If you’re criticism is based on payments you have not been paying attention to the space for the last 5 years.

Anyway, it’s easy to make a circular argument of “people buy it because they are fools, and they are fools because they buy it.” You’ll be right whether it goes up or down so there’s not much of a debate to be had..

Well I'm glad we agree that Bitcoin has failed in its original purpose. Perhaps you can set straight all the people who argue otherwise? Because there sure are a lot of them.

The trouble is, it doesn't actually have another one, not a practical one.

Payments is..part of the original purpose. And I think for everyday transactions Bitcoin has failed, so far. Lightning is a step in the right direction though, but it's not there in terms of UX. And volatility is obviously an issue.

If you are actually unaware, and not just arguing in bad faith, most development right now is happening on Ethereum and DeFi apps running on Ethereum. You can get collateralized loans, there are decentralized prediction markets, stuff like that.

Payment was the entirety of the original purpose. As the original paper says, "a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash". The first sentence of the introduction starts with "Commerce on the Internet" and ends with "process electronic payments". It has failed both on "peer-to-peer" and "electronic cash". It makes no material difference to internet commerce. It has signally failed in its original purpose.

And yes, more development is always happening. Success is always in the future. Never mind that M-Pesa and Venmo and Android and Tesla all started around the same time. Uber and Lyft and Twitch and TikTok all launched years later. They all have actual success. None of them are hammers blundering around in search of a nail. None of them have to keep blowing smoke about the incredible future ahead.

But in the same way that Bitcoin is making no difference today in the real-world payment markets, none of that development is making a difference today in their equivalent markets. Colateralized loans, if they work, are 0% of the total colateralized loan market. Prediction markets have existed for more than 20 years. Adding "decentralized" doesn't make them better. Most of that "innovation" is in the category of dancing bears: the impressive part is not that the bear dances well, just that it's a bear doing the dancing.

But since you can't name a purpose, I'll just tell you: The actual current purpose of the whole circus is to enable assorted grifts. When Bitcoin got popular, that's what drove it: people seeking unearned wealth, and the people preying on the suckers with money to lose. That has kept snowballing, grift upon grift and with massive effort to create more suckers to keep the grifts going just a little longer.

Are there reasonable people caught up in this? Sure. As Madoff showed, many of the people involve on both sides of a Ponzi scheme are perfectly sincere believers. But neither their belief nor their sincerity changes the underlying truth: there is no value being created. Nobody can admit that, of course, so they just claim that the value creation is just down the road if only you hodl and believe hard enough.

> Prediction markets have existed for more than 20 years. Adding "decentralized" doesn't make them better.

Prediction markets have probably existed for thousands of years, but this is where we disagree. Decentralization is a fundamental improvement to a betting market, because there is no longer a counterparty who is incentivized to cheat you when you win, or incentivized to take on so much risk that they cannot pay you back if they lose.

> Colateralized loans, if they work, are 0% of the total colateralized loan market.

You sure about that? There's nearly $100B locked in DeFi, although admittedly that's more than just collateralized loans.

You can disagree with that but the snarkyness of "you can't name a purpose" isn't necessary, I've named multiple. It's easy to find cases where a company took much longer to become successful that Uber and Lyft and ended up doing much better than both. I don't find that argument very compelling do you?

I think folks on either extreme of "cryptocurrency is going to eat the world" and "cryptocurrency is literally a trillion dollar scam" should really try to second guess themselves a bit. I think emotions get in the way a bit.