sure, this might sound good in abstract, but it didn’t work out to be useful. almost no one actually uses it as a currency, they hold onto it as a pseudo-asset which fluctuates wildly in “value”.

Have you met currency speculators? They do the same thing with fiat, as do speculators on every asset class in existence. This is not a problem that's unique to bitcoin.

You can’t do anything with it except buy drugs. you can’t use bitcoin to pay for rent or groceries. some stores experimented with taking it as payment several years ago and they all quit because it was a pain in the ass and transactions took too long to clear.

If you google "where to spend Bitcoin" you'll find plenty of places to do so. There are many restaurants, online vendor, hell, some US states even let you pay your taxes with it. Walk into any grocery store in the US with a coinstar and you can convert USD to and from Bitcoin. Is it as popular as the US dollar? No. But it's much more popular than many other smaller national currencies, especially in the countries with those less reliable smaller national currencies. Why? Because even though Bitcoin's price isn't as stable as the US dollar, it's easier to access and better than their local currency, they can trust it. All they need to use it is a cell phone and a cell network, which many places have even if they don't have functional banking infrastructure.

a big reason why people say crypto is bad is because it has an enormous environmental impact

Problem 1: we get too much of the world's power from unsustainable sources, that's not Bitcoin's fault. Bitcoin relies on the cost of energy usage to provide security. Energy has a relatively constant cost relative to the entire economy, relative to physics even, that is important.

Problem 2: What is the environmental impact of banking? Even smaller, what is the environmental impact of the top three remittance companies (Western Union et al) whose core functionality Bitcoin has been better at since day one? Bitcoin has lower fees, faster transfers, simpler cross-border movement of money, etc. What about all the Western Union kiosks and offices and whatever. That adds up. If we assume Bitcoin is to replace the global currency system, SWIFT, etc then we are really looking at a massive amount of energy that system uses. How much energy is spent driving cash from one place to another?. This is not even getting into non-proof-of-work cryptocurrencies which have their own pros and cons.

Problem 3: Bitcoin can actually be really, really good for the environment and can help subsidize the change to green energy due to its ability to dampen demand curves. I'll leave this here for that

and the main thing it’s known for is as a vehicle for normal people to be tricked out of their money and left holding the bag as its “value” evaporates.

Crypto as a whole? Sure. Bitcoin? No. The crypto world is full of grifts, scams, and rugpulls and it's incredibly unfortunate. Then again, many of these are very obvious on the surface get rich quick schemes. But it is how it is. These scammers don't need crypto to scam, there was a healthy scam market long before crypto. Other highly volatile asset classes have similar problems. It's a bad thing, and I agree with you that it's left people with a bad association with crypto, and that is unfortunate.

i think it would inevitably happen with any so-called “money” or “asset” that has no inherit value and nothing backing it up institutionally.

Traditional currency relies on faith, a collective mass delusion that the currency is worth something. It's a network effect. The currency is useful because other people believe the currency is useful. Does having an established, trustworthy government behind the currency help? Of course! You can also just impose the currency on people against their will, as many conquerors have done in the past. But that's it. There's nothing inherently valuable about a piece of paper that has Benjamin Franklin's face on it. It ultimately comes down to trust and faith. People have faith that the US will continue to have sound economic policy and stable currency exchange raters, or at least that it will be sounder and more stable than the other national currencies. But any day that faith could end up being misplaced. Faith in bitcoin is faith in the mathematics underlying the system, faith in the most widely read and audited source code in the world. You don't have to place faith in a person or institution, that is the key difference.

it becomes a problem when your currency is treated as an asset. if your money will put on gains year-after-year without having to do anything, it’s deflationary and that means no one will want to spend it, causing a retraction of money supply. of course no one wants to lose their money’s value to inflation, but the deflationary aspect of bitcoin ensures that people will hoard it instead of using it to buy things. if the whole economy was like this, you’d be looking at something akin to the conditions of the Great Depression.

You are making good points here, and most economists would agree with you that a little inflation is healthy precisely because it incentivizes people to spend money instead of hoarding it. Your statement presumes we would enter in a deflationary spiral because Bitcoin's price would continue to increase forever, but I don't think that's a sound assumption, especially if it were to actually contain a majority of the wealth of the global economy. But even going on that assumption, I wonder how the world might look if somebody had to really convince you to part with your money. Perhaps our products would be of higher quality? Look to any country with hyper-inflation, people will spend their money on anything they can get their hands on because the money will be worthless tomorrow. It's a broken market environment. In the same way that capitalism to function correctly must have the risk of failure, how might corporations and banks act more responsibly if they didn't think the next bailout was right around the corner? These are interesting questions.

Satoshi gave us the ability to create our own financial systems and experiment with them, which many people are doing, and those experiments can be done without wrapping up an entire national economy in them. For the first time in human history since fiat currency became dominant, we have the ability to choose which economy to participate in, and it's much more accessible and useful than for example trading foreign currency ever was. For example, want a universal basic income? Use a coin based around that concept. You can have a protocol that automatically distributes 1% of the total transaction fees of the entire network back to all the participants. And that 1% can be decided by a network-wide vote. You don't have to convince a national government to run that experiment with the entire economy, you can grow a system for it sustainably by starting small. With blockchain technology, we have the opportunity to create economic systems which are ruled and governed by their participants, not their creators, not by whomever currently rules everything else. It represents a new type of democracy. That is a beautiful and exciting thing, and a gift that will bring all sorts of new things both good and bad. And we have Satoshi to thank for opening that door for us.

We can say with near 100% confidence that bitcoin’s price has been fraudulently manipulated at some point in its lifespan since 2010

Ok welcome to assets traded on an open market like... Bitcoin is not immune to that nor is housing or currency or oil or anything. The bailouts were market manipulation, the shit pulled to stop Gamestop investors was manipulation, the whole economic system is rigged and full of speculative manipulation.

Bitcoin has problems when it comes to usability, adoption, reputation, granted, I don't think anybody who is actually knowledgeable about this topic disagrees about that, I certainly don't. But the system is good, it works well, for 15 years it has faithfully kept to the protocol and worked without being hacked or experiencing any downtime.

Satoshi hasn't moved any coins in many many years. Many speculate Satoshi is dead. Moving any of those coins would probably crash Bitcoin's value relative to USD, but Bitcoin would survive and keep true to its promise via protocol: anybody who owned Bitcoin would still own that bitcoin and could faithfully transfer it around the network with no issues. And not even Satoshi could print more into existence.

Even if Satoshi could somehow sell all their coins at current market rates, there are still plenty of people whose wealth measures in the trillions who would be way richer and who really did nothing for their wealth aside from be born into it.

For context: Jeff Bezos owns 10% of Amazon. Zuck owns 14% of Facebook (down from 28% at IPO). Elon has 17% of Tesla. Satoshi’s share is relatively small compared to other founders, and all of those companies are worth more than Bitcoin's total market cap. Those are just some people who got rich off a single company, there are people whose wealth is measured in countries not companies. People with lineage who measure their accounts in trillions, not billions. Satoshi would barely even rank on the list of richest people.

If I point a gun to your head and tell you to send me all your bitcoin, you will probably do so, and then you will call the police to tell them that I robbed you at gunpoint. The police will then arrest me and make me return the bitcoin to you that I stole. When you call the police after I stole your Bitcoin, are you trusting a centralized authority to decide whether or not the transaction was legitimate? After all, if I check the blockchain, the transaction seems perfectly fine.

Bitcoin can't solve theft and has never claimed to. Neither can our existing banking system. Bitcoin can guarantee that money can only be in one place at a time. The only theft Bitcoin can solve is the theft of government's inflating the money supply and reducing your dollar's purchasing power. It can change the theft of irresponsiible central banks. That's it. All a transaction on the blockchain tells you is that the person with that private key can own the money, it doesn't establish who that person is or should be, the same way if you have $5 USD and spend it at a hot dog cart, the hot dog vendor has no way to know how you acquired that $5 or who the that $5 "should" belong to.

Blur and OpenSea, the leading NFT marketplaces, both have measures in place to attempt to stop the sale of stolen NFTs. Should we trust these centralized platforms to decide whether or not a token should be tradable? Should we demand they abolish these theft protections in the name of decentralization?

I have nothing nice to say about the NFT marketplace or any of the actors in it. NFTs are a joke. Interesting tech but in 99% of cases used for completely garbage purposes. And no, some random startup running a NFT website shouldn't be in charge of your ownership of your coins or NFTs or anything. Like many things that are bad in crypto, people think Bitcoin = stupid monkey JPG NFTs = Ethereum = Dogecoin. They are all different things but they get painted with the same brush in the media unfortunately.

As long as there exists a state with an authority on violence, Bitcoin being decentralized is a mere technicality. All power comes from the barrel of a gun. If the state wants to take your Bitcoin to pay for another war, they can do so regardless of what the code says by simply having the police knock on your door.

It's more nuanced than that but, sure. Bitcoin makes it a lot harder. A lot harder. It's much easier to simply inflate the money supply and spend that money without people's consent than round up people, point guns at them (or use some other, less direct form of coercion) and tell them to give up their Bitcoin. The state controls the banks, BTC puts you back in control of the economic power those banks hold. Ultimately, if the state asks the bank to turn over your funds, they will, you cannot control that. You can control whether or not to say "no". If you stick to it, and they kill you, they still do not get your BTC. Let me ask you, if Putin had to send his goons door-to-door in Russia to collect funds for his invasion, don't you think that reaction from people might be a little different than if Putin just turns on the money printer and slowly eats away the savings of his people? How might the vietnam war have gone differently if not only was there widespread opposition but the government had to double the tax rate or confiscate people's BTC? Through a particular lens like this, BTC can be a tool for global peace. Wars of aggression are much harder to start without central banks backing them. It does not make war impossible, but it changes the rules of the game and the scales which can be tipped.

Do you want to abolish the state altogether?

No. The state has many important jobs which we currently cannot replicate any other better way like paying for common goods (roads schools etc), providing an imperfect but important check against runaway effects in the capitalist economy (market aggregation leading to monopoly, destruction of the environment for profit, etc). I hope humanity will continue to experiment with, iterate on, and improve what we think the state's function is and how it should function, just as we should with money and our economy.

If you think all centralized authority is bad, what are your thoughts on the crypto space getting increasingly centralized?

It's bad, I have no love for centralized digital currencies. Decentralization is key to cryptocurrency being something which enables access to democratic and open markets.

What do you think about Yuga Labs buying up other top NFT collections?

Haven't heard about this and don't care about it. NFTs are a joke.

How does Bitcoin solve any of the problems you outlined and do you really think that if the government hadn’t been able to print money, they wouldn’t have found another way to bail the banks out?

#1. I agree the bailouts were necessary given the circumstances. The way they were carried out wasn't great for example bankers giving themselves massive bonuses with bailout money, but something had to be done to prevent the collapse of the banking system in insert_country_here. The question is how to we avoid getting into those circumstances in the future? Part of the answer is having hard currency. The second you start making promissory notes, lending, and especially allowing the private sector to be involved in lending, you will inevitably end up in situations where banks fail. So the central bank becomes their backstop. But what happens when the central bank fails? This happens. The reality is that anytime you have fractional reserve systems, you run the risk of a bank run. You can have the safest economic policy in the world as I would argue the US is generally seen as having, but there are economic shocks you simply cannot prepare for, and when those happen, you will have bank runs. With BTC, if you hold BTC, you don't need to worry about that because nobody can print more to bail out unelected, irresponsible bankers for making decisions you had nothing to do with.

#2. If fiat and Bitcoin are to continue to co-exist, I imagine the government would still print their way out of the problem. Or perhaps they would raise taxes. Bitcoin isn't concerned with how to solve the problems of other economic systems, it's only concerned with providing a strong, robust currency which it has faithfully done for 15 years.