Gambling can be accomplished in a variety of ways much easier than opening a traditional casino. You can more easily create a web site for gambling than you can, set up the elaborate, de-centralized infrastructure that crypto requires.
Sure, you can set it up. But then how will anyone send you money to gamble with, and how will you pay anyone their "winnings" if they wish to withdraw?
If using the traditional banking system, how exactly do you think that a bank will react when you ask to open an account for an offshore gambling site or they discover that is the purpose of the account?
(Hint: It's not by keeping your account open.)
There are other problems too - like convincing people you are trustworthy and that the game is fair, avoiding the possibility that funds are arbitrarily taken from players, or how to avoid being shut down/robbed by targeted attacks.
I think it's safer to say the vast majority of peoples' wealth is not liquid, and not in banks. It's probably in real estate, stocks and other assets that have intrinsic value. Real wealth involves things with intrinsic value (stocks do have intrinsic value, crypto doesn't).
Correct. All the value is based on a complex legal system with many more entities than just banks, with liquid assets and sales or transfers almost always going through the banks.
Nobody has to "accept" fiat. Fiat is mandated by law. Whether you like it or not; whether you "believe in fiat" doesn't matter. It's what's used "for all debts public and private." It has value as long as the state you live in is solvent and able to enforce its mandate as the de-facto transfer of value.
I would argue that using fiat is at least passive acceptance, and if people didn't accept fiat (passively or actively), there is no way the government could use mandates alone, simply of the reality that (1) citizens vastly outnumber the government and are collectively far more powerful, and (2) we live in a democratic system where the people have a role in electing their leaders.
there's not much precedent for a security with no intrinsic value being arbitrarily accepted as a transfer/store of value by any statistically significant number of people over time.
Bitcoin does not match the legal definition of "security", which by its very definition as per the Howey test, depends exclusively on a small group of people. We haven't ever had a similar asset that couldn't be mass-produced. And thanks for recognizing that bitcoin is something unique in history.
"Come back to me when it does something." 13 years later. It still doesn't work.
I'm not sure what you mean by "doesn't work". Bitcoin has remained online for all those 13 years, keeping accurate records and processing payments exactly the same as it always has.
Sounds a lot like the banking system we already have.
Yes, pretty much the same system just without needing the banks. The banking part is completely opt-in.
Just let it die. Let it go. Save your hopium for something more practical, like determining which flavor of Dr. Pepper can cure cancer.
I do enjoy this discussion a lot but it is very time-consuming.
You could possibly use Dr. Pepper to cure cancer if you ionized the sugar and then blasted radiation to target the cancer cells.