I respect your stubbornness to pick something and run with it in the face of people saying it won't work, to get great leverage you need to be outside the mainstream view in some way. But, I am not outside the mainstream; I named several things about the internet in 1995 that would draw people in, and asked what would be the comparable ideas for BitCoin. You very bluntly replied that you can't chat to people with bitcoin because it's not a chat protocol. Either deliberately, or accidentally, missing the point. You named savings, and sending people money. Two things I can already do, and am not excited about. And that's ... it.

You tell me "it's not about riches" then say I should invest for a speculative 50x-100x return.

I don't think it's dangerous, I think it's dumb. I think gambling on it paid off, and gamblers think that's proof they were smart. I think your "selling shovels to gold miners'" approach is sensible and a good way to make a more stable but smaller return from it.

> "Let's rephrase that for 1995: If you're a company and you open an online store, it makes life harder for you [...]"

But no, in 1995 you don't open an online store because there isn't a big popular trusted way to pay for things over the internet. You pay someone to develop a website, put your domain on your business cards, have a promotional brochure-style website that acts like your entry in the Yellow Pages. Cheap marketing. Gives people your details, address, phone number, ways to contact you offline. It gets you email, a way for new customers to contact you - and maybe for you to contact your suppliers. It's comparatively low cost, low risk, the tech details are probably entirely handled by a web developer company so you barely have to care at all, but if you do care you can gradually add completely new things to your company like an email newsletter, an inventory of parts too detailed to bother publishing on paper, referral links to companies you have deals with, making more potential customers able to find you.

You apparently can't do anything /new/ if you accept payments by BitCoin or lean on a blockchain. In twelve years, nobody has come up with a killer app, or even a mildly compelling app. Most likely you let your payment provider deal with it, but in so doing it doesn't add any new abilities.

Look at what happened to Git since it appeared in 2005, iPhone in 2007, Apple app store in ~2009, and compare their use to Bitcoin use (not hype, use) in the same time frame.

> "the payment you get might be stolen in ways you don't understand with no oversight or regulation and law enforcement with little experience of what to do next."

But no, because it's US dollars, traded by credit card companies. It's a big, established, regulated industry and credit companies insure you against loss of your funds, because they have an image as a trustworthy financial company to uphold, and all the credit cards are (supposed to be) issued to real people with provable IDs, typically in the same company. Again the risk is low, and often taken by a payment provider. Here, in 1995 or 1999, opening an online store opens up a large new market.

For today, BitCoin? If you have it handled by a payment provider you don't even have to hear or know about it. It opens nothing new, there is approximately nobody who has BitCoin who doesn't also have your local currency and who you want to deal with[1]. If you don't, and you have to deal with it, it opens you to a market of people who are interested in being anonymous, deregulated, anarchic, no companies with insurance or images to uphold, uncertain legal/tax/regulatory status for you to declare your above-board use of it, and developing ecosystem with tons of competing coins and behaviours you have to pay attention to.

> "It's such an obvious failure of LW they did a few postmortems, to try to understand how they could get it so wrong:"

Even that thread says Gwern was right for the wrong reasons, that BitCoin hasn't become the world currency and is "unclear" why its valuation is so high.

> "* It's fun to create things that benefit a lot of people - like free software early on. Have you forgotten the hacker spirit?"

No, I'm quite happy with a bit of bit-twiddling. I never got the "hacker" spirit of "eat ramen, build a startup, sell it for billions".

> "Instead, I relied on the wisdom of the HN crowd, which denounced bitcoin as a dangerous scam, and trusted them."

I don't argue that it's dangerous, only that it's minimally boringly utility useful at best, at worst a tulip bubble. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

> "actually, a lot worse, due to Dunning-Krugger effect*"

For someone gloating about being superior and retired, you still end up in the same HN thread as me, with a massive chip on your shoulder and an inferiority complex.

[1] e.g. say you think Venezuela's currency is in a bad way and you want to sell to people in BitCoin. Are they going to be eager to buy trinkets from the USA, and you want to trust their postal service and import staff and import duties, while their economy is in tatters? It might be that "countries with collapsing economies and dysfunctional governments" are a new market you can enter, but not most people's first choice.