Topic: Utility Uses of Bitcoin in General - page 2. (Read 538 times)

Those are pure speculations on your part in order to try to grasp at straws. Bitcoin exists since 15 years now, and it's still using a public ledger allowing anyone to track any transaction, it's still way less safe than cash money for hidding transactions. So if its goal is to be a tool against government surveillance and persecution why it has never evolved to integrate any obfuscation feature till now? In addition Satoshi doesn't talk anywhere about governments in his white paper, but he describes Bitcoin as "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash [allowing] online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." Financial institution means banks...

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Hmm, OP had complied with most of the things in general but if we check out some points specifically they seem to be UN-realistic utilities at least for a person like me, especially point no 4, it will be impractical with the passage of time because, with the increase market valuation, most of the people will lose affordance to use Bitcoin as a payment option for virtual purchase and service transactions.   

Physical cash can't be easily transmitted on the internet. There's obviously a strong need for electronic means of value transfer.

As for the public ledger, I suspect that was a design trade-off, and I also suspect Satoshi didn't quite anticipate the effectiveness of chain analysis. You have to remember that in the beginning, by far the biggest challenge for Bitcoin was establishing trust since the notion of digital tokens was quite strange at the time. Also, the encrypted ledger ala Monero is another layer of complexity on top of what--again, at the time--was already an incredibly complex system.

If he just wanted to create a money for people who could not safely use a bank or other institution for fear of government prosecution or persecution as you say. Why did he created a currency based on a public ledger(the blockchain) allowing anyone to track all the transactions from(or to) any address? Cash money is way more safe than Bitcoin to transact without risks of being tracked by anyone.
In addition Bitcoin can be used without internet, you can just give one or several private keys from addresses containing funds to pay someone you trust. Or you can simply give him a signed transaction to broadcast later if he trusts you.

Yes, the survey will always result that way because most people who have invested in Bitcoin don't really know much about it or its history. All they know is that it's a good asset and the ones who invested in early have made good money and that's why they might also make money by investing in it.

A few weeks ago one of my friend told me that he invested $40 in Bitcoin in hope to get 2x return from that investment. After holding his investment for 4-6 months he only profited $3 and then he somehow converted his Bitcoin back to USDT and withdrawn it as fiat.

He told me that someone from his friends has told him to invest in Bitcoin and that's why he invested in it, and when I asked him that how much you know about Bitcoin? He replied not much but his friend said it's a good asset for the investors and nothing else.

Privacy, decentralization and the rest of all the anonymousity in bitcoin are bitcoin primary and core utility, anything aside that is just an addition just like a second layer bitcoin usage, but the main points and those that you mentioned and that I mention above, unlike some shitcoin that are tie to one single platform to provides utility, bitcoin on the other hand have such a fundamental responsibility to protect the privacy of it users.

What may be important to you, may not be important to me. With this, we do not need to bother about what comes first or last in terms of Bitcoin's usage. All the points stated above about bitcoin are actually accurate, I will also love to add that bitcoin has been very useful in aiding payments through escrow where trust and transparency is paramount.

There are lots of things yet to be discovered we can actually use bitcoin for,  it will only take time for these uses to unfold. Some years back, many didn't know that bitcoin can actually be used as an investment aside just being used as a means of payment.  Now, almost every bitcoiner is trying hard to take advantage of the bitcoin price fluctuations to make money for themselves. Every bitcoiner is at liberty to use bitcoin the way they will enjoy maximum benefits from it, provided the usage is legal and does not cause harm to the next person.

I do not think that eight is really that much used, or at least that much cared about, nobody really cares if you sign a message using the chain because that's rarely that important and we could just ignore that if we do not want to be part of it. However, we are going to end up with a good result if we know what we are doing with this, since that means we have the first four, which are the by far best uses of it.

It's great for investing for obvious reasons and I do not need to explain to them because we are all here and know it already, we all know gold type of investments has been used for a long time so it is not a shock, but at the same time we are talking about payment process at third and fourth which are great too.

I have used all four so far in my life and I can tell you that it is far greater than anything in fiat and everyone should be incredibly happy with it, there is no doubt about that and we can only make this work perfectly whenever we get some time.

Yes, most view bitcoin as an investment rather than any of its use cases. I asked some people if bitcoin became stable, would they continue to stick with it and use it? Or they will quickly look for another alternative investment account. Even though many people say they will continue to stick with it even when it stabilizes, I'm skeptical of what they say.

I would like to add that I think investing is completely different from storing value. Investing means we can have profits or losses but for a store of value it needs stability so I don't think bitcoin would be the ideal store of value.



Some people are excited about businesses or organizations accepting bitcoin payments, but how many people would use bitcoin to pay instead of traditional payment methods? Because as I see it, we all just want to hold bitcoin for profit, very few people want to use it except in emergencies. So I never expected or believed that bitcoin could become a popular currency or payment method.

If in the future bitcoin becomes stable, it is also unlikely to become a payment method, it could be a store of value, a safe haven like gold, IMO.

The order of priority would be different for each Bitcoin user, depending on what they focus on. The order could also be based on actual usage, but I honestly don't know where we could get reliable data on that. I assume investing is the most common use, followed by trading, gambling, and then the rest from the list. I wouldn't make two banking points, and I think both trading and gambling deserve to be on the list but aren't there for some reason. Unlike investing, trading means doing lots of operations with Bitcoin regularly. And as for gambling, I still believe it's among the top uses of Bitcoin as a form of money.

If we survey the use of Bitcoin, I guess a majority of respondents would attest that they are using Bitcoin as an investment. Some people do not care about privacy or controlling their finances, so the decentralised attribute of Bitcoin is not appealing to them. Most of us just want to keep our money in a safe asset and wait until it appreciates before we sell.

Few businesses accept Bitcoin as a payment option but most people still prefer using Fiat for daily transactions since it is stable and widely used. Maybe in the future Bitcoin's value might be stable and more nations will legalise it, which might make its daily use more popular.   

   

I think Bitcoin ended up sort of accidentally having a strong use case as a store of value. People make vast gains with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, then they cannot easily sell without getting extreme levels of taxation. So, people stand pat on their fortunes with the intention of simply spending it more directly rather than exchanging it for fiat currency. But because of the high transaction fees preventing retail adoption, that might be even more of a focus in the future as extreme returns are no longer considered a strong prospect at some point in the future (whether that point is months, years, or decades in the future). And it seems like Bitcoin is actually being adopted more quickly for more things than in the past. Store-of-value long-term holders are using Travala and gift cards quite a bit to spend some of their assets on an as-needed basis. So in that respect store-of-value holders really pairs with retail and contract use cases.

It wont be as easy as you describing, I think by not considering this daily use of money we can use bitcoin as future gold. Where inflation can never reach. To make this happened I think bitcoin spot etf need to accepted by all over worlds government and peoples.

Yeah, I don't think that there could be an order there, although if we go back to the roots o Bitcoin, as per whitepaper it was designed to be used as micropayment scheme. It's that it has evolved since it's inception, becoming an asset.

And it has grow even more, now one of the best if not the best asset in the world. People are obviously making money out of it, and we even have a country that legalized it (El Salvador). And it even proved itself as a hedge against financial and economic disaster like in the Covid-19 lockdown.

I guess in current times the best use case of Bitcoin in my eyes and in the eyes of most hodlers is that it works pretty well as store of value and can grow in value overtime as more investors start investing money in Bitcoin.

Although, it can still be used as a payment system and it's used that way on daily basis but the best one can do with Bitcoin is by holding it for long term to gain some profits from it.

Making a profit from Bitcoin is what perhaps 95% of Bitcoin users do with it today. This is not what Satoshi envisioned, but that's the reality of Bitcoin circa 2024.


No, he made Bitcoin for people who could not safely use a bank or other institution for fear of government prosecution or persecution. Surely most people who use Bitcoin--now, as well as in the beginning--already had some kind of bank account. They merely wanted to put... certain assets... out of the reach of their government, and/or wanted to be able to trade in such a way that could not be traced by their government.

If you wanted to make a developing world solution, it would be rather strange--especially 15 years ago--to create something that requires the internet and a computing device in order to use.

I'm not saying Bitcoin can't be used this way--it can, and is--but it wasn't made for that in mind anymore than it was made for what Bitcoin is mostly used for today e.g. an investment instrument.

Anyhow, the original point I was making in my OP (such that we can reel the conversation back on track here ), is that it's important not to look at what Bitcoin "can" do, but rather what can it do that nothing else can do. Bank cards etc. work well for much of the world's daily transactions, and Bitcoin was never intended to replace those transactions. Monero works correctly as a government-proof means of value transfer. Haypenny currencies are far faster and cheaper than credit cards. Bitcoin's only meme is "Bitcoin". Etc. etc.

We're trying to answer, "what can you use Bitcoin for", and... I think we're answering that, right?

There is no need to rank them and they are correct but you can simplify it by saying that Bitcoin's use is payments and as an asset. If you're going to summarize all of it, the categories that I've mentioned are where Bitcoin is going to fall and it is not a hidden use case anymore. Everyone is aware that Bitcoin can be used mostly with those use cases. I want to point #7, tokenization means that you'll have to convert your bitcoin asset into another one. Bitcoin is the asset and there's no need for any tokenization of it, you're making me remember about the crazy ordinals and brc20 tokens.

I don't understand why you're talking about markets now? The topic is about the "Utility Uses" of Bitcoin, not about how you could try to make money with Bitcoin. Besides that, Bitcoin doesn't belong to any company, it's a free, open-source and decentralized tool, the goal of Satoshi Nakamoto has obviously never been to try to make profits with it. Helping unbanked people, is maybe not what you care about the most, but Satoshi wanted to build something allowing to transact without the need of using banks.

Yes, when something is less than 5% of a market, I think it's fair to call it an extreme niche.

That doesn't meant the market doesn't exist, and it doesn't mean that you can't make money serving such a market, it only means that most of the market is somewhere else.

I really don't see why this is particularly controversial to the point where you had to start in with the personal attacks... This is just dictionary definitions here...


There is no such thing as a "risk free investment". Gold in particular has varied wildly in the market at different times.

You can certainly say that, based on a particular timeframe, a certain instrument might be "higher risk" or "lower risk", and there are obviously a lot of investments out there that many would feel comfortable believing "won't lose value" because it's very unlikely, but technically-speaking everything has a risk.

I'm really missing what it is I wrote that has made you so upset.

I've rarely seen someone showing such bad faith as that, to be honest. You're this kind of guy arguing for hours when he knows he's wrong I bet.
Do you know how many people represents 6% of the USA population exactly? That is to say 6% of 340 000 000 people? That's just 20.4 millions of americans. While it's one of the richest country in the world. So you can guess how many people are actually unbanked in poorer countries...
1.4 billions of adults around the world are unbanked according to the World Bank. That's what you dare to call an "extreme niche", sincerely?  
 

I'm sorry to say that, but it's the same kind of bad faith argument as above. Highly volatile and risky assets are well known, and Bitcoin is one of them, low-volatility and risk-free ones, and therefore safe for storing value, are well known too, gold is the most famous of them. You're very unlikely to lose any substantial portion of your initial investment at any time with those assets.