I always feel like this sort of point is gaslighting me. Or, like, arguing from the perspective of like the third reinvention of the pitch for bitcoin.

When I first read the bitcoin whitepaper well over a decade ago now, there was none of this detailed segmentation of the target use case, it was just gonna be decentralized digital transactions for everybody.

Fine, I get it, people figured out long ago that it is a more niche thing than that. But can we stop pretending that it has always been obvious that its current niche was always obviously the only one intended and that anything else is a "straw man"?

It really has a ring of "Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia" to me.

No use case is a “straw man”. The parent post had a hand-waving farcical “more systems will solve that”. I’m pointing out the reality of the positives and drawbacks of private key control.

The original whitepaper didn’t describe use cases, you’re right. It’s a technical document explaining a solution to the double-spend problem and defines core rules of the network.

The use cases were always something that developed over time. Andreas Antonopoulos was highlighting the key need as those without financial services in 2011-2012.

It sounds like you were convinced this was going to be of direct use to most people in the near future? If so, what resources have you been reading?

It’s worth noting here also that Bitcoin was co-opted by a censorious minority - Theymos and Blockstream - who have maintained an artificially low block size, ostensibly in order to keep a high number of non-mining but full-history nodes. Bitcoin’s competitors such as Ethereum and Monero did not allow a software or discussion forum monoculture and instead have scaling block sizes, and still hard fork to add new scaling features (https://ethresear.ch). This does make them much more useful for small transfers.