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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

That's factually incorrect. For example, several months ago I was owed some money (around 500 USD) by a friend, and we decided to exchange the funds via Bitcoin, not for speculation or your delightfully pejorative "crypto-anarchist fetishism," but because it was by far the easiest and fastest way for us to do so.

Cue your reply, justifying your original universal quantification by retroactively redefining it with new exceptions.

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I think the argument against your anecdote is that it was the best solution for you--no doubt a technologically literate person who has confidence in their mental model of what bitcoin is. For the general populace, it's a distant novelty still which reduces its general practicality greatly.

It doesn't need to work for the "general populace". As long as it's useful to a small set of people it will be used by this small set of people.

I think that it does, to some degree, in order to fulfill some of the promises that proponents claim will be delivered in the near future. There are ceaseless calls by BTC advocates for retailers of all kinds to accept bitcoin payments. For this to happen on a large enough scale there needs to be distributed demand by a great number of consumers, not frequent demands by a few edge cases.

I say that's the minority of the BTC users claiming that widespread adoption will happen. But Bitcoin is already useful as it is, it doesn't need any more use cases, they just may emerge naturally.

So then, the real statement is that Bitcoin is useless, except for the people who are savvy enough to use it? I can accept that, but it's a very weak statement. You could have said the same thing about PayPal (which is now quite popular in the general populace) or even credit cards before they became mainstream.

I don't entirely disagree, but even still people understood both of those things conceptually before they existed. Credit, arguably, predates state-backed currencies and PayPal provides the same functionality as a bank for online transactions. Bitcoin is a traded commodity represented by long hashes stored on disk. It's very abstract and coupled with its current volatility it makes it hard to pull people in if they aren't already convinced that its massive deflation will make them rich.

That said I have mined and sold bitcoin (luckily a few weeks ago) I just remain skeptical about its viability to go mainstream considering these and many other barriers. I was personally frustrated by it when making a recent purchase due to the fact that my buying power fluctuated by 10% while proceeding from shopping cart to checkout.

A conversation I had the other day:

"Ha! I'm glad you like my idea. You should send me five Dogecoin."

"Okay, so, we just have to install this wallet on your computer..."

"Uhhh nevermind."

It's not much different than having to open a PayPal account, and it's much easier than opening a bank account.

I sell ebooks, I actually give them away if the person can only pay with PayPal, because PayPal is such a hassle.

It's all relative, I guess.

They call that the "moving the goalpost" fallacy, don't they?

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