What if you’re stuck in Turkey with its current inflation and want to hedge against it? Or what if you’re someone who would like to in a permissionless way buy Bitcoin options?
What the Hacker News crowd generally misses about crypto is that it’s technology, ideology and finance in one package. They keep on arguing against the storage model itself (centralized vs decentralized) and miss the bigger picture.
So many of these anti blockchain comments remind me of the initial HN reaction to Dropbox and people saying that “hey, you can just set this up yourself on a Linux machine”.
You’re missing the point. A 3 trillion dollar industry doesn’t give a shit about your database takes and how it’s all a bubble - we’re way beyond that.
Have you ever tried withdrawing all of your money from your bank? They will fight tooth and nail to stop you.
Have you ever tried sending money with a wire? Your bank may say "No" you aren't allowed to send your money to who you want. This happened to Wikileaks in 2008.
Have you ever fought with PayPal to get access to your money on their platform? They've shut down millions of legitimate accounts barring people from accessing their own money.
With cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, you are always in control of your own money because you have not deposited it into someone else's system.
It's yours.
If you still call that "zero use case" I can't force you to drink the water I brought you to.
That's not a particularly valuable contribution to the discussion, nor is it even true.
A use case for crypto is to be independent of the establishment financial system. This isn't important to that many people, but it is a use case, and there are valid reasons for it.
I'm sure you have nothing to hide, and so nothing to fear, hmm? If the world is to move towards digital currencies one way or another, we might as well protect our human rights.
Have you ever used an anonymizing network for your Internet activities? Some of us have to use them for most of our activities, and while you might deem us criminals for that, privacy tech is used for legal activity the vast majority of the time. There are countless people who are currently alive only because of encryption and various privacy technologies, yet your only response is "some criminals could abuse it though"? Is not the most widespread crime in our world the violation of privacy by governments/corporations?
