Hi, this is my first post here.
I'm a CS graduate who has been fascinated with crypto(graphy/currency) and cipherpunk since I was in high school. As an adult, my only take on all of it is: Blockchains are too cool to be this useless.
Where I live, the shills and hodltards have crawled back into their holes, the techies and true believers seem to be back a little. I want to get back into caring about crypto an search for a dev job in this space. So when somebody asks me "what do you do", how do I answer them without making crypto sound like and end unto itself? I'd like to be able to answer: "Such and such amount of tangible goods and services are paid for with btc".
There's a meetup in a pub near me that tries to onboard people onto the lightning network (I think?) by letting you buy a coffee with lightning, sounds fun. I'd consider sats spent towards a cup of coffee a contributing towards the "true GDP" of the BTC economy. I wouldn't count: Block Rewards, NFTs, any money made in financial products.
When I think of "actual commerce" done Bitcoin, the following comes to mind:
- Some VPS/VPN you can buy with btc
- Darknet stuff
- Anything that accepts bitpay-type services. In 2015, I bought a pizza with Bitcoin. Ouch.
Basically I'm trying to start up a discussion around the following question: How would you go about estimating the "true GDP" of btc?