Quote from: coolcoinz on Today at 08:08:04 PM

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Don't take this as an insult, but if they hold a few hundred dollars worth of bitcoin, they aren't serious about their investment, so I wouldn't expect them to be serious about concepts like self-custody, decentralization and security.

Yes, but here's the thing: these are the people Bitcoin needs in order to be accepted as a mainstream investment option. This is the whole point of my OP. You can deride the "dumb dumbs" all you want, but if you scare their money away, the price of Bitcoin will likely go down.

In other words, if most people's first impression of Bitcoin is that you have to believe in a bunch of technical concepts that don't apply to their everyday lives in any way in order to see the value, then that's going to leave them with a negative impression.

Quote from: coolcoinz on Today at 08:08:04 PM

I've encountered people who have a lot to say about these things and who wanted to tell me how I should secure my bitcoin and then I ask them how much they have and they happen to own 0.01BTC and my response to them is that I wouldn't care where my private keys are if my whole investment was worth less an average mobile phone, or a set of car tires.

Well, if you ask most mainstream people, I think it would be the exact opposite: they don't want their entire life savings held in some iPhone they could accidentally drop into a landfill. They like the idea that their life savings is secured in a financial institution that is based on their identity as a person.

Most people only keep a tiny faction of their total wealth in their physical wallet on their own person.

Quote from: coolcoinz on Today at 08:08:04 PM

What real problems would you like it to solve? Poverty? Wars? How about dilution of money supply by the Federal Reserve and inflation?

I am talking here of using blockchain as a technology architecture to solve real problems, e.g. the way technologies like RDBMS's solve problems, or cloud computing solves problems, or other new architectures solve problems.

And the point about the Fed inflating the US dollar is circular reasoning: you are saying that Bitcoin will outperform the US dollar because... Bitcoin will outperform the US dollar. Maybe it will, or maybe it won't. Maybe it will lose half of its value in the next six months (like it did 24 months ago for instance), and maybe it will double in price. But in that context, bringing up the inflation of the US dollar--which peaked at something like 10% annually in the worst part of the pandemic recovery--seems pretty paltry in comparison.

And absolutely any investment instrument from stocks to bonds to pork bellies can be used to hedge against the US dollar, so Bitcoin is not exactly unique in that regard.