If you find the draw of Bitcoin hard to understand and are of the engineer bent, try this on: Bitcoin refactors money to be a service shared among all countries. Your money is no longer coupled to your nationality.
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By "Bitcoin" here I mean "the idea of cryptocurrency, generally" not Bitcoin itself or any other specific implementation.
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Why is this valuable? Well, at one level, it just feels like the right thing, just like any other refactoring. But it also enables money to compete separately from nationality. This has the most obvious potential in places where money currently sucks (e.g., Venezuela).
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Replying to @aboodman
This is the most contingent claim for a medium of exchange...that you can exchange it? Were forex markets somehow not functional?
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Replying to @slightlylate
I mean they "work" in the same sense that taxis "work" in SF. Technically, yes. In practice, no. I once tried to buy Euros and hold them in a bank outside the US, the best I could ever get done was to buy shares in an ETF.
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Replying to @aboodman @slightlylate
Maybe I'm dumb, but I think that in practice holding and using foreign currency is hard enough for most people to be not practical.
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Replying to @aboodman
I find that the difficulty and relative cost of moving (even large) sums between countries is vastly overstated by crypto-currency advocates.
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The logistical difficulty is roughly the same, and the costs are only "high" for forex if you don't pay any volitility price in a BTC exchange.
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