1) fake wallets (give them a key to some coins but not all)
2) multisig - someone else has to provide the other half of the key or what you can give them is worthless
etc
The total value of all currency right now is far higher than the value of all the gold - if there was some sort of rush back to gold the price increase would be tremendous
you don't have to move that far to escape all that. Plenty of areas an hour away from San Jose that are nice and a lot cheaper (still more expensive than Texas or Florida, sure).
Even if we're at the same home price / income ratio as 2008, a big difference is mortgage rates. In 2008 a 30 year was 5.5%-6.5%. Now it's 3%. So we aren't yet near 2008 levels of mortgage payment / income ratio
> There is nothing actually better about crypto for this application
> The most obvious would be to sell shares in a corporation or LLC
Well certainly you can do it faster with crypto. How long would it take to set up the corporation / LLC? How quickly / easily could people buy shares? Could anyone buy shares?
Yes there are more risks this way, but I don't think there are zero benefits to the crypto approach.
> crypto brings absolutely nothing to the table that I can discern except an increased risk of getting scammed
So you think it'd have the same chances of success if it didn't involve crypto? Of course not! Yes the point is it's crypto, it's experimenting with new ways of doing things, and that's what people want to be a part of.
I keep several tarantulas and a few other spiders, and they are absolutely fascinating! Your description of the spider waving its arms and running from side to side makes me think it was likely a jumping spider. This group of spiders have large eyes and don't build webs to catch prey, and are really cute!
If they had "no problem" cannibalizing their offspring, they'd quickly go extinct! In reality, cannibalizing of offspring only occurs in particular circumstances - if conditions are poor enough that most of the young won't survive anyway, for example. In which case their instincts kick in to cannibalize as a way to recoup the energy and try again at a better time. If conditions are right there will instead be a strong instinct to protect the egg sack / young.
> By that definition, gold too is a ponzi. No, gold clearly fails to satisfy that definition on two counts.
> First, few if any gold investors have expectations of profits. They generally invest in gold as a hedge -- a "store of value" -- that they hope will retain its value in case other assets go sour.
I believe Bitcoin has potential to become the "new" gold. It's better in many ways. Does that mean I can only buy Bitcoin if I want to use it as a hedge? No! I can buy it with the expectation of profit because I expect it to be commonly used as a hedge in the future, at which time it will have a much higher price and I'll have made money.
The main use case I've always seen is to use bloom filters on the client side to reduce traffic to the server looking things up. As you said, you could cache 250 million integers in a gigabyte - but you don't want to bloat your client side implementation by a gigabyte for every bloom filter you use. Also, many times the items are a lot larger than an integer. For example, storing a list of malicious URLs, a common use case.