Cryptocurrency evangelists keep saying this, yet I've still not seen a single actually useful application of this tech outside of cryptocurrencies. Cryptography is massively useful, but in no way new. Open, distributed ledgers are kinda-sorta new, but only really the "open" part. And so on. Do you have any examples? If not, at least I'm going to keep my skepticism. I'll gladly be proven wrong, but can't say that seems likely for now.
You kind of have a point here, but there are some major differences. The US Dollar is a bad example, though, as it's the most-used and most accepted currency out there. Let's compare Bitcoin to something smaller and more comparable: the Norwegian Krone.
-The NOK has ~5 million people "accepting" it as their default means of quantifying value, and for everyday transactions of various kinds. BTC probably has far more people involved than that, but roughly zero of those rely on it entirely, or even for the majority of things they use money for.
-The NOK has the support of a country, its government, and thus any and all business conducted inside of and out of that country shores up its value. BTC has a heap of hobbyists, a few companies, and another minor heap of investment bankers (read: gambling addicts putting money into pretty much anything that might score them a win, but who also cut their losses and run for the hills at the first sign of danger).
-For scale:
On the 21st of December 2015, there were 24 411 085 digital payment transactions processed in Norway, of which the vast majority were in NOK (yeah, we're a largely cashless country). At the time, that was a new record - it's probably been beaten by now.
BTC has yet to reach 450 000 transactions in any single day.
-Comparing total value is tricky, as the total value of a currency is meaningless, but as BTC isn't really treated as a currency (which makes sense, as it's barely accepted as one anywhere) but rather as a tradeable good with its value defined by the market. As such, the most meaningful comparison for me (who knows next to nothing about macroeconomics or finance, that is) is GDP (as the NOK is a national currency) vs. market capitalization.
The GDP of Norway in 2017 was 3'299'005'000'000 NOK (~404'787'913'500 USD). The
current market cap of BTC is 127'275'455'176 USD.
-Of course, the GDP of a country is a far more stable and predictable amount than a market cap, which is entirely dependent upon the whims of the herd of semi-panicked animals that investment bankers often resemble. As such, the NOK is a far more stable and reliable entity compared to BTC (even if the relation between GDP and currency is loose at best, and a whole host of other factors impact it more directly (such as the price of oil, in our case)).
In other words: on a global economic scale, BTC is a flyspeck. Its market cap is quite large, but as a currency, it's barely used at all. Its primary purpose used to be storing value, but now that has turned more towards gambling on that value increasing. It's essentially useless for trading and exchange, and both expensive and massively impractical. While the distributed ledger system theoretically gives it some advantages compared to centralized currencies, those are entirely negated by the fact that its value is essentially determined by coked-up Wall Streeters. In addition to this, the "creation" of whatever unit of cryptocurrency you choose is reliant upon burning energy for no practical reason whatsoever (outside of generating this potentially valuable, potentially not "currency") and thus causing massive pollution in the process. I really don't see many advantages to this, truth be told.
he will have to enlighten us
