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I find it very manipulative to offhandedly dismiss the utility it provides to people suffering under oppression or unstable financial systems and to compare tha

I find it very manipulative to offhandedly dismiss the utility it provides to people suffering under oppression or unstable financial systems and to compare that to smoking. As the article states, check your financial privilege. And "tiny amount of people"? What's "tiny" here? Hundreds, thousands, millions? Do you know how many people use Bitcoin in this way?

lalaland1125 5y ago
> Do you know how many people use Bitcoin in this way? Do you?
- glenvdb 5y ago
  Not exactly, no. But I wasn't the one assigning a vague description of "size" to the number of people that use it that way, was I?
- glenvdb 5y ago
  But if you're actually curious to know it only takes a quick search to find info about proportions of use around the world https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-global-crypto-adoption-index https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-global-crypto-adop... It's very hard to get exact numbers of users, because of how Bitcoin works, but this should give you a good sense of proportions and you could infer numbers of people based on known population sizes for each country
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    That link plays fast and loose with stats making any actual analysis impossible. "We calculate the metric by estimating total cryptocurrency received by that country, and weighting the on-chain value based on PPP per capita" Weigh how? "we rank countries by their P2P trade volume and weight it to favor countries with lower PPP per capita and fewer internet users" Weigh how? How do you get the numbers on internet users? "We rank all 154 countries according to each of those three metrics, take the geometric mean of each country’s ranking in all three, and then normalize that final number on a scale of 0 to 1" What? It's not a methodology conductive to analysis. Is a hodge-podge of smart sounding words that create pretty graphs. Oh, and they changed the methodology this year, but still compare results to previous years that used the old methodology. Very scientific

lalaland1125 5y ago

> Do you know how many people use Bitcoin in this way? Do you?

glenvdb 5y ago
Not exactly, no. But I wasn't the one assigning a vague description of "size" to the number of people that use it that way, was I?
glenvdb 5y ago
But if you're actually curious to know it only takes a quick search to find info about proportions of use around the world https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-global-crypto-adoption-index https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-global-crypto-adop... It's very hard to get exact numbers of users, because of how Bitcoin works, but this should give you a good sense of proportions and you could infer numbers of people based on known population sizes for each country
- dmitriid 5y ago
  That link plays fast and loose with stats making any actual analysis impossible. "We calculate the metric by estimating total cryptocurrency received by that country, and weighting the on-chain value based on PPP per capita" Weigh how? "we rank countries by their P2P trade volume and weight it to favor countries with lower PPP per capita and fewer internet users" Weigh how? How do you get the numbers on internet users? "We rank all 154 countries according to each of those three metrics, take the geometric mean of each country’s ranking in all three, and then normalize that final number on a scale of 0 to 1" What? It's not a methodology conductive to analysis. Is a hodge-podge of smart sounding words that create pretty graphs. Oh, and they changed the methodology this year, but still compare results to previous years that used the old methodology. Very scientific