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17 Years After Their Invention, Cryptocurrencies Have No Use Case

Except one.

Aure's Notes
Notes
3 min readJan 1, 2025

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Bitcoin was born when Satoshi Nakamoto used the blockchain, a distributed encrypted database, to create a decentralized currency whose transactions are cryptographically verified by miners getting paid in said-currency for their service, which he called “Bitcoin”.

Shortly after, Ethereum was created under the impulsion of Vitalik Buterin, a teenager who had been banned from World of Warcraft and understood the value of a decentralized distributed system to avoid abuse of power.

The industry grew and people started creating crypto exchanges, crypto payment gateways, physical crypto wallets, and even crypto ETFs (although that took a few years).

VCs raised hundreds of billions to invest in crypto companies and we saw the rise of giants like Coinbase and Binance, the rise and fall of scams like FTX, and Bitcoin even became legal tender in El Salvador (abandoned in 2025).

While the industry may appear successful, the vision that Satoshi laid out in his 2008 white paper remains unfulfilled (to say the least): crypto has still no use cases, besides speculative investment, tax evasion, and scams.

The latter, which began circa 2017, has been popping up again and again and always consists of the…

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Aure's Notes
Aure's Notes

Written by Aure's Notes

2X Msc in pol. science and business econ. Summarized +100 books. 25k people read auresnotes.com. From Belgium. No niche.

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