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Comment by idiotsecant | Hacker News Reader

>What would someone use this for, when fiat works everywhere?

For the same reason some people line to use linux when windows works everywhere. Actual technical use cases, ideology, and 'tinker-friendliness'

1) there are some use cases where it is better (typically when you want to do something that the state doesn't want you to do)

2) there are ideological reasons to prefer decentralized ownership of the financial system rather than assuming the state can be responsible with the dials and levers of that system

3) There are neat properties of crypto that are fun for tinkerers - money is programmable and you can do neat tinker-toy things with it like micropayments, fintech like collateralize loans and decentralized derivatives trading, dumb things and experiments like the old peepeth, etc.

I think eventually if adoption is wide enough there will be society-altering implications inherent to crypto but for now I think it's those 3 things.

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Finally someone brings up tinkering - a.k.a. the thing that hacking (and by extension HN) is supposed to be about.

Core developers of the Bitcoin ecosystem are also Linux hackers. Rusty Russel, C-lightning main developer was also the creator of iptables and a good part of the Linux TCP stack.

Technical minded people showing hostility toward Bitcoin because of some obvious scammers is as unfathomable to me as showing hostility toward TCP/IP because of malwares.

Don't forget Hal Finney :)

TCP/IP works quite beautifully for something designed decades ago, and actually solves real problems, though (like delivering your message to my t̶e̶l̶e̶t̶y̶p̶e halfway across the globe). "Crypto" seems to be quite good at worsening air pollution in my country (which is already very bad) and not much else.

So does Bitcoin. For the first time in history, we have achieved sound money, something neither gold or fiat money have.

https://miro.medium.com/max/720/1*rVgI62Reha0MnvUiWC0SXg.web...

https://danhedl.medium.com/planting-bitcoin-sound-money-72e8...

Of course, whether it's gold, fiat or cryptos, we'll have scammers and gullible people who fall for ponzis, but because money can be used to scam doesn't mean it's a scam itself.

Although I bet there are a lot more either useless or scammy projects in crypto than in gold (fiat must have the most scams since it's the most popular), people writing off the entire industry as a scam is disingenuous, myopic, and so often delivered with obvious jealousy that they had the chance to buy up some space cash when it started but said it was stupid so now they will stick to that argument.

I had to donate to Wikileaks years ago via a very expensive wire transfer since the credit card companies bowed down to the USA and cut them off. If I had BTC, I would have used that for almost free.

But, doesn't TCP/IP also fundamentally power and enable almost every conceivable ostensibly "bad" thing happening on the internet?

Like, for example, "crypto"?

I feel like it's somewhat poetic and a powerful indicator of something I can't quite put my finger on that this thing we call the internet is now old enough that some of us are doing old-man-shakes-angry-fist-at-cloud at newer parts of it. The more things change the more we stay the same.

Stripe doing this seems to help with neither 1, 2, nor 3.

you 're talking about the subset of people who use linux inside a virtualbox in windows.

people who deal in pure crypto have no reason to use Stripe , which goes contrary to the whole ideology and narrative of crypto.

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