What's with all the extreme negativity with Bitcoin and its trading price on HN? I've been noticing that in all the BTC related threads recently. Yes, this is possibly getting too large too fast. Yes there is a chance this is a bubble because the barbers and shoeshine boys are talking about it. But there is also a chance that we genuinely are at the beginning of the transition from Fiat currencies to crypto (beginnin…
For technical reasons, Bitcoin honestly sucks. The block rate is so low that transactions cost many dollars and take hours to confirm. This is only going to continue to get worse, as it turns out that having a global ledger is actually the opposite of a decentralized system. I can't do anything with Bitcoin that I can't do more easily with my credit card. It offers no value except a tool for rampant speculation. Bloc…
Sure, all of this technology is nascent and scaling issues are yet to be solved. But it's far from useless in its current form. Not every application needs 10s of thousands of txs per second, for example ICOs. I know that this is another hot-button issue, but some of us feel strongly that people should not be protected from themselves. And that's the most important thing that blockchain offers: true freedom, and that's why it's so exciting. Especially at this junction, in the wake of the internet having been co-opted by big business and big government.