Topic: Utility Uses of Bitcoin in General (Read 538 times)

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Though I think we might change things a little, your list is really good. Top investing? Thats so Wall Street, so yesterday. The future is Bitcoin, and it will be about more than just rapid profit. Regarding "everyday use," let me say: paying your bills, shopping for groceries, sending money to your granny abroad free from those outrageous charges We have been waiting for exactly this change.

Many millions of individuals worldwide lack access to fundamental banking services. Bitcoin can help to alter that. This is a financial system created by people for people. Thats something about which one should get enthusiastic. Tokenizing, smart contracts, all that sophisticated language? Indeed, it has potential. Let us, then, concentrate on the here and now. Lets demonstrate to the world what Bitcoin can accomplish now rather than only what it might be tomorrow.

Generally speaking, I think OP's list was right on point, but recent trends would suggest a few changes that I would make.

I would then move the first one up the order: "Store of Value." There has been quite a rise in the adoption of Bitcoin as a store of value, especially with 70% of coins remaining unmoved for over one year, including when price increases. This essentially shows that long-term holding is becoming a dominant use case, especially as more institutional investors come in, viewing it as a hedge against inflation.

The second constituent of the required upward trajectory in "business contract payments" and "remittances" is because Bitcoin is increasingly used for cross-border payments and settlements. The use of the Lightning Network has 10xed since 2021, and the possibility of low-fee and fast transactions anywhere in the world makes it increasingly useful for regular payments and international remittances.

Speculation and arbitrage probably fall a little lower down the list now, as market volatility has been shrinking and people are moving into more stable, long-term uses.

I mean not exactly a utility but a benefit I’d say added privacy and security for full custodial of all your assets if you do it right without the need for an3rd party or bank

Hello I am very new to crypto currency and I am trying to buy some btc and eth. I need to make sure my wallet will let me transfer btc and eth both. If anyone who can help can you please message me about sending me a small amount of BTC or ETH, (the smallest amount your wallet will allow you to send), to my btc and eth wallet? You can't imagine how much I would appreciate this. I hope someone can do this for me. Thank you in advance

BTC wallet address: 3LcjxaSbyeeX9xyohyuqUaBXtWh6M9gozu

ETH wallet address: 0xeD16c223c756E4B6B705a71134a640320a95dE03

Hello I am very new to crypto currency and I am trying to buy some btc and eth. I need to make sure my wallet will let me transfer btc and eth both. If anyone who can help can you please message me about sending me a small amount of BTC or ETH, (the smallest amount your wallet will allow you to send), to my btc and eth wallet? You can't imagine how much I would appreciate this. I hope someone can do this for me. Thank you in advance

BTC wallet address: 3LcjxaSbyeeX9xyohyuqUaBXtWh6M9gozu

ETH wallet address: 0xeD16c223c756E4B6B705a71134a640320a95dE03

Hello I am very new to crypto currency and I am trying to buy some btc and eth. I need to make sure my wallet will let me transfer btc and eth both. If anyone who can help can you please message me about sending me a small amount of BTC or ETH, (the smallest amount your wallet will allow you to send), to my btc and eth wallet? You can't imagine how much I would appreciate this. I hope someone can do this for me. Thank you in advance

BTC wallet address: 3LcjxaSbyeeX9xyohyuqUaBXtWh6M9gozu

ETH wallet address: 0xeD16c223c756E4B6B705a71134a640320a95dE03

Hello I am very new to crypto currency and I am trying to buy some btc and eth. I need to make sure my wallet will let me transfer btc and eth both. If anyone who can help can you please message me about sending me a small amount of BTC or ETH, (the smallest amount your wallet will allow you to send), to my btc and eth wallet? You can't imagine how much I would appreciate this. I hope someone can do this for me. Thank you in advance

BTC wallet address: 3LcjxaSbyeeX9xyohyuqUaBXtWh6M9gozu

ETH wallet address: 0xeD16c223c756E4B6B705a71134a640320a95dE03

I won't stress about the orders because it can be arranged in different orders depending on how it is useful to who is incharge of making the list. I might have Bitcoin being a store of value as the most important utility of Bitcoin for me because I'm more interested in investing my money to not lose value but to keep increasing while someone with his own thoughts might prioritize Bitcoin being a currency because he has a business that with the help of Bitcoin, he or she has been getting lots of customers because they want to pay using Bitcoin. What is more important for all of us is for Bitcoin to get more adoption to help use use it freely without being scared of being punished because for some people, their country has ban the uses of cryptocurrency while others don't have people that accept Bitcoin in their country that they can use Bitcoin direct to pay for the goods or services that they offer.

Theres no order list of the bitcoin that you need to understand and for sure most of that list you don't even know at the same time, you can do ass possible is to focus a one or two among your list and by that you will enlarge the knowledge you have, for sure if you will earn all of this things you will might get overwhelmed to all of the information. If you think that strategy you've got gives you a good g ain why not continue this or make another step so you can broad your knowledge into different aspect of bitcoin.

I don’t think there is any order for listing an expenditure although, all that is above doesn’t count as an expenditure since, some are literally having to preserve value like, what I’ve got in quote.

Had to single it out because, getting to accept it for a utility didn’t sit well at first but, looking at it as a use case actually does and that’s what utility is.

Bitcoin is a lot of things alright and it continues to scale the boundaries as time goes on.

Your list is okay but the utility of Bitcoin may be endless and I don't expect you to cover them all, especially in the area of decentralization and cross-border payment that is not partial like fiats, it's just too enormous. For me, I will continue to stick to three uses of Bitcoin, which are the use for Payments, Trading and Investment. The low cost of transactions of Bitcoin is good if there is no congestion and miners are not manipulating it for their selfish gains, and the speed is somewhat very okay if one knows his way around it. The Investing and trading are cool as well and I've not seen an asset traded by me that gives easier earning than Bitcoin. The investment is also cool, once the investor is smart about it by buying Bitcoin cheaply and divesting at a high level on larger chart confirmation, money will be earned regularly.

These are not really that great, I mean in general the most common "utility" comes from trading and investing and payments, that's it and nothing more. While people can use it for other stuff, we need to realize that it is not going to be that common and we are not going to see this work out that commonly, it exists solely for the people who use it for more advanced ways.

Market uses it for the main three things which I mentioned, trading, investing and spending that so that they would get something. That's the only thing that people will continue to use, and that's why I think we need to focus on what we can do, and if we ignore all the others and just use this part then we are going to be able to get better results on why people use it.

1. Investing: Speculation on increased value and arbitrage.
Correct.

2. Store of Value: No intent to sell at higher price or higher price after inflation accounted for.
Correct.

3. Business contract payments including regular bill or invoice paying
Incorrect. Reason: Most businesses need financial privacy (due to competition).

4. Retail and service/virtual purchase transactions
Incorrect. Reason: Too expensive to use and too slow.

5. Banking: Transmitting value overseas among different banking jurisdictions
Correct.

6. Banking: Temporary holding for banking needs, or acquiring to sending money to others without a specific bill or retail transaction involved.
Correct.

7. Tokenization of assets by tying Bitcoin ownership to ownership of another asset.
Correct but also: All tokens are worthless.

8. Public Statements using Bitcoin's comment feature.
Correct but also: No one needs this.

For me, this is the main use of Bitcoin for me, because I already experiencing it and that's how I am using  Bitcoin right now. Most of the time is for transactions and modes of payments.
Bitcoin being the store of value is already given to me because since I owned Bitcoin, I have already considered it always as a store of value and I continue to hodl Bitcoin.

I don't think that the "public statements using Bitcoin's comment feature" are particularly useful for the average BTC user/investor/trader.
Also the "tokenization" thing is not useful at all and has nothing to do with the core features of the BTC blockchain.
You could summarize your list in basically two or three points. Store of value(even though the price is volatile) and medium of exchange.
Those are the main features of every currency and BTC is supposed to be a currency(but unfortunately it is still being viewed as "digital gold"). The third most important feature of BTC is "being your own bank" and not relying on a third party to store your wealth, but not a lot of Bitcoiners are using this feature.

Your point of view on bitcoin utilities is very correct but perhaps their is no hierarchy among them all because basically everyone is entitled to their opinion on whatever use the deem most vital of all so that's how they would rank it's utility too.

Maybe you haven't looked at the collectible board in this forum where members purchase goods and collectibles via bitcoin even though I haven't made such purchase but I know that people do it frequently, it's just your own point of view or it's just that you're ignorant towards that part of bitcoin but apparently everything op mentioned here is very realistic but only to those who use them base on what they want.

I don't know if you are talking about my account or not, but if you are then you... need to calm down? My account is... my account. This is the only account I have or have ever had. And it's not "red tagged", whatever that means.

And I'm really not seeing why this discussion is so extremely emotional that you are making it personal like that.


If you don't care about government oversight into transactions, then the utility of Bitcoin, as compared to existing transaction mechanisms, it greatly diminished. Bitcoin is much more expensive than ordinary transfer mechanisms for all but a tiny number of very large transactions. For most of the billions of daily transactions, Bitcoin is far more expensive and far slower--and most developed-country consumers have a bank account already, and have access to things like credit cards and other bank-based payment methods.

Perhaps your perspective is different: maybe your business requires a lot of large-scale money transfer all of the time. But that isn't a problem that very many people have.

Oh, you mean this red tagged Full Member account from december 2023 is a sock puppet account actually?   What a surprise. Anyway bro, if Bitcoin has been designed to be an anti-government currency then we can wonder if it didn't fail. Because it's now fully accepted and regulated in most countries, some of them are officialy holding it, and it is even a legal tender currency in few of them. Despite that, Bitcoin hasn't changed and it still doesn't obfuscate its transactions. So maybe during its "cypherpunk" era, in its very first years, it has been seen as a tool against governments by a part of its community but I don't think it was the initial goal of Satoshi and I don't think it's still the goal of its current community either. For me, it has mainly been designed to be an alternative to the central and commercial banks system before anything else.

Authorities being able to do chain analysis is fairly new. I recall the first 5-10 years of Bitcoin's existence, most people considered it pretty private. And lots of cyber-extortion crimes were committed using Bitcoin, which is pretty strong evidence that people--in this case people who were literally betting their lives on it--thought Bitcoin was government-proof in terms of privacy.


Clearly that implies a financial institution that cannot be audited by a government. You must be pretty new to the Bitcoin community if you aren't aware of the anti-government theme of creation of Bitcoin .

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.

But there is absolutely no guarantee your wealth will be preserved with Bitcoin or any other investment instrument.

When you say, "investment XYZ will preserve my wealth", you are speculating that is the case since, not being God, you cannot predict the future.

No matter what, you are predicting the future: you are speculating on the future value of Bitcoin (or whatever investment). This is true for US dollars as well (if you choose not to decide you still have made a choice, etc.).



There really isn't. Any professional investor views them as exactly the same, because they are.

For instance, perhaps many here believe that Bitcoin will preserve your wealth forever and ever--it will maintain its value or increase no matter what. Other people would point out that Bitcoin's value is extremely volatile and has dropped in value by 80% in the recent past, and may drop again and stay that way.

Some of those people may be right, and some of them may be wrong. Only God knows who. But both are speculating.

Speculative investment would be someone buying Bitcoin for the explicit purpose of trying to get more value out than they put in when they trade later on. A store of value usage would be if someone just wanted to preserve their wealth, so they buy Bitcoin with intent to trade for similar value without the intention of relative appreciation of Bitcoin relative to other assets. There is something fundamentally different about purchasing something to sell it for a higher price later on, as there is from purchasing something to sell it for an equal price later on.

It seems in this thread some people are claiming that speculation is not a type of investment at all, though I would disagree with that definition. I think speculating is a type of investment. However, I don't think that buying something to trade it for equal value later is investing... the idea of investment is growth. I would call that saving but not investing.

Bitcoin can be used for many things depending on what the holder chooses to do with it. You can decide to give someone Bitcoin as a gift, which make it acceptable as a gift, you can use Bitcoin as a form of collateral to acquire loan and Bitcoin can be used by scammers to carry out their Shaddy  activities. So, a Bitcoiner actually decides what he or she wants to do with their Bitcoin.

It is true that everyone has different needs so they will use it according to their needs but you need to admit that most people use bitcoin as an investment more than any other use case . Right on this forum or other social networks...do you see how many threads talk about the use cases of bitcoin or do people mainly just discuss the price, volatility , and profitability of bitcoin? Or are you and your friend using bitcoin as an investment or do you just consider it a currency and don't care about its fluctuations?

Of course , you can both use bitcoin as an investment and turn it into a store of wealth, currency...you can combine but your priority is still investment , right? Bitcoin's volatility is a great gift so there's nothing wrong with people taking advantage of it to make a profit .

Is there any study regarding how much people are using bitcoin for investing and for transactions? Due to its decentralization, it is difficult to come up with accurate numbers so we would not know for sure just how much are using bitcoin for this or that.

We all use it for different reasons depending on our needs. Some really do use it for transactions while some use it to hold and only plan on retrieving their funds when they are in retirement already.

What can i say here, basing on current features and practical applications is that the use of Bitcoin can be reconfigured, definitely controversial if being the most common due to its popularity as a high-risk, high-reward asset and investing in Bitcoin to provide insights into value appreciation and arbitrage. Most people now recognize Bitcoin as a store of value, very much like "digital gold", where one holds it to preserve wealth from inflation. The next one is retail and services trade, where more and more merchants and websites selling goods started to adopt Bitcoin. Commercial contract payments, like regular fees and premiums, are less frequent in occurrence but still dominate. If there is a use case where Bitcoin shines, it would have to be in banking transfer of value and temporary storage of money. Asset tokenization is a new concept linking Bitcoin ownership to other assets and is possible but not widely adopted. In general, Bitcoin's speech in public discourse remains an inefficient tool for other use cases. This graph shows the current state of usage and prevalence of Bitcoin in the market.

No.  The order is very subjective.  For me, the best Utility of Bitcoin is definitely not the arbitrage and Investment but that I can use it to my liking and with out having to explain to anybody what, where from, how, why, when, to whom.  Arbitrage is of course an advantage because after all our lives depend on Money but that is not the strongest point.  The strongest points are still the ones it has been created for.

94% of US adults have a bank account:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1386867/us-adults-with-bank-accounts/

I don't know what it is in other developed countries, but I suspect it's a similar number.

And I also suspect that easily 90% of the world's money is held in bank accounts, so the "don't have a bank account" market is an extreme niche.

And even more of a niche would be the intersection of, "has no bank account, but has consistent access to the Internet". We're talking a pretty small portion of the developed world here.


There is absolutely no asset known to mankind that does not have the ability to diminish in value. If somebody says they asset will never ever diminish in value, they are lying to you because they cannot possibly know that.

Every asset you hold is a speculation instrument, and could go either up or down in value as compared to other instruments.

Some instruments are very volatile, historically, and some are more stable. But there is no magic force making them stay that way. There is no asset that you can just leave there "without thinking about it", as much as people wish there was.

A plain old credit card would do that job much better... if you have a credit card and a bank account. Cryptos are the best solution against unbanking, so being able to pay goods and services without using a bank account and having to make a request to anyone to create a wallet is an important use case IMO. Besides that, when you say that speculation instrument and store of value amount to the same thing, they are the exact opposites for me, that's why I don't think one asset could be both of them. For me the store of value thing is a maximalist narrative. Such volatile asset can't be used like that, because its price needs to be the same or at least not lower than the price you bought it, once you need to use it.

Investing is different than trading which includes arbitraging.

Bitcoin is actually inflationary, not deflationary like many people think it is. The good thing from Bitcoin is its inflationary decreases with time,  and it can not be changed to be faster or slower by anyone. After 210,000 blocks, Bitcoin block subsidy will halve and it is coded in the Protocol.

How is the 21 million bitcoin cap defined and enforced


Bitcoin is Bitcoin and it does not need to be tokenized. There are tokenized Bitcoin tokens, Wrapped Bitcoin tokens but those tokens are not actual bitcoin.

If you want to own bitcoin, buy bitcoin. If you buy wrapped Bitcoin tokens, you don't have actual bitcoin and those tokens can lose in value if they fail to maintain their pegs to Bitcoin price.

"When your problem is a nail, every tool is a hammer."

This list looks fine, albeit somewhat redundant ("speculation instrument" and "store of value" amount to the same thing, etc.).

But the correct what to make a list like this is not, "what can Bitcoin do", but rather "what can Bitcoin do that nothing else can do".

For instance, while you can pay for a coffee at Starbucks with Bitcoin, why would you?. A plain old credit card would that job much better, and a high-speed digital currency like a Haypenny currency would be even better than that. A lot of the other features you mentioned can be handled better with other technologies as well.

So in short, you are asking a question in a way such that the answer is not helpful.

The correct question to ask is, "What are Bitcoin's unique features that allow it to do things better than existing alternatives". That list, you will probably notice, will be much shorter. Basically, Bitcoin's only unique competitive feature is its use as a speculation instrument that is safer (better governance) than other meme investment instruments--and Bitcoin's brand name itself.

There is no order in my opinion but all are true about the uses of Bitcoin in general, depending on each individual's point of view, their perspective on BTc itself.

1. Investing: Speculation on increased value and arbitrage.
2. Store of Value: No intent to sell at higher price or higher price after inflation accounted for.
3. Business contract payments including regular bill or invoice paying
4. Retail and service/virtual purchase transactions
5. Banking: Transmitting value overseas among different banking jurisdictions
6. Banking: Temporary holding for banking needs, or acquiring to sending money to others without a specific bill or retail transaction involved.
7. Tokenization of assets by tying Bitcoin ownership to ownership of another asset.
8. Public Statements using Bitcoin's comment feature.

Do you think this list is in the correct order of most to least likely uses of Bitcoin? How would you rank or change this list?