I used to buy a lot of pizza and burgers with bitcoin when I did night shifts. Still use it to buy electronics at least once a month.

It's also the best way to donate to nonprofit projects. I can just send ~ $10 of value, one time. No need to risk accidentally signing up for a monthly subscription or being bombarded by spam.

If you don't keep 100% of your monthly budget in BTC, you don't really care about the volatility either, because long term it always goes up.

In a Thursday speech, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Paul S. Atkins announced “Project Crypto,” an initiative to modernize the country’s securities rules and regulations to move financial markets on-chain.

“Under my leadership, the SEC will not stand idly by and watch innovations develop overseas while our capital markets remain stagnant,” he said at an America First Policy Institute event in Washington D.C. His plan includes measures to reshore crypto businesses that have left the country and to ensure that “archaic rules and regulations do not smother innovation and entrepreneurship in America.”

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(qz.com)

So to match the fraudulent government, the USA is going to have an entirely fraudulent market and soon after an entirely fraudulent currency.

Same thing happened to the Argentine peso, let's not pretend if you make a government currency it's magically stable

I mean, global economy really. Crypto has the potential and already fucked a few banks when it shit itself which could've led to awful bank runs.

If/when it destabilizes the American banking system the entire global economy will follow its lead down, at least a bit.

Like I don't think people understand how devastating letting a scam like this into proper finance can be. Finance itself already has way more latitude than it should- wait until this just splits everything wide open.

If/when it destabilizes the American banking system the entire global economy will follow its lead down

One of the nice things Trump has been doing has been decoupling the US domestic market from the global chain. If we can keep ourselves propped up for another couple of years, the collapse will remain contained to ourselves and our immediate allies. I mean, case in point, Russians and Iranians and N. Koreans and Cubans are so sanctioned to shit that they don't really care if the dollar takes a tumble.

Like I don’t think people understand how devastating letting a scam like this into proper finance can be.

2008 was the hard lesson. Too Big To Fail means the scammers are the only ones who walk away from the mess.

Number of channels is decreasing, but the money in each channel increased. In BTC terms the money decreased, but in real terms the money increased.

Real terms being 2022 dollar value

The Argentine peso crashed and then stayed down. That's actually a sign of stability, because it's remaining at a constant, not jumping up and down wildly.

It didn't crash only to go back to original value to the decrease by half and undulate like a wave, like Bitcoin and other crypto does.

No it hasn't. Again, according to that link I provided, the total capacity of Lightning peaked in December 2024. These are not the graphs of a growing layer 2, it's been stagnant for many years.

Bitcoin simply wasn't designed for this sort of application, and Bitcoin's foundation layer is absolutely frozen due to the ideology of its users and developers so I don't expect the situation will improve. If you want to do a layer 2 then why not use a blockchain that's specifically designed to support it? If you use Ethereum you can even use token-wrapped Bitcoin as your medium of exchange. There's $14.4 billion dollars worth of WBTC on Ethereum available for exchange, as opposed to the $440 million worth in Lightning channels.

What are you talking about? It crashed, then crashed again, then crashed again. How is that stable?

It's easy to transfer to other countries. Ever tried to send $20 to another country like Kazakhstan? It's a nightmare

the Ethereum blockchain

Ah, yes. The fine folks that gave us NFTs.

No pump and dumps to be found over there

To be fair, the concept of an NFT was very cool when it was first imagined, but then all people used NFTs for was stupid gifs to be sold like trading cards or fucking pogs...

But the concept is cool if you actually use it for something. For instance, you can create an NFT as a digital key (like a literal key that unlocks something) or as a legal deed that proves ownership of something. Then you have a digital asset that can be resold or folded into a smart contract, where the digital item actually controls something physical. For instance, you could design an NFT to be the actual key that can unlock and start a car. If you sell this digital asset, you will not be able to start the car, but the new owner will. That is cool, monkey gifs are stupid bullshit. And if you try to convince people to buy bullshit, that makes you a scammer.

But Etherium didn't invent the stupid bullshit, they just created a system that made more interesting things possible. And then with the power to do anything, some people made the stupidest shit in the world. It's like, you can hand someone a pencil and paper and some people will use that to prove a theorem, some people will sketch a landscape, and some people will draw a huge cock and balls... But you don't blame the people that created the pencil and paper.