You should not believe everything you read on the Internet. Most people who are feeding you this misinformation are strongly incentivized to make you believe things are going much worse than they are.

Bitcoin alone has achieved a market value of over $650 billion as of now. I really don't care about any of the other centralized affinity scams that the Silicon Valley VCs with cheap money failed to make into a success. It is bitcoin that is being used in third world countries from Venezuela and Cuba to several countries in Africa and the Middle East to build the future of the world wide open source payments network. It's also being used in America and the rest of the first world to allow anyone who cares to take control of their financial future to do it privately without the control of government bureaucrats.

The bitcoin network is much larger than America. For example, think of the Canadian trucker protest. Also Cubans, Venezuelans, and others dealing with double- or triple-digit inflation trying to recieve remittances from their diaspora.

That's what a lot of people said about the world wide web, Linux, etc, etc. Rome was not built in a day.

Digital transactions are instantly acknowledged in the payment network (i.e., Visa or Mastercard), but as a merchant, I am not guaranteed to receive the funds to my account until they clear the hurdles of the traditional banking system. This is why many merchants accepting bitcoin discount such payments.

If you are crossing into territory where your credit card, apple pay, or bank account are not accepted or valid, you won't have access to those things when you arrive.

Contributions to political causes are also frequently blocked/confiscated. But you are accepting the frame that it is reasonable to restrict certain legal activity so long as it's not something that affects you directly.

On-chain transactions still incur the traditional mining fee, but the lightning network is extremely low-fee, on the order of hundredths of a penny or even free in many cases.

I can make online transactions with bitcoin virtually instantaneously with immediate final settlement. That cannot be done with cash or "regular digital money."

I can walk across a border between political jurisdictions with all of my wealth stored in my head. That can't be done with cash or "regular digital money."

I can make online transactions for things that are blocked for ideological or political reasons with bitcoin. That can't be done with cash and the "regular digital money" is the source of the power to restrict those things to begin with.

I can avoid credit card processing fees for things I buy online using bitcoin. That can't be done with cash and the "regular digital money" that avoids credit card fees comes with substantial multi-day processing delays, if it is even supported.

This claim is entirely unsubstantiated. There are illicit uses of digital coins, but it could just as easily be stated that, "Cash has had its most successful use in laundering and illicit trade. It seems most usage is by criminals." Are you advocating for the elimination of cash for the purpose of controlling its illicit use?

As for the speculative aspect, who cares? Let people speculate. What business is it of yours?

I know it's wasteful, but when the national lotteries have those big jackpots, I like to buy a few tickets. The lottery app for my state only allows debit cards and two of my debit cards decline transactions for lottery purchases, regardless of the fact I'm only spending $20.

Many credit card networks also block purchases of legal adult content. Some also reject gun purchases.

The chargeback risk that vendors are facing comes with 2%-3% fees which are passed onto you in the form of higher prices. Many places will provide a cash discount and some offer discounts for the use of bitcoin for this reason. As for protection to you, you are on the losing end of this and the cost charged to the vendors in total covers enormous amounts of fraud in ongoing organized criminal networks.

Is that why FinCEN is trying to pass rules that prevent the use of coinjoining?

Would you like to have a rational conversation about this or are you so committed to your priors that you cannot consider the arguments?

I wonder if you have ever considered the level of privilege you enjoy that you don't have to concern yourself with these issues.

All of the things you mention necessarily depend on access to a bank account and each of them has chargeback and censorship risk. None of them provides the privacy and anonymity of cash.

I'm not sure where you live, but my right as an American to communicate numbers over a network of interconnected computers is protected from the actions of overbearing government bureaucrats who would like to prevent me from using such methods of communication.

The government can use its tools to find bad guys doing bad things on the network (however it defines those things), but it can't prevent the use of the network for communicating numbers. At least, not legally.

Criminals think they can get away with financial crimes through the use of the bitcoin network. It should be supported as an alternative payment network so law enforcement can find all of the criminals trying to break laws with it. Why not use it for a national currency?

Criminalizing the use of bitcoin will just drive criminals to use other options. It would be better to support bitcoin for widespread domestic adoption so the criminals cans be tracked.

This post contains exactly zero sarcasm. /s

This is clear evidence that python is a tool for fraud and must be banned. If you're not a criminal, you have no reason to use python, anyway.

The government demands backdoor access to all operating systems to find anyone using python in order to impose the proper penalties.

The "delete" on the Mac keyboard is the functional equivalent of the backspace key on a Windows machine.

Are you lamenting the missing Windows-style "del" key which provides forward delete functionality? This is available on a Mac laptop with fn-modified delete, but is also available as a standalone key on Mac keyboards with a numeric keypad.