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Comment by nrhk | Hacker News Reader

How is censorship free money not useful for something.

You've got an entire darknet, you've got 80% of the world's population living in areas where censorship resistance is valuable. Chinese wanting capital flight, inflation infested countries looking for an alternative, areas of high political risk and instability.

To say its not really useful for anything is just facetious. Bubble sure, tech isn't there yet sure, no future use cases, now that's definitely not true. Will the use cases be worth 400 billion, that's a better question.

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> you've got 80% of the world's population living in areas where censorship resistance is valuable

Setting aside the fact that censorship is not a technical problem but a political and societal one, Bitcoin's max transaction rate is so pathetically low that if 80% of the world's population used Bitcoin, they'd be lucky to make a single transaction every 45 years! Bitcoin can't even scale to what would be required to service a single football stadium during halftime.

> To say its not really useful for anything is just facetious

It's useful for anything illegal -- money laundering, drugs, murder for hire, etc. And even then, the traceability, extreme volatility, and long confirmation times make Bitcoin a poor choice for even the sketchiest of mob bosses.

Bitcoin's primary use case is scamming naive, starry-eyed libertarians, an-caps, and goldbugs out of their hard earned dirty fiat.

(source: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(5.7+billion+transacti...)

"Will the use cases be worth 400 billion" is not the better question, it is the whole question. For a potential investor in this moment it doesn't really matter if in the end Bitcoin turns out to have a market cap of 4 billion or 0, in both cases they've lost (almost) all that they invested.

Yes, censorship free money is useful for some people for some purposes - but most people in most purposes won't be willing to pay a single cent extra for this feature; if I'm buying a sandwich for lunch, I'm not going to buy it with censorship free money unless that service is better on its own disregarding the censorship issue, and BTC-as-it-is-now is not better in other aspects nor is it cheaper. While a lot of people might want a few such transactions for some special needs, those transactions are the edge cases that constitute a tiny, tiny fraction of the daily global commerce.

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