> but does bitcoin (or any cryptocurrency) have any practical, legitimate use with visible impact on the global economy (or even the national eonomy of any country with major footprint)?
I've read anecdotes on HN that it's used quite a bit for remittances to some countries with unstable currencies, but my understanding is that nearly all of these users are immediately converting it to the local currency, so the only money at risk would be that which is in active transit. It would definitely be unfortunate to lose any money being transferred, but remittance recipients don't tend to have any savings at all, so I don't think that it would have any broader economic effects (in the context of this specific example).
It could also potentially mess with electricity prices in some areas, since Bitcoin mining uses quite a bit of power, but I suspect that some AI datacenter would step in and buy up all the excess power, so this probably wouldn't be much of an issue either.
(And I don't know enough to comment about how this could affect other sectors of the economy)
> I've read anecdotes on HN that it's used quite a bit for remittances to some countries with unstable currencies
I can confirm that this aspect is absolutely massive and often underestimated by those living in the West.
It's happening all over Africa, Middle East and LATAM, since stablecoin transactions are cheaper and require no access to financial infrastructure that could be locally unavailable, but as you mentioned it's only used as an intermediate link before converting to local currency.
I just looked up the world bank’s estimates which say remittances are around $850B (including direct co-party islamic cash transfers, illegal in many countries). The amount using crypto is about $26B, so about 3%, hardly material at a macro scale (might be a big deal for a small country) so losing this would not be noticeable to the global economy.
As I mentioned, I’m sorry for the misguided and nitwits who lose their money too. Not the grifters though.
And I’m from a small country and I have no illusion that many people would care much if Australia were leveled and all the people killed by a series of bad earthquakes. There would be sad headlines for a few weeks and then something else would get everyone’s attention. That’s why I was asking about anything at the global scale. Someone replied with the Hormuz Strait, and while small, it does have an enormous global impact. But that was the only such answer I got.
(BTW geologically that’s pretty much impossible to happen to Australia - -it’s just an example).
I've read anecdotes on HN that it's used quite a bit for remittances to some countries with unstable currencies, but my understanding is that nearly all of these users are immediately converting it to the local currency, so the only money at risk would be that which is in active transit. It would definitely be unfortunate to lose any money being transferred, but remittance recipients don't tend to have any savings at all, so I don't think that it would have any broader economic effects (in the context of this specific example).
It could also potentially mess with electricity prices in some areas, since Bitcoin mining uses quite a bit of power, but I suspect that some AI datacenter would step in and buy up all the excess power, so this probably wouldn't be much of an issue either.
(And I don't know enough to comment about how this could affect other sectors of the economy)