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What are you talking about? That concept doesn't make any sense. Decentralization is a concept, not an asset. It doesn't have a quantitative value. If that is really what you are asking then your question has no answer.
I agree (with the bold part). But yet you gave decentralisation
some value by saying: "The benefit of decentralization is not nearly large enough to outweigh the massive costs". Costs are measurable and you valued decentralisation below that. What if costs were 50% lower, or 75%, would decentralisation outweigh the costs then? Is there any deeper logic behind your statement, or is it just "I don't like it - not worth it"?
I had never even heard of Aliexpress but the problem you are describing is most likely not an issue with the credit card. Either way, your evidence is completely anecdotal. The last bitcoin transaction I made took 8 days and cost $40.
Aliexpress is a sub-brand of Alibaba, only the biggest e-commerce platform in the world. Not quite an anecdotal evidence if there are plenty of others with similar problems and when they have dedicated FAQ section for that. What's anecdotal (purposely?) is your BTC transaction, if really happened at all (care to share tx id?).
Speed/cost may be performing better for crypto recently, but 10 minutes is still WAY too slow. If I go into a store to buy something, I'm not going to wait 10 minutes for the payment to process. Furthermore, the costs for bitcoin transactions are higher than credit card costs to vendors for reasonably small transactions. This problem will only become larger as mining becomes more difficult and fees rise. For bitcoin to be worth anything, it needs to be able to scale to thousands of times its current size, and it is running into major hurdles way before even coming remotely close to that point.
Are you of impression that fiat transaction are
settled instantly?
You can build any 3rd party payment services on top on Bitcoin, with instant transactions (ie transfers between Coinbase accounts, pre-RBF BitPay purchases), you could accept BTC zero-conf for smaller purchases before RBF was implemented (you can still do it with BCH), you have BTC powered debit cards, you have Lightning Network, you have coins that scales on-chain, you have non-blockchain coins that claim to have unlimited capacity (IOTA) etc.
Bitcoin was created primarily as a response to the flawed global financial system, not as competition to payment processors. Even if it can compete with the latter - comparing them is bit missed.
Saying BTC is only worth something if it has capacity to replace fiat entirely is simply retarded and no different than saying McDonalds is worthless until they have capacity to feed entire world.
There's nothing stopping BTC from existing forever as a niche-alternative to fiat. What gives it value is the free market - not the way how you feel about it.
Your argument is that private blockchains must be valuable otherwise people wouldn't be spending money and looking into it. That argument is horribly flawed. Go read the last few Snapchat earnings reports and tell me that Snapchat Spectacles are valuable. They spent a ton of money on it and then gave up when it fell flat on its face.
No. My argument was that:
"Furthermore, blockchain technology necessarily requires cryptocurrency" and
"A centralized and non-trustless blockchain ... is completely pointless" are false, as evidenced by Swift (among others). Private blockchains are just a form of distributed database and some find this tech very useful.
I have impression that you got stuck in some weird "something-is-overhyped-therefore-completely-useless" kind of logic.
One reason I can give you for many companies to be looking into blockchain is that simply saying the word "blockchain" in public will cause a company's stock price to go flying to stupidly high levels. Look at Long Island Blockchain, formerly Long Island Iced Tea. They are an iced tea distributer based on long island and their business has NOTHING to do with blockchain. They announced that they would look into blockchain technology and changed their name, and all of a sudden their stock price surges to wildly irrational levels.
Agree. What are you arguing here? Yes, 'blockchain' is overhyped and mis-used to screw investors. How does this affect cryptocurrencies?
And just to add, the bottom line really is that more and more crypto can be created infinitely, and none of them ever have any intrinsic value (yes, the USD DOES have intrinsic value). The crypto space is infinitely inflationary for this reason, and IMO will eventually fail. It is only getting so much attention because it is new and people made a lot of money. This is not anything remotely like the internet.
No, USD DOESN'T have intrinsic value.
Cryptos are infinitely inflationary only if you assume that every newly created crypto is somehow automatically valuable and gets its share of crypto market cap (at expense of other coins). If that's what you believe, then put all your money in, go margin-short on BTC and create new coins at rate of thousands per day. Instant billionaire. What's stopping you?