> There is still no legitimate use of bitcoin beyond niche markets and speculation

You are making me laugh about your ignorance, sorry for my pedantry but... if my company in Argentina receives an international wire transfer from a customer in my HSBC account, it will be less money than if I receive the Bitcoins and exchange it via https://bitex.la/ , and deposit it to the same HSBC account. Both process follow all the tax regulations and are legal.

Currency pairs have the same counterparty and volatility risk - it is solved with hedges and other derivatives

There is nothing inherent in bitcoin to differentiate it from other currencies that doesn’t allow the same derivative infrastructure to be built out and offered (it already is)

not many currency pairs swing in value by 50% any given week

yet I can buy a hedge today with a consumer market account in two clicks for a dozen currencies

There are plenty of countries with volatile or straight out hyperflating currencies that still manage to trade with the world

Wall St and finance market is 8% of GDP - this is what they do

sounds like a problem with the Bitcoin markets and not a problem with Bitcoin.

I've done this all personally many times and it is the cheapest way to exchange a couple thousand dollars worth of fiat cross-border (I usually made a profit, even).

You have to hold bitcoin on the destination exchange and then buy and sell in the US and on the foreign exchange simultaneously. If you're worried about the price risk for the bitcoin you're holding, you can open a corresponding short position to hedge.

> Did you transfer money last week?

No, I can choose when I trade since I don't have any cashflow issue.

It's also useful for cheaper & faster cross border remittances for the common person. For the common person paypal's %3+ currency exchange fees is more expensive than the equivalent %0.5-%1 in fees you get from a 2 bitcoin exchanges. And it's far faster since everything moves at the speed of local deposits & withdraws.

Transferwise is pretty friendly and uses real exchange rate + reasonable fees Usually around 1% or less. With Bitcoin, I can send the same transfer for 0.03% - which puts Transferwise to shame and makes PayPal look like an absurd joke. Granted there's much more involved with current volatility of bitcoin but once that gets more stable all of the other options will be a total joke. People who cant't understand the future of bitcoin as remittence are in for a rude awakening.

This is based on the assumption that bitcoin will stabilize.

I think bitcoin is a flawed first mover. The winner (and future stable cryptocurrency) likely hasn't been invented yet.

But I imagine it's mathematic properties will allows for a sustainable transaction rate (i.e.: thousands per second), short (as in sub 2-3 second) final confirmation times, and the ability to execute Ethereum like smart contracts without major security flaws and naive language implementation choices.

Bitcoin has Lightning with non-Turing complete smart contracts which offer better security

Ethereum has plasma and raiden with touring complete smart contracts

Pick one and build on it - there is no need to rip out the underlying blockchain to achieve what you’re outlining - it exists today

You assume that current remittance providers can't lower their fees. That seems dubious.

If you had traded BTC cross border at the wrong time last week, you could have lost 5-15% in value based on the prevailing market price during the time it took the transfer to settle and the coins to move onto an exchange and sell.

BTC is in practice a speculative security. Not a currency.

Now if your goal was simply to circumvent overseas capital transfer limits and legal limitations, that fee might be "worth it."

protip: Ethereum can be used by criminals too, not just Bitcoin. Though, I'm curious (not trolling), why is Ethereum's model a better way forward? Are you talking about smart contracts or what?

The smart contract model makes it useful beyond just "purchasing things" (as the unimaginative would say. Yes that's a dig at you senatorobama). The EVM (despite it's implementation flaws) makes it's uses practically limitless.

Bitcoin...is an impractical, user-unfriendly first mover. Ethereum is the flawed second mover (ok, I'm discounting all the silly coins in between). I'm honestly not sure who the ultimate winner is. Unless the Bitcoin or Ethereum community fundamentally changes, it likely won't be them.

I'm involved, in this space and agree. Though to play devil's advocate, smart contracts (especially since Ethereum is soon adding zk-snarks) also allow for more sophisticated ways to commit crimes. But yes, I definitely think that smart contracts are the next move forward for this space. Dumb money transfer is a really awesome thing, but it's also quite small. Bitcoin does have some smart contract-ish functionality, but it's incredibly difficult to use, and so is for the most part useless outside of niche applications.

As I said, Ethereum is fundamentally flawed. And the implementation was...naive. It is a giant liability to all those who use it.

I'm very excited for the space. Just not for the current currencies.

Heh, you don't need to tell me about it. If you like reading rants, I wrote one a while back over why the Ethereum Virtual Machine's core design is flawed to the very core http://earlz.net/view/2017/08/13/0451/the-faults-and-shortco...

Ethereum, like bitcoin, is not inherently anonymous. Criminal usage in both cases require extensive mixing which is a pain.

https://blog.cyber.fund/huge-ethereum-mixer-6cf98680ee6c

Bitcoin was the crypto of choice due to the network effect, although for now it is probably better to skip ethereum and skip right into somthings like XMR and Zcash.

You can buy perfectly lawful things at perfectly lawful places. I'd say that is a legitimate use?

Reiterating an argument that most HNers have heard, and already either agree or disagree with, does not advance the discussion. It would be more constructive to present a novel argument, or novel evidence for a usual argument.

The truth isn't dulled by repetition. It's up to crypto enthusiasts to come up with a use case.

Yeah, like buying things.

Bitcoin is basically useless for buying legal things. And especially useless for high dollar transactions without escrow agreements, since the value can fluctuate rapidly before transactions settle and can be liquidated to fiat (funny how moving it to fiat always seems to matter to people selling physical items.).

Wish I could buy a coffee with it.