i don't agree, but that's probably just because you don't know what you're talking about, which is probably because you're here to do ideological battles instead of share knowledge

(for evidence, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41687424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41685852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41681866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41678925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41688170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41695494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41681925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41681928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41677504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41677500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41677494 which are all, astoundingly, within the last two days, and mostly content-free hate-filled political flaming unrelated to bitcoin)

to post an actual argument rather than just the one-line shallow dismissals you're here for, several of the other items on the list depend on bitcoin to survive. several others will start to depend on it as soon as they are banned in the usa, probably after the next major terrorist incident. and, in my actual experience, the people who benefit most from bitcoin (and cryptocurrencies) on a personal level are impoverished venezuelans supported by family remittances from abroad despite economic sanctions by the usa

more broadly, the reason the internet is good is that sharing knowledge is a positive-sum game: the social benefit that results from sharing what you know is far greater than the cost of doing so, while it's comparatively more difficult for bad actors to do harm by spreading misinformation. it's not that nobody vandalizes wikipedia; it's that undoing and blocking vandalism is easier than the vandalism itself. this makes it possible to collaborate effectively on a wider scale than the social scaling of dunbar's number permits

unlike knowledge, though, some things are zero-sum, like the ownership of computers and houses, and the allocation of human effort to competing goals. as it turns out, having 'money', an impartial way to keep score in voluntary transactions regarding those things, is also publicly beneficial, because such 'markets' also permit collaboration on a wider scale than the social scaling of dunbar's number. money and sharing of knowledge have different strengths, so we cannot simply replace one with the other

the dramatic irony of this bears repeating: having an impartial institution for zero-sum transactions is a positive-sum outcome

a problem with money systems so far has been that they mostly depend on a central authority to regulate the money supply. this opens many vulnerabilities to the abuse of that power; the money in my pocket today buys a quarter of what it bought a year and a half ago, for example, evidently because a disproportionate expansion of the money supply made our domestic inflation here the worst in the world. and, when russia invaded ukraine, 300 billion dollars of its overseas reserves were confiscated by ukraine's allies, who were in a position to do so because they controlled the international money system—a power which, though used justly in this case, is too great to be entrusted to any potential belligerent in future international conflicts

on a smaller scale, in 02022, the canadian government froze the bank accounts of people suspected but not convicted of donating to fund a protest against some of the government's domestic policies, the so-called 'trucker's strike'. in this case, in the end, the government backed down and returned the money, but it's another clear case of structural vulnerabilities in the current money system

cryptocurrencies make it possible to have money without these vulnerabilities

when bitcoin appeared, i thought this would probably destroy civilization. now i think civilization is doing a fine job of that on its own despite cryptocurrencies slowing the collapse