> I have looked, quite a bit. I have not found a good use case yet
Agree with a lot of the analysis. But not quite the broader thesis. Analogy I would make is this: the fact that some banks are bad does not imply that fiat currency is bad. The fact that Tether is bad does not imply that Bitcoin is bad.
Bitcoin enables payments / transfers without intermediaries. In the existing financial system, intermediaries take a cut of these transactions. (Aside: patio11's employer, Stripe, has built a business on this.) Figuring out whether by eliminating those intermediaries you can lower transaction costs (no interchange / wire fees controlled by card networks / banks) and effectively eliminate a tax on all economic activity seems like something worth exploring.
Just because it's a bubbly space does not mean there's no there-there. Pets.com didn't make me think the Internet was a dead end.
In Bitcoin, miners are the intermediaries, and they take an even larger cut. You cannot magic away the need to keep a ledger, and keeping a distributed ledger is going to be more costly than keeping a centralized ledger.
Think interchange in US is around 2% and wire fees can be in tens of dollars.
Right now a reasonable Bitcoin fee would be around 30 sats / byte or 6000 sats / transaction, which is around 50 cents USD. Average transaction fee is less than this right now.
But this is well-trodden ground.
I agree with you in principle, you need to pay for trust somewhere, but a loosely regulated banking sector and cartel of card networks isn’t giving us an ideal outcome, and a decentralized system may be better.
A point in your favor, I’ve been much happier with payments since moving out of the US and into the Eurozone.
Agree with a lot of the analysis. But not quite the broader thesis. Analogy I would make is this: the fact that some banks are bad does not imply that fiat currency is bad. The fact that Tether is bad does not imply that Bitcoin is bad.
Bitcoin enables payments / transfers without intermediaries. In the existing financial system, intermediaries take a cut of these transactions. (Aside: patio11's employer, Stripe, has built a business on this.) Figuring out whether by eliminating those intermediaries you can lower transaction costs (no interchange / wire fees controlled by card networks / banks) and effectively eliminate a tax on all economic activity seems like something worth exploring.
Just because it's a bubbly space does not mean there's no there-there. Pets.com didn't make me think the Internet was a dead end.