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Comment by 6nf | Hacker News Reader

Every minute, there are thousands of bitcoin transactions happening at dozens of exchanges, and it's happening instantly with very low cost. Because it's off-chain.

That's what you're missing here, not everything needs to be on-chain to be valuable. Exchanges and businesses and services can aggregate.

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But if it's off chain, why use Bitcoin at all?

If you never actually use the blockchain, then you don't really know if those BTC you 'bought' even exist.

It’s still backed by the currency. Kind of like how when you make a stock trade the actual trade isn’t cleared for some time. In this way the blockchain of Bitcoin is simply transparent and easy to follow, if slow and expensive.

A big criticism of the current market is that Tethers aren't backed by anything. Nonetheless, there's a huge BTC and USDT and USD trade going on.

The same reason why when you use Venmo you don't think "wait, why use USD at all if it's all a database?"

The truth is, the current financial system is just a large number of databases trying to sync with one another, and one of cryptocurrencies' goal is to decrease this amount of databases.

> and one of cryptocurrencies' goal is to decrease this amount of databases.

And replace them with one of the biggest wastes of electricity?

What's the point of "getting rid of databases", when you end up needing them for something as fundamental as an BTC/USD exchange anyway?

> biggest wastes of electricity

you're aware that you're talking about legacy cryptocurrencies?

The whole point of bitcoin was to be decentralized. If bitcoin transactions are loaded up on an app like robinhood, then it’s no different than robinhoodbux

You don't have to use the aggregators, it's just more expensive without them.

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