alt Hacker NewsI'm a bit concerned about starting a flame war, but I barely follow any cryptocurrency news at all. So I am curious: would there actually be any negative macro consequence if this were to happen?
I know, at the micro level some people would lose their money, 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)? And I'd be sad for some of those people. but would it have any impact that I would notice? My money is in broad, boring index funds.
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> 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)
Depends on your definition of "legitimate", but Iran uses cryptocurrency to tax oil tankers going through the Strait of Hormuz. There is certainly some practical impact. https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/crypto/articles/iran-turns...