It's still pretty niche. Built mostly for and by bitcoiners, but has potential as a new way of doing social media that isn't reliant on major tech companies.
Without being an expert on the topic I'm going hazard a guess that it's due to regulatory moats that keep challengers out of the arena, and banks endlessly lobby to maintain that regulatory capture.
They provide a legitimate demand response service i.e. when the grid is generating excess energy that there's no other demand for, Bitcoin miners buy what no one else wants/needs.
> Inflation encourages investment because if you just sit on your money it gets eaten away by inflation.
People shouldn't be penalised for saving money.
"Oh, but just invest it!"
With investment comes risk. Why shouldn't people be allowed to save without risk or having their savings melted by lost purchasing power through inflation?
Inflation is a hidden tax and theft of those furthest from the newly "minted" money to benefit those that are closest to the source i.e. banks and large borrowers.
100 million baht in 2 years? So about $1.5m USD in a year.
That's not exactly "staggering" or significant in the context of the Bitcoin network. Unlikely that such operations have any meaningful control over the network or liquidity, even if it's just 1% of what's known.
You seem to think that these sorts of operations are somehow connected in a large coordinated cartel the controls the industry, but given that they're illegal, isn't it far more likely that these "black market" operators are fairly small by comparison to the legitimate players in the US?
The mining ban in China a couple of years back gave us a pretty good indication of the size of the legitimate industry in that country, and it absolutely DWARFS the biggest of the illegal examples you gave.
Interesting way to word it too, "illegal mining". They're just stealing electricity. If they used that stolen electricity for heating, you wouldn't call it "illegal heating", would you?
> you cannot build scaling technology that inherits the self-custodial, permissionless, and censorship resistance qualities of the underlying ledger
Correct, and yet you seem to still miss the point. There are tradeoffs. You can't scale AND maintain those properties. This is why Bitcoin scales with layer 2 solutions like Lightning (and more ideas like Enigma, Ark, Cashu etc.), or things like RGB or Taro for expressiveness. Separation of concerns.
The best attempts to have their cake and eat it too have failed in crypto.
There is very little innovation to be had in the core function of what a blockchain was designed to achieve. There's plenty of innovation ahead of us for the layers that are built on top of it.
> Each coin has its own ins and outs, there isn't one that is the best. They have their own time and place.
This is just wishy washy rubbish trying to appear "diplomatic" and "balanced". Oh sure, you can mint some monkey jpegs or construct a needlessly complex and public smart contract for some esoteric "use case", but the truth is the majority of people in the world don't want or need those things.
People just want a money that works. You can send or receive it instantly across international borders, that no one can stop, and it doesn't lose it's value over the years.
Bitcoin is the only game in town, the "crypto bros" just don't realise it yet because they can make obscene amounts of money from pump and dump schemes with flashy marketing about "use cases" and "yield".
> But neither currency has ever done a roll back of this nature again.
Maybe not a rollback, but Ethereum has proven it is malleable time and time again. As one example, compare the issuance of ether to Bitcoin. Eth's issuance is a dog's breakfast, indicative of changing opinions by those who call the shots... just like a central bank.
Bitcoin's issuance? Predictable and steady as a rock for 15 years.
Another example is replacing Proof-of-Work with Proof-of-Stake. A core part of how it works, important for censorship resistance and accessibility, and they removed it for something permissioned that makes censorship far easier.
Bitcoin? Still on PoW and never going to change. If you think it will change, you still don't understand Bitcoin. But never fear, there's already a PoS Bitcoin out there (that no one uses).
Perhaps building alternatives that can replace them on run in parallel is the best way to do that?