this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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Many years ago, I was watching an Ukrainian twitch streamer. She's couldn't get a Paypal account, so the only normal way to donate would involve huge fees or Russian-only websites. Crypto was by far the easiest and cheapest way to donate. I'll admit that I don't see a need for it on a massive scale, but there are use cases beyond what blind scam screamers imagine.
I was into Bitcoin before it even had value. Cryptocurrency is a cool concept and not a scam by default, but it was never meant to be some mainstream thing that was going to replace the dollar as you hear parroted annoyingly everywhere.
When non tech people started getting interested is when the scams started (also didn't help that governments were lending money at 0% interest rates for like the last two decades)...
Drug dealers also like getting paid in crypto, but they never hold on to it. The few that use it like a currency are ok, but the vast majority use it like a commodity.
Back in the early days (early 2010s was when I first heard of it) when Bitcoin was worth pennies on the dollar that was exactly the kind of thing it was good for, and it was marketed as an international currency not beholden to governments. It is a shame that it got taken from that for the sake of "Bitcoin being valuable because you can profit off owning Bitcoin."