just not the kind you were expecting it to be.
The value in Bitcoin doesn't come from trust in people, it comes from trust in crypto.
Money is just another kind of trust.