Live data from Hacker News

Ending Bitcoin Support

stripe.com

151–160 of 659 posts

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold as a metal has an inherent value though. If not only for jewelry, it also has important uses in electronics. The value associated with bitcoin seems purely sentimental.

Very little though. If the demand for gold were merely industrial it would not need to be mined in such quantities as it has throughout history. I would put jewelry in the 'sentimental' category as well. Not only is Bitcoin purely sentimental, it represents has huge costs in the form of raw energy. Bitcoin's only claim to value is that it is an artifact of an act of ritual sacrifice. One might imagine a precedent in…

Electronics industry actually uses a lot of gold as in 100's of tons. It's use is mostly limited by price so expect increased demand as the price drops.

It's not clear how much demand for gold would increase at say 1/10th the price, but based on other commodities we would probably use more than 10x as much would would represent a solid price floor.

Bitcoin on the other hand has no price floor and can effectively go to zero. Though, in practice much like beanie baby's or other fads people are likely to hold on to good vs sell it for 1/1,000th the price hopping for a comeback. You would expect long term bitcoin sales below 1 cent per coin to be very rare until eventually the network collapses.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#152

Ethereum transaction fees are still in cents. They should start supporting it as a form of payment.

Wouldn't that just contribute to Ethereum transaction fees getting higher, so they eventually have to remove it? They'd need to move to a cryptocurrency with better scalability (something eth might have in the future, but certainly doesn't have now)

Casper + Plasma will solve that.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I hate the comparison of crypto to gold or any other "value asset'. Houses are lived in. Stocks act as a cashflow for companies. Even if the world economy collapses you can still use a solid gold bar as a blunt instrument to kill an animal and eat it. Cryptocurrencies have exactly 0 secondary uses.

What's the secondary use of all the shares of AMZN one might have in their eTrade account? That's also just data, right?

the value backing AMZN shares is the value of the utility that amazon, inc provides to society.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? I look at it (maybe naively) like a solid gold bar. You're not going to walk in to a convenience store and pay with a bar of solid gold; you might flee the country with one though. Beyond that, I totally agree with your read on the post. Linking the pull request[0] was especially backhanded. It feels like there's some underlying frustration…

Gold as a metal has an inherent value though. If not only for jewelry, it also has important uses in electronics. The value associated with bitcoin seems purely sentimental.

Gold is not valuable because you can make jewelry with it. Jewelry is valuable because it's made of gold. Important distinction.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold as a metal has an inherent value though. If not only for jewelry, it also has important uses in electronics. The value associated with bitcoin seems purely sentimental.

This is why I hate the comparison of crypto to gold or any other "value asset'. Houses are lived in. Stocks act as a cashflow for companies. Even if the world economy collapses you can still use a solid gold bar as a blunt instrument to kill an animal and eat it. Cryptocurrencies have exactly 0 secondary uses.

Okay....livestock bludgeoning explains 0.001% of gold's value.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#156

Stellar isn't a direct replacement per-se, it's fast and has near zero transaction fees, but the lumens themselves were not intended to be used as a medium of transaction, only to have a token amount to pay the miniscule fees with. To use the stellar network as intended, there needs to be an anchor that issues USD/EUR/whatever tokens on the stellar network, and then have stripe accept those tokens (issued by anchors…

Even if XLM was not intended to be used for direct payments, is there anything that actually prevents it from being used for it? From everything I see, it actually seems like a pretty good candidate for actual spending.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I hate the comparison of crypto to gold or any other "value asset'. Houses are lived in. Stocks act as a cashflow for companies. Even if the world economy collapses you can still use a solid gold bar as a blunt instrument to kill an animal and eat it. Cryptocurrencies have exactly 0 secondary uses.

What's the secondary use of all the shares of AMZN one might have in their eTrade account? That's also just data, right?

The United States government enforces, with lethal weapons, the right of Amazon shareholders to Amazon’s assets.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold as a metal has an inherent value though. If not only for jewelry, it also has important uses in electronics. The value associated with bitcoin seems purely sentimental.

Very little though. If the demand for gold were merely industrial it would not need to be mined in such quantities as it has throughout history. I would put jewelry in the 'sentimental' category as well. Not only is Bitcoin purely sentimental, it represents has huge costs in the form of raw energy. Bitcoin's only claim to value is that it is an artifact of an act of ritual sacrifice. One might imagine a precedent in…

Gold has "real" demand though in jewelry. It's distributed and longstanding and it has utility. People wear it and use it in real life and value it and wish to keep it in order to look at it and possess it.

That's as tangible as anything else. Nobody would say that there's no demand for musical instruments, or baseballs, because they are optional parts of life that aren't food or shelter.

Gold has intrinsic value in part because people seem to intrinsically like it for what it actually is, not just it's utility in exchange. That's fundamentally different.

Re: Ending Bitcoin Support

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold as a metal has an inherent value though. If not only for jewelry, it also has important uses in electronics. The value associated with bitcoin seems purely sentimental.

This is why I hate the comparison of crypto to gold or any other "value asset'. Houses are lived in. Stocks act as a cashflow for companies. Even if the world economy collapses you can still use a solid gold bar as a blunt instrument to kill an animal and eat it. Cryptocurrencies have exactly 0 secondary uses.

That's false. Google up Ethereum and you'll immediately see thousands of uses besides currency for it, because of its full programming language and massively distributed processing power.
Post reply on HN