You're saying Dropbox is a grift with a $7bn market cap?
The bank is just someone else's ledger.
Yes. As a service. Which is what people want.
Nobody wants to run their own bakery just to get a bagel.
I've not heard this before, I will remember it. This is such a good retort.
And some people don't, and it should be possible for them to get ledger-as-a-service.
Why can't there be room for both?
I'm saying they should temper their expectations, if they think that secretly everyone wants to be a baker, and in the future a meaningful fraction will be.
Most people, when they go to a baker and ask for a bagel, will not want the answer "great, so just buy this oven from amazon. I'll show you how to use it when it arrives'.
Cryptocurrency advocates are wrong about what other people want, or will want. They can LARP if they want, but that doesn't mean that it's value to other people.
Another example is Cloudflare. If the internet was designed properly, you wouldn't have DDoS attacks in the first place. There would be no one to sell DDoS protection to, no one to rent out botnets to.
You wouldn't even need most web/file "hosting" in the traditional sense if you could just share static files with bittorrent/IPFS.
P.S. The problem dropbox "fixes" is that there is no decent file transfer protocol that is IP agnostic. Using something like bittorrent's or IPFS' DHT fixes this. Dropbox "fixes" this by making file transfer into a paid service
One reason is that such a scenario relies on one of my computers with bittorrent-dropbox to be online for me to access my files elsewhere. Syncing it in the cloud means they are available reliably.
The last time I used IPFS it took four hours before I could access the file just using the hash or even the public gateway after pushing it to several major pinning services.
See? We both can play that game!
Bitcoin has no utility.
It has the 'promise' of utility, which is the current utility it rests upon, making the underlying value quite difficult to determine.
If BTC were to dissapear, the world wouldn't skip a beat, and we would have no need to 'reinvent' BTC.
We would likely to continue to think about and experiment with other things, but as it stands so far, BTC isn't the solution to anything.
There would be no need to 'reinvent' Dropbox, either. People would do so for both regardless of necessity (and indeed have done so for both, ad nauseam) because they find them and the concepts thereof useful or interesting, contrary to what you or I might assert.
Dropbox (Box, Google Drive, etc.) are imminently useful services, almost all of us use them.
If my cloud drive we vaporized, even if I had backups, I'd be livid, as would maybe more than a billion people would be as well.
People pay for cloud storage because it's immensely useful. I share documents with clients every day.
BTC is some surplus money changing hands, bouncing around between owners trading magic numbers, willy nilly. There's no need for it to exist. Even unproductive things like 'gambling' serve the purpose of entertainment at least.
And meanwhile there are migrant workers, refugees, and the like who depend on cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin for basic economic participation. If Bitcoin vanished overnight, they'd be back to being at the mercy of a legacy financial system that shuns them at best and actively exploits them at worst.
There are no migrant groups workers who depend on Bitcoin as a means of banking, it's completely (ridiculously) unsuited to that purpose.
Migrant workers use of innumerable financial services offered to them by banks at home, in their country of work, or one of the myriad of financial services apps made available to them via app stores etc..
There's more to economic participation than just banking (even assuming that what you wrote wasn't a blatant falsehood).
> Migrant workers use of innumerable financial services offered to them by banks at home, in their country of work, or one of the myriad of financial services apps made available to them via app stores etc..
Previously, yes, with predatory fees that make even Bitcoin (let alone any of the umpteen million iterations on its design) affordable by comparison. The working poor lack the bargaining power to meaningfully demand fair treatment from the legacy financial system; for them, a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin provides that fairness.