Anyone in the variety of South American countries experiencing massive inflation would have been worlds better if they had just parked their money in BTC. Crypto is full of scams but there is also a world of positives and opportunity there.
They would've also been worlds better if they had parked their money in Gamestop, or honestly even in a casino, but that doesn't make it a sound investment
“Orange reddit” was one of the first places that Bitcoin was discussed. Consequently there’s an awful lot of people here who know exactly how much they missed out, and express this by being saltier than dead sea whenever the topic comes up. The accepted wisdom on HN, when the bitcoin price was in the single digits, was that it was a “tulip bubble” and you should absolutely not buy it under any circumstances.
The accepted wisdom is still that it's a bubble and you should not buy it, the price going up does not necessarily mean that the price isn't higher than it should be. Projecting everybody who disagrees with your viewpoint as somebody who is angry they missed out is simply a quick way to hand-wave away people who disagree with your crypto-is-the-future dogma. I wasn't in the early adopters per-say but I did do some crapcoin trading back in the day and made a decent sum at the time, and yet I still hold crypto and blockchain technology as a whole as almost entirely pointless. I have still yet to hear any real valid use of the technology that is better than existing/alternative solutions. It speaks volumes that the people who would know the most about the technology (software engineers, who are prevalent here), are the ones who (outside of the general public) believe that the technology is largely pointless, if not downright idiotic.
I find it really hard to reconcile this viewpoint with reality. I personally know businesses who use stablecoins for international money transfers because it’s just faster and cheaper.
Also, every month or so an article pops up here where either some business is rekt because their payment processor’s automated process kicked them off, or someone’s bank account got closed in a similar way screwing them.
Yet the only way to self custody electronic money and transact without intermediaries is somehow ‘pointless and idiotic’.
The key differentiating factor in your hypothetical reasons why traditional finance is inferior to defi is that there are systems to remediate the exact issues you mentioned, whereas if you send your crypto to the wrong address- it's gone. If you lose your seed words to your wallet and can't access it, or someone else gets access to them- it's gone. If you get scammed- it's gone. Literally all of these things (which are a /feature/ of the tech!) make it essentially unusable for any business that isn't looking for an adrenaline rush. What I love most about all of these shortcomings of the technology is how much people who push it minimize all of these issues by saying that it's user error, and people who utilize good practices won't have these issues. It's almost as if all of these people have literally never talked to a real person. No regular person cares or would ever want to care about hard wallets versus alternatives, seed words, verifying addresses, and avoiding phishing scams. All of these issues which can be mitigated by being technically inclined fall flat on their face with any person who just wants to send money to their grandson or pay a friend for dinner.
The reasons are really not hypothetical. That being said though, I don’t personally believe that crypto will or necessarily needs to totally replace all fiat usage. It’s more along the lines of the realization that the possibility to have electronic money kept and transmitted outside of the fractionally reserved banking system is immediately useful.
Given the state of crypto adoption now, I can’t imagine a non-dystopian future a century from now where what we now call crypto or digital assets haven’t become a very boring and non-remarkable part of the civilizational fabric.
I can imagine dystopian futures where that’s the case though. One would be where the infrastructure we use to run crypto on (the internet, telecommunications) doesn’t exist. Another is where all the regulatory environments for digital assets that currently exist (UK, EU, Canada, etc) have been totally rolled back, and self-custody has been made a criminal offense. Probably some type of society straight out of hunger games.
One is a run of the mill software engineering consultancy, the other a startup making a development as a service platform where they link companies needing work with engineers in the developing world.
And many people were scammed and lost their savings to BTC and other crypto schemes. It's funny how the Ponzi promoters always forget that part when touting whatever cooked-up reason they promote crypto for.
But sure, in a sector where most of the biggest names are fraudsters, some people still manage to be adherents.
I first read about Bitcoin on Slashdot. I thought it was a stupid idea back then, and I think it's a stupid idea now. Buying bitcoin in 2008 would have been a terrible investment decision regardless of whatever result it might have produced. If you don't understand that an investment decision can't be evaluated after the fact on the basis of the outcome of single random event you know nothing about investing.
If you would have looked at the geopolitical landscape and what they've been doing to our money for 100 years it would have been an easy investment to make. Geopolitics and monetary policy is your due diligence.
