It breaks my heart how few people in HN appreciate/understand BTC. This technology is creating a new monetary system + Internet for human kind.
What would it take to get you to read the bitcoin white paper and comprehend that bitcoin was not created as an investment vehicle but as an electronic cash system. So Wall Street is speculation on bitcoin. What did you expect?
Bitcoin is as useful at $100 dollars as it is at $1 million. Why then are we fixated on price when this technology can change millions of lives? Let's talk about the many awesome things we can do by coding trust into a decentralized Internet. Price is just a footnote.
I don't know - in their current forms BTC/ETH offer a stupendously wasteful, environmentally disastrous way to add / subtract numbers or execute bits of code for $10-20 a transaction, for bits of digital data that, based on the mania of the masses may be worth $100 this week and $5000 next week.
I've read the white paper and the Ethereum yellow paper - the technology is undeniably fascinating and cool, and I have some hope for proof-of-stake systems curbing the current waste, but in their present form they're almost useless as a monetary / payment system, and the only thing I really see happening in the crypto space is various get-rich-quick schemes based around issuing probably-worthless tokens of data, and a million and one ways to convert them amongst each other.
If they can pull off merging mainnet into ETH2 it'll be a big improvement environmentally & scalability-wise, so yes. Supporting ETH/BTC now is pretty harmful to the world.
Not sure if the volatility thing will be solved, it's still people bidding at the value of intrinsically meaningless bits of data. But maybe more genuine utility, i.e. a payment solution better/cheaper than cash / credit / brokerages, would help justify the valuation. Ethereum's decentralized computation model might find more actually-beneficial-to-the-world applications if the tx costs weren't so painful.
Private keys are dangerously powerful for the average person, i.e. lose or have them stolen and you've lost your money forever. But that's a feature too, you can "open an account" in the few milliseconds it takes for your computer to generate a keypair.
Agree about private keys, but I see the problem a little differently.
Combustion engines are dangerous and frankly beyond the comprehension of the average person, but cars put such a heavy layer of abstraction on top of them that anyone can get a ton of utility from the combustion engine.
Software and smart contracts like key escrow services will solve this problem I bet.
Volatility, I don't agree with. Look at DAI, it's completely decentralized and has done a great job pegging to the dollar. With DAI you can participate in DeFi / smart contracts without ETH volatility.
> Bitcoin is as useful at $100 dollars as it is at $1 million. Why then are we fixated on price when this technology can change millions of lives? Let's talk about the many awesome things we can do by coding trust into a decentralized Internet. Price is just a footnote.
That's a great argument, but for BCH (or any other altcoins without a speculation problem) instead of BTC. There's virtually no technical differences between the bitcoin family of cryptocurrencies. That implies that there's no artificial limit on supply of coins, either. Just fork or spin up a new blockchain if there's ever a real supply crunch for cryptocurrency in general.
The BTC mining pools could trivially mount a >50% attack on BCH or any of the other alt-coins, but it's apparently not even worth it for the lulz. All the more reason to use them as simple currencies if that's the case. Any fiat currency issuer would be overjoyed with a 0% interest in counterfeiting.
> That implies that there's no artificial limit on supply of coins, either. Just fork or spin up a new blockchain if there's ever a real supply crunch for cryptocurrency in general.
I agree and this is the argument that I haven’t heard a good response to. If Bitcoin has value and utility, why shouldn’t a second chain, with the same parameters, have roughly equal value and utility?
Gold is on the periodic table of elements. You can’t make another gold.
For the same reason that a photocopy of a dollar bill isn't worth anything. As long as you can distinguish between two things there's enough room for a value difference, even if they are functionally the same.
The value in bitcoin comes from the boatloads of people trusting it enough to use in one form or another. If you spin up a bitcoin fork you'll need a lot of work to get people to believe in your fork.
> The value in bitcoin comes from the boatloads of people trusting it enough to use in one form or another. If you spin up a bitcoin fork you'll need a lot of work to get people to believe in your fork.
Sure, but the trust transfers a lot easier than to some completely different cryptocurrency because the only meaningful difference is which protocol the miners and clients accept and which block hash is the root. People trust that bitcoin has value because not many people are going to switch to a new client that e.g. accepts 10^20 bitcoin rewards to miners per block; it's in too few people's self-interest. Or, more specifically, if a group of people do want to issue 10^20 coins every block then the bitcoin protocol serves as a coordination method for them to do that with each other.
Being on the first blockchain has only sentimental and inertial value.
Bitcoin is a scare digital asset; scarcity is why it has the value that it does.
You can’t just spin up another Bitcoin blockchain and expect to have the ecosystem move that chain without sacrificing their hash power on another chain when they’re deeply invested in the original $1 trillion (and growing) chain.
That’s like suggesting Apple move to a copy of the NASDAQ exchange.
Lindy effect. Sure you can copy it, but the original remains. The scarcity exists inside the network, and in a sense you cannot copy it, because the copy is just that - there is no use in copying it.
> Lindy effect. Sure you can copy it, but the original remains. The scarcity exists inside the network, and in a sense you cannot copy it, because the copy is just that - there is no use in copying it.
That's why I refer to it as a speculative bubble; everyone is betting on how much other art appreciators will pay for artsy bitcoins in the nebulous future.
It's also only moderately explanatory; the original BTC client doesn't work on the current network any more, either. So what does BTC have that BCH doesn't? They share a root block.
I loved the idea and for a couple of years I was using Bitcoin as a currency whenever I could. I even sold some speakers to someone over 1000 miles away on Craigslist once since they were willing pay me in BTC in advance.
At this point though, and really for the last 3-4 years or so, it’s fairly useless as a currency and it’s an environmental nightmare.
I read the Bitcoin whitepaper and I find blockchain a terrible and entirely inelegant technology. It is horribly inefficient and I can think of only a handful of domains where blockchain's properties would outweigh its problems. Cryptocurrencies with no central issuer are possibly one such domain, but do we really need them (esp. at that environmental cost)?
Bitcoin the technology is interesting, in so far as it has inspired new technology that is more useful or less wasteful. Bitcoin the asset is pretty terrible for anything besides speculation.
> Government-issued currencies have value because they represent human trust and cooperation. There is no wealth and no trade without these two things, so you might as well go all in and trust people.
Hm..
If you bought BTC when this article came out you'd be up 250%
what does that statement mean, though? for example, if you bought GameStop you would have 6x'd. are we to assume that GME is twice the "investment" that BTC is? twice as impressive? twice as meaningful to the world?
no, of course not.
all of this is fueled on speculation, and picking arbitrary date ranges and prices on speculation as a basis for comparison outside of relative speculative performance is not super useful - as recent events have shown, things can move quickly based on purely market- and popularity based events.
Maybe, not convinced that market was quite as liquid as BTC. Either way, is it really a useful, interesting, or novel comparison this late in the game?
If you bought Enron in 1997 and sold in 1999, you would be up ~100%. If you sold in 2000, you'd be up ~200%. If you bought earlier, those figures would be even higher.
Obviously different scale, but they seem similar in my view - bubbles based on assets of little practical utility (who buys groceries with BTC with $12 transaction fees and your wallet doubling or halving every week?), fueled by unpredictable crowd mania.
That's what it always comes to, doesn't it? It can't be that bad if it turns a profit. The same argument used by pirates, slave traders, tobacco CEOs and money printing central bankers.
And mathematically-issued currencies such as cryptocurrency have value because they represent mathematically-provable trust, which is more reliable than human trust.
The mathematical trust just ensures the transactions will all add up and history won't be rewritten. You still need the human trust to deliver the sold goods, have your exchange give you USD for your BTC, etc.
What would it take to get you to read the bitcoin white paper and comprehend that bitcoin was not created as an investment vehicle but as an electronic cash system. So Wall Street is speculation on bitcoin. What did you expect?
Bitcoin is as useful at $100 dollars as it is at $1 million. Why then are we fixated on price when this technology can change millions of lives? Let's talk about the many awesome things we can do by coding trust into a decentralized Internet. Price is just a footnote.