I don't intend to ever own bitcoin, but "the government called 1000 australians and asked whether they use a soon-to-be-taxed, questionably-illegal currency, and most people said no" is some pretty poor science. Why is this the top post in the "Science" community of the science-focused Lemmy instance?

Almost like gambling?

I use it to transfer money anonymously ;)

I tried to pay something with Bitcoin instead of debit card a couple of years ago. The transaction took ~4 hours to clear and that's with fees totalling about 40% of the amount. Granted the original amount was like $10 but still way too slow and way too expensive. I understand that technically credit cards are not instant too, but there's an intermediary that guarantees that the amount has been reserved until the bank clears your payment. I wasn't expecting Bitcoin to be instant but 4+ hours is excessive.

That's 2-3 years ago so my experience might be outdated.

Honestly I never truly understood the appeal of cryptocurrency in general.

If you want to make an anonymous deal, cold hard cash gets the job done and doesn't have nearly as poor of an environmental impact. I guess if you really want to make sure online purchases are anonymous then it can be hard to do that with cash, but unless you are buying something blatantly illegal that shouldn't be too large of a concern (at least if you are in a first world country). The whole "decentralized" currency argument also falls pretty flat when some of the top used cryptocurrencies are not decentralized (Tether, Usd Coin).

Cryptocurrency feels less like an innovation to fit a need, and more like somebody created something cool as a concept and tried to figure out a use case after the fact.

Sadly it's popular in scummy trades

... said every nocoiner ever.

Lets hope it crashes faster, so that people than can pay attention to experimenting with potentially viable crypto money.

Bitcoin is the future of money. HODL!