It's an ingenious solution to achieve a "trustless" currency that prevents double-spending without a central authority. Unfortunately, this solves the wrong problem. Spending money usually involves getting a good or service in return, which inherently requires "trust" (as does any human interaction). Your fancy blockchain is not going to help you if you order something with Bitcoin and no package arrives.

Blockchain is a very inconvenient database, for sure, but there is a good reason Bitcoin uses it. It had to solve to double spend problem and create a trustless p2p digital cash, while being censorship resistant and having no central authority.

Some people around a decade ago started using blockchain for everything where a SQLite db would have been better, because blockchain was the buzzword around that time, and they were charlatans who wanted funding and hype, or signal how cutting edge they are (kind of how the last two years everybody became an AI company).

It doesn’t mean that Bitcoin using blockchain is stupid.

The anonymity aspect of it always confused me. If anything, bitcoin and almost all other cryptos are the ultimate surveillance state currency. Every single bitcoin, no matter how many fractions it is broken into, is traceable through every single transaction it has ever participated in, all the way back to when the coin was first mined.

To understand the initial arguments, look no further than the Genesis block, which includes this text:

The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

In many rich countries, all signs point to nasty inflation for the foreseeable future. Bitcoin is inflation-proof because there is no central bank that can print more Bitcoin. Having a secure system with that property means accepting some tradeoffs in terms of usability and efficiency, compared to a centralized database.

Crypto makes perfect sense if you just understand it's for doing illegal stuff.

No moral judgement, but the only viable use case for the blockchain is doing things with money that the authorities don't want you to do.

Other than that, no, there is no use for a distributed database because doing financial transactions with people you can't even trust to abide by the law is generally a bad idea.

my naive self was just looking at a lot of what apps were doing:

    - waiting for users to do very simple things (gather a few fields, expand a template, store)
    - sleep during the night (as their users were sleeping too)
    - emit very small amount of data
    - struggle with security
    - reimplement 70s business but on top of digital network

in some corners of society this kind of tools (doctor appointments) seemed to be a net benefit, you can now book your GP even if it's 10pm, the system was ready to fire.

and when I see some news on zk parallel vm for smart contracts i feel some valid technical quality..

but maybe it's really just a fools errand i don't know

Simply put:

Bitcoin was to be an alternative to FIAT, but it ended up being nothing more then a meme-stock that consumes more energy than Poland or Argentina.

Its sad really. But the greed in people turned it into shit.

You say this right when your central banks went on a massive money printing spree, shot up inflation beyond their own baseline for years, and have created a frankenstenian K-shaped economy where everyone who is not in the top 10-20% is getting actively poorer

It doesn't take a lot to figure out that hard currencies with some supply cap tend to hold value better. BTC might not be it - it might be gold or silver - but you really can't ignore the inflation issues inherent in fiat currencies anymore.

Yeah and even more crazy: all other applications of blockchains are even more stupid. Haven't seen another application that wouldn't have been better, faster, cheaper implemented in a "classical" way.

I think block chains are inherently fine. The issue with bitcoin is that it isn't inflationary. Yes, yes, the supply increases over time, but that's also true for gold, and I've yet to hear anyone call gold inflationary. If a declining unit value is not guaranteed over time then it cannot be used as a currency and just becomes a savings vehicle / speculative asset. This is why all central banks aim for inflation. Try telling the true believers this and they'll reply with something about "sound money", seemingly nostalgic for the gold standard or something. It's rather disheartening.

At least for me, the big selling point was being able to send money fast and relatively cheap. Back then you either had PayPal, or wire transfer. PP could easily freeze and hold your money over whatever issues, while bank transfer was slow.

And, mind you, I only purchased/sold legal stuff.

well actually, you could build a network on top of that (expensive) database... hmm... it's kind of starting to sound like SWIFT.

but you have: no rollbacks, no refunds, no governance to stop bad actors you do gain: immunity from government decisions, theft by state and independence

as unpopular as it might sound like, bitcoin is great for criminals, yes you could say "who decides what is a criminal", well let's make this simple: people who murder and steal.

edit: by "murder and steal" I generally mean something that is "lawfully and/or morally disallowed"

Ideology can be blinding. It was never about the technology.

> Now the uninformed gambling on futuristic sounding hokum? THAT is easy to understand.

Yes... During a hype rush, sell memes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusion...

To understand why crypto became popular requires understanding that there was a massive anti-America (and by extension, anti-USD) sentiment in the 00s and 10s, mostly on the heels of America's various wars in the Middle East. For some brief period of time, America was the evil imperialist global enemy number one, even in the eyes of many American people. There was practically a patriotism crisis in America around when Trump first came to power.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine completely hard-flipped this overnight. America once again became the good guys of the world, and with it died any serious movements to disrupt the USD and greater financial status quo. More critically it also started the narrative that China might do to Taiwan what Russia is doing to Ukraine. It basically brought the world back into the late-20th-century good guys in the West versus bad guys in the East bipolarity.

Apparently, some fraction of the population is willing to believe whatever makes them rich.

> I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me.

This may not help much, but it's really a (self-)governance thing. That's why they start their article like so:

> I donated to Gary Johnson as a starry-eyed libertarian. On top of being a staunch Randian, I was into computer programming, so crypto was a natural fit for me. The cypherpunk ethos attracted me. (...) Being able to walk across the border with a billion dollars in your head is and always will be a powerful idea to me.

It is also why you keep hearing about crypto transactions being primarily used for illegal stuff. Just like with the uber-free-speech p2p platforms, it primaily benefits those who'd be otherwise hampered. Who, contrary to the usual talking points, are usually not actually so innocent or respectable.

But then we do keep sliding back, so maybe it's only a matter of time the proportions shift, and the claims of these technologies' justness stop being so false and hollow. And maybe these events and processes are further not actually uncorrelated. Trust is at an all time low and dwindling, after all.

I agree with the article and I hold 0 crypto right now. But I still think it's amazing that I can hold something limited, something I can exchange for real money, in my head, just based on math. Sure it is extremely inefficient database, and pretty much all the real value needs to be linked with real world banking, but it does have some really unique features that makes me sad that it (predictably) turned to just scams and speculation.

Edit: and the other feature I like is that I could just attach my code to the raw banking backend. People say that anyways everybody just uses exchanges, and that's true, but if you'd ever want to connect to banking backend, you'd get buried in paperwork. With crypto, you'd just run or connect to a node.

Because... Nothing else achieves that? Besides a centralised database, which is extremely vulnerable to censorship - as seen when Visa blocked Steam from selling porn games.

I can send a billion dollars to someone in Uganda with no intermediary or oversight. This was not only impossible before but most likely would never have been a possibility. Being able to hold massive amounts of value in the ether and control it from anywhere, you don’t find that impressive? Sure, this is mostly used for nefarious activities, but let’s not pretend it’s solving no problems. It’s incredibly difficult to transfer money into a third world country without incurring massive fees, unless you use crypto.

TLDR: to understand bitcoin you have to see the problem it's solving - most people are blind to it even though it affects their lives terribly.

https://x.com/saylor/status/1878154748353818932

> "The block chain is, and always was, an extremely inconvenient database. How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me."

The answer to your question is humans' inability to resist printing money out of thin air if it's possible to, and the disastrous effects it has on the world. Bitcoin is money that can't be printed out of thin air by anybody. The only way to obtain it is by providing work of equal economic value.

Look up the M2 money supply over the decades and realise that each time it doubles, the value of your wages, savings and pension are halved. Worse still, that value is stolen, sucked out into the hands of the people above you in the fiat pyramid scheme (see the Cantillon Effect).

It's one of the most important inventions in the history of mankind. This is because it shuts down the biggest scam in the history of mankind - central banking. Bitcoin's positive effect on the world is to restore power to the people and end their monetary-based enslavement - the changes will be profound.

I think the sort of libertarian mythos of crypto is very appealing to a lot of people. Escape the big bad man and so on.

The crypto ecosystem though is totally disconnected tho...

read the original Satoshi paper

all the 3rd party summaries/interpretations of this paper are problematic. Read the original.

Truer words have never been spoken.

> I've never understood the initial arguments about Bitcoin, no matter how many times they've been explained to me.

Bitcoin has a great mythology associated with it. People over emphasize the technical aspects, i think its the "story" that made it succeed. Its about taking back "control" from the man. People love an underdog story, people love a rebellion story. Lots of people in the tech space are anti-establishment or libertarian. Bitcoin is the perfect fulfillment of the dream of that ideology.

When people try to sell bitcoin, they aren't selling merkle-trees, they are selling "freedom".

I think if it was actually just about digital currency, then chaumian ecash would have taken off. It technically has a central party but not in a way that matters. It makes so much more sense than bit coin. But it doesnt have the total freedom story.

> How anyone, especially many intelligent people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top of such a unwieldy piece of technology is beyond me.

I mean, it did work. It is a shitty currency no doubt, but you can buy and sell stuff with it. There are bitcoin atms in my neighbourhood. I think the bigger mystery is not how anyone thought it could be a currency, but how the hell something so silly actually sort of became one (albeit bad one)

What do you mean? Technically it works, no?

it is an incovenient database, for sure, but the fact that people can trust it enough that they put billions of dollars in it is remarkable.

I wouldn’t put my house in an S3 bucket…

So the bitcoin market cap is currently at $1.8 trillion.

You can compare that to USD M0 which is $5 trillion or EUR M0 which is around €4 trillion.

Not bad for an "extremely inconvenient database".

I guarantee you that blockchain tech can solve a real, extremely important problem, though it's only a problem for some people. If you're connected to the money printers, then it's useless to you. Just like if you worked for a company like Enron which was cooking the books, 'honest accounting' would not be a solution for you; 'honest accounting' would be a problem for a company like Enron and everyone who works for Enron.

Proof of Work is highly inefficient and inconvenient. I agree to this.

Cryptocurrency sector is mostly a scam; or at the very least, a kind of casino. I Agree to this; though my understanding is that it has been corrupted by mainstream financial interests; just like Africa is kept corrupt and poor by some of those same interests. Then the plebs basically blame African people for 'choosing this'.

I've worked for some very successful crypto founders who became corrupt. I saw the change happening. The desire to improve things turned into self-sabotage. It was unlike any other company I ever worked for; nothing made sense. Yet I know for a fact that government regulators gave their approval. I witnessed the EU commission give grants to scam projects with nothing behind it, then these same founders got funding again and again after failed projects. It was all announced publicly though it took some time to understand that the projects were scams from the beginning... But like they got money from a government entity and they didn't build anything AT ALL. Then they got more funding on their next project... Weird right?

Proof of Stake is actually highly efficient; it's basically a ledger with dynamic runtime replication ability.

Unless you fully understand the current mechanism of how money is created globally; including the Eurodollar system and how stablecoins, derivatives and other financial constructs could be used for legal counterfeiting, you should not speak about the utility of blockchain.

regardless, they found a way for two parties to exchange wealth without trusting each other. the failures were letting it diverge from being a currency into a speculation instrument. It failed in being a low-cost wallet that we can pay our restaurant tab with.

Someone called J.Powell decides the price of US dollar. Bitcoin fixes this by inserting an algorithmic monetary policy, never seen in human history before.

The blockchain is an excellent distributed storage system for anything that should be immutable, such as contract hashes like notarial deeds, vehicle sales, and digital identities, which are not controlled by any central authority (if the blockchain is truly distributed) and are verifiable and tamper-proof. NFTs are the toy experiment that demonstrates this path.

It is therefore also usable as a currency, with fungible tokens, where the transactions per second (TPS) are sufficiently high, not for Bitcoin, therefore, but for example, Solana is already adequate; its performance and economic model are sufficient to pay for your local café.

That, without widespread acceptance, they have limited use, initially for crime, then for speculation, is another matter, but it is not a technical issue. The technical issues are quite different: https://blog.dshr.org/2025/09/the-gaslit-asset-class.html

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To understand Bitcoin you need to forget the technology and first understand the problem. You need to understand what caused the 2008 financial crisis and how it resulted in us collectively funnelling more value into the hands of useless bankers. You need to understand that there are people who are literally spending their days playing games with each other, trading bits of paper and making silly deals and bets. If you don't understand the word "literally" or don't believe it, read more, study harder. If you don't understand a zero sum game or how this nonsense fucks up the lives of regular people, read more.

Read The Big Short by Michael Lewis. You could even start with the film by Adam McKay who also gets it. Then read Other People's Money by John Kay.

Only once you understand the problem can you begin to understand why a trustless digital cash would be good for us. Bitcoin is simply the first viable solution to the problem. If you can come up with a better one you'll change the world.

That you don't understand something doesn't mean everyone else is wrong.

>How anyone, especially many "intelligent" people, thought it was realistic to graft a currency on top...

However a currency was grafted on, is used by millions and has a $1.7tn market cap. Seems real.