So what?

"omg this ycombinator founder didn't change the world" said nobody ever

But mention crypto one time.... I guess it is nice that it is held up to a separate higher standard and captivates the minds of some people willing to help it get there.

Some people here mentioned a standard about merchant adoption, even to that, so what? thats the least interesting use case, the M0 money supply is small in exchange systems people choose to respect, its panned out the same way in crypto but people decide to make a separate standard of "hey a lot of this is used for speculation! I don't consider that a use case, is it because I'm ignorant of how fiat currencies work, no, can't be".

There are various services for merchants that shield the merchant from knowing crypto is being used, and various services for consumers (like debit cards) that shield them from needing to directly use crypto. That exists, not a lot of fanfare is needed, if you want to use that you can and don't need to write a whole blog post about it. Its not an interesting use case, no matter how much you felt you needed to quantify its use in that way in order to feel better about it.

It also works, shrug, onchain (+tx eventually settled onchain) transaction volume is at all time highs and it doesn't even make international news because its not news, as it should be.

One of the (back then) dominating bitcoin exchanges used the domain mtgox.com which was an acronym for "magic the gathering online exchange".

Does this mean you can only make real money if you got in at the very beginning?

Personally, I used it to buy electronics in Japan, worked well. Also used it to sell my VR headset in person, because Paypal and our banks didn't allow the transfer. I use it to tip and donate to various online creators with no fuss. It's really quite simple, no need to overthink it.

Sure, maybe one day the price will crash or the peg fail, but for most intents and purposes it works fine. Monitoring crypto prices and fundamentals is not so bad compared with traditional finance folks having to read through hundreds of all-caps tweets to know how much value the USD will lose this month, or sifting through reddit WSB troll posts to know which stock to buy.

It's a deflationary store of value.

What is Gold valuable for? It's a deflationary store of value (though it does inflate slightly so it's not as good as Bitcoin in that sense).

Deflationary stores of value are valuable.

It's the same reason why a battery is valuable if you have solar panels. It captures excess energy from the system and allows you to store it for later use when you actually need it (like at night when the sun doesn't shine).

When the Fed is printing tons of money, the sun shining... You don't know what to do with all that excess energy. You could buy more electrical appliances to consume that excess electricity (e.g. invest in that hot new startup), but you already have more of them than you know what to do with... You may as well store that excess energy to use later for a rainy day.

Source? The link supplied uses 5 cents/kWh, which is also an assumption on their part that they do not explain either.

There are lots of reports of 'seasonal mining' occurring in China, where mining operations are occurring in areas with very cheap or completely free electric, generally because the costs of producing the electricity are fixed, rather than scaling up or down with demand (geothermal / hydro / other renewables).

Also, politicians never answer my emails and I did try. I must be living on a different planet.

I'm not suggesting that Twitter investing in BTC is or isn't a good thing, but the CEO having a personal stake should not prevent the company from investing if there's suitable expectation of positive returns for the business.