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Comment by Epiphany21 | Hacker News Reader

These anti-crypto articles coming out lately are just a feedback loop of negativity designed to get people sucked into a mini online tribal conflict so that they don't start build parallel economies and free themselves. Even though this outlet went and found some of the most fringe and inflammatory advocates for blockchain technologies, they still managed to sneak a few truths through.

Cryto-currencies are generally good for two things: Making transactions almost impossible to stop and difficult to track, and storing wealth in place where the powers that be can't easily steal it from you. This is why the owners of legacy financial institutions and the mass of corporate serfs on their payroll hate it.

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The market demand for making sanctioned transactions is quite small. For the average person, it’s basically nothing. For the prosumer, it might be drugs or prediction markets, and especially the latter is already legal in many jurisdictions.

>The market demand for making sanctioned transactions is quite small.

This might have been true 10 years ago but it certainly isn't today. Barring some unprecedented natural disaster or act of god, that demand is just going to increase with all the political and social turmoil happening in the world today.

Can you cite some evidence? Ten years ago we were in the middle of the Arab Spring and the USA was in two different hot wars?

>Can you cite some evidence?

The prices speak for themselves. A decade or so ago people were using thousands of Bitcoins to purchase a pizza. A single Bitcoin is currently worth $40,000. Even though this down from a high of around $61,000, that price fluctuation is still less extreme than the total growth it saw in a relatively short amount of time.

7 transactions per second

Bitcoin cannot be banned.

Try making a big purchase with it in China.

Well, bitcoin still needs a point of entry. To buy, most people go to their bank, transfer to an exchange and make a trade from fiat to btc. If western banking decided to ban this kind of exchange it'd be pretty close to a bitcoin ban. I don't think anyone is going to trade large amounts of physical cash for bitcoins like they used to before exchanges.

Yes they can ban the exchanges, but the US and Europe didn't and haven't done so, that's the biggest economy bloc in the world, who cares if african country #12 bans it.

Google "game theory bitcoin".

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