I think there's a difference between Bitcoin and Dropbox/Twitter. Even if you were skeptical about the latter products at first, with the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to make a retroactive argument for why they made sense (better usability, better network effects, etc).
But with Bitcoin, even with the benefit of hindsight, I still don't get it.
Bitcoin's success is extremely easy to understand.
Socially:
Some people don't trust governments to handle one of the most powerful collaboration technologies ever invented (money). All financial systems before Bitcoin were government controlled. Some have behaved in a trustworthy way, many have not. And over the longer term they all tend to mess it up eventually.
So these people set out to build an alternative that they believed governments couldn't control.
Technically:
The interesting key advance that made Bitcoin interesting and successful was coming up with an algorithm that solved the problem of getting parties that don't trust each other at all, to collaborate on maintaining a global ledger to everyone's benefits, without them having to even know about each other.
This is already a feature of money (I don't need to know about you to have indirect financial ties to you) but was not true of the financial system itself until Bitcoin.
> All financial systems before Bitcoin were government controlled
Company scrip, community currency, hawala have all existed for centuries.
Also Bitcoin is also government controlled. It lacks the anonymity required to protect participants making it trivial for nation states to influence. And it does nothing to prevent the centralisation of capital that causes so much manipulation in traditional currency systems.
> And over the longer term they all tend to mess it up eventually.
Over the long term the probability of failure of all systems is 1.
> Company scrip, community currency, hawala have all existed for centuries.
All of these have the problem of centralized and permissioned issuance, where one entity can arbitrarily inflate the supply without the knowledge or consent of others.
> Also Bitcoin is also government controlled
In what way?
> It lacks the anonymity required to protect participants
This is false and does not make it government controlled. I’ll concede that there are many ways for one to lose privacy when using Bitcoin though.
> And it does nothing to prevent the centralisation of capital
The ‘centralization of capital’ isn’t an issue Bitcoin aims to solve. One of the big problems Bitcoin solves is the unjust accumulation of capital via arbitrary issuance (IORB, RRP, loans via newly created bank deposits, etc.)
I wonder what it says about me that the only counterexample that came to me is the use of Nuka Cola bottle caps in the Fallout games. But that only works in a post-apocalyotic setting, when there's no longer any manufacturing capability.
Except it isn’t money at all; only suckers call it ‘money’.
It’s considered a security; a representation of value for sure. Move it around all you want until you’re blue in the face.
But money still has to come out of an exchange and through some sort of bank. So it’s all a shell game that’s decidedly not anonymous or protected at all.
That’s why so many have concluded that crypto is a scam; we might as well be smuggling Egyptian grave goods.
What organizes labor are the specifics. This is what math doesn't get, math isn't timeless, it's trapped in exact moments where it appears real. The arbitrary is simply a conduit metaphor, not only not real, but entirely illusory, prone to primate biases and exploitation. And all metaphors eventually fail, that's a bio-ecological certainty. Show me a currency from 700AD still traded on arbitrary markets. There are no limitless molecules or homeostatic climate. The system is already bust in numerous indexes, we're just riding the arbitrary fan out.
Also "banking the unbanked": giving financial infrastructure to anyone with internet access, even if local banking infrastructure doesn't exist or isn't accessible.
Which is great when applied to rural areas of underdeveloped countries. But realistically it's more about financial infrastructure for criminals, outcasts, scammers and rich people in counties with strict financial controls
Stablecoins are interesting, but they're closer to company scrip than to decentralised currency. Anyway, stablecoins are apparently becoming important financial infrastructure, so that's something.
Bitcoin is completely useless as a currency since its value does not decline with time, thereby making it an investment vehicle instead of a currency. An asset can't be good at being both a medium of exchange and an investment. Only criminals use bitcoin as currency, and they do it because the alternative for them is moving cash around in suitcases.
I think the success is completely logical, in hindsight, when you consider that the majority of the crypto traffic is bots (to hide the traceability, money laundering, scams), or linked to plain real-world illegal activity.
But with Bitcoin, even with the benefit of hindsight, I still don't get it.