Never gonna happen is a bit of a stretch. It used to be a thing. Steam accepted bitcoin. They stopped accepting it due to volatility and high transaction fees at the time. You still price things in your local currency but convert at checkout. There are "plug and play" payment processors who can handle it now.. Spar in Switzerland accepts it.

But imo, its not something regular people should be using anyway.

That happens to every currency, BTC is more volatile than many, but things can be priced.

Also until twiddling is made illegal, prices can be set by some other currency or some function, and be calculated in BTC from that, and displayed on electronic price tags for example.

Apparently GameStop are considering it too.

I like GNU Taler, and I would like there to exist not just such a payment system, but also an electronic currency system without blockchains (global synchronization is a pain), unfortunately currencies are not like most applications.

I also wrote two smartass paragraphs completely wrong after this, and now thinking about it - Taler is as good a solution as possible. It's basically what can be done. You can't decentralize an issuer or a bank, except for the BTC way. If you can, then you can't plug it in seamlessly , you need some synchronization (would be a shame if a failed transaction made it into Taler as passed).

If I understand that correctly.

Gosh. It's year 2025, I've achieved nothing. I was blabbering on these subjects in year 2011! I'll be 29 in less than a month. But so cool that someone is making the humanity better.

Frankly movement is all that matters. Too deregulated looks like cryptocurrencies, too regulated looks like PSTN which every phreaker could own, because it relied upon laws for its defense, not technical robustness.

There's no system that remains working when just kept standing, all that matters is that we can quickly rebuild any part of it. Which is why modern legal systems and modern Web suck so much, they've lost that trait.

In what way is Bitcoin not fundamentally a scam? There are multiple interpretations of "Bitcoin is a scam" you can take, and honestly with most of them I think it's been true the whole time.

Edit: I think some folks are parsing my sentence incorrectly, and I can't blame them. I didn't do a great job communicating. When I said "in what way is it not a scam" I didn't mean to make it sound like an exclamation like "how can you not think it's a scam!?", I am saying, "which specific way of people referring to it as a scam do you believe is wrong?"

Right, why invest in a rug pull coin when I can invest in an ETF of all the rug pull coins!

In what way is it?

You’re aware we just use the conversion price in fiat, right?

No, but one of the good ones

Yeah but GameStop's entire existence depends on crypto meme hype, while Meta's depends on extracting our data as efficiently as possible

i notice that is usually conservatives that buys into the scam, and the ones that peddle it too.

They believe shitcoins = the whole crypto economy

The only thing they know are ERC20 tokens

I agree and in fact I feel the same with AI.

Fundamental cryptocurrency is fascinating. It is mathematically sound, just like cryptography in general (computational complexity, one way functions, etc) and it had the theoretical potential to change existing political and economical structures. Unfortunately (arguably) the very foundation it is based on, namely mining for greed, brought a different community who inexorably modified not the technology itself but its usages. What was initially a potential infrastructure for exchange of value became a way to speculate, buy and sell goods and services banned, ransomware, scam payments, etc).

AI also is fascinating as a research fields. It asks deep question with complex answers. Research for centuries about it lead to not just interesting philosophical questions, like what it's like to be think, to be human, and mathematics used in all walks of life, like in logistics for your parcel to get delivered this morning. Yet... gradually the field, or at least its commercialization, got captured by venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, regulators, who main interest was greed. This in turn changed what was until then open to something closed, something small to something required gigantic infrastructure capturing resources hitherto used for farming, polluting due to lack of proper permit for temporary electricity sources, etc. The pinnacle right now being regulation to ban regulation on AI in the US.

So... yes, technology itself can be fascinating, useful, even important and yet how we collectively, as a society, decide to use it remains what matters, the actual impact of an idea rather than its idealization.

It would be better to state how it is a scam

Apart from that, well no big company or country profits from it. You’re not paying someone that’s actively trying to fuck you over. You’re not paying to fund a capitalistic villain that wants all the world money. You’re paying for an, at least the original goal was, uncensurable means of payment that’s decentralized and doesn’t rely on a government or a company.

A pseudonymous and trustless way of paying people. Believe in the maths, not a regulated entity that might seize your money at any time.

It’s the cypherpunk's wet dream and I view it as such.

Most people only view it as investment and "ponzi scheme" because they don’t care about this. They don’t care about not giving too much power to a few individuals and don’t hate banks.

Any country can just print money and make what you have worthless, and it’s often done in poor countries as a way to wipe debts or similar bs. Crypto can shield them against that, which is probably the reason why it’s more used in those kind of countries (or in countries with oppressive governments)

Bitcoin is one of the cleanest cryptos. It’s old, doesn’t work that well, but it’s not owned by anyone and it has a strong identity

For anyone saying it’s only perceived value and doesn’t rely on anything, well it’s a bit like any market. How does it really differ from stocks for example? And crypto actually relies on the way of creating coins: mining, minting… which is known. If you don’t agree with it, don’t use it. The limited number of coins plays an important role in the price.

Decentralised currencies are fundamentally too expensive to operate, while providing dangerously little safety and a far worse user experience than fiat.

The scam part is the idea that any crypto coin is an asset with inherent value, when in fact the price is created entirely by new investment, in other words it's just a ponzi scheme

For example, I mainly hold crypto that I’ll be using for payments, or those I deem technologically interesting.

I’ve already made many crypto payments, know how they pretty much work, and prefer using them than paying by card, because fuck the banking system and those greedy visa/mastercard that takes huge cuts from payments. Also, anonymity benefit: don’t always want my name to be known, for example when donating to an individual or particular cause

What putting money into crypto does is empower early bitcoin speculators

I don't know what you're saying. If I charge a particular amount for a loaf of bread and then the cryptocurrency value drops halfway through the day then that person still has the bread but I now don't have the money.

The whole point of currency is to get away from the fluctuating value of exchange that everyone had to deal with when we used to buy things with gold and semi-precious stones.

The fact that they stopped due to volatility kind of proved my point.