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Comment by Qworg | Hacker News Reader

What is value? Without an exchange, how do you secure it?

Exchanges facilitate liquidity between crypto and other common currencies. This has obvious value. But just like any currency, the value of a crypto is what you can get for it. So in the hypothetical where there are no exchanges, there would still be value in terms of the things you can buy with crypto directly.

I mean if I give you X BTC for Y products or services, no exchange need be involved.

This is the theory that has been expressed for years, but it is in practice still a fantasy. Somebody tried earlier this year to live on it for 36 hours; even in a major city it's not practical: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/nyregion/new-york-today-l...

Actually dark net markets work this way.

We need more developments and time to move away from the hodl mindset to where crypto can be seen as currency not an asset. How much time this will take? I'm not sure, after all we are talking about some very powerful and ingrained institutions involved.

USD has a 225 year head start...not surprised BTC hasn't hit that level of adoption yet. Credit cards took a few decades to hit mainstream too to the point where you could literally use them everywhere.

The point is not that you can't use Bitcoin everywhere dollars (or even credit cards) are accepted. The point is that it's useless as a day-to-day currency. As far as I can tell, the number of places that accept it is declining, so it will never catch up with anything.

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