Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin is a disaster

metzdowd.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 992 posts

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#381

Post by cesarb »

baby wrote: post #31

That’s nonsense. Bitcoin is as good a store of value as gold due to one unique feature: scarcity. Actually, it’s even less power consuming than the gold industry and is much more transparent. I wouldn’t really advise bitcoin for anything else, like day to day transactions, although I and many of my friends have used bitcoin to transact on dark markets and it works. The only argument I’ve heard about gold being better…

Scarcity only matters if there's demand.

I could take an A4 sheet and draw a triangle on it. It's scarce (there's only one A4 sheet with that precise badly-drawn triangle), but since nobody wants it, it's worth as much as the paper it was drawn on.

The same happens with both Bitcoin and gold. Since they are scarce, as long as there's enough demand their price will increase. However, there's a difference: gold has industrial uses for which there are no replacements with the same characteristics, and this provides a baseline level of demand. For Bitcoin, that is not the case; for any use case, there is (or can be created) another cryptocurrency which can be used instead of Bitcoin. This means there's no floor for the Bitcoin demand; for instance, if everyone decides that Ethereum's proof-of-stake is the best thing since sliced bread, the demand for Bitcoin can almost completely evaporate, and its price will go to zero. (There's a small intrinsic demand for Bitcoin as a collectible, since it was the first proof-of-work cryptocurrency, but that by itself is not enough to sustain its price.)

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#382

Post by bitxbitxbitcoin »

tomphoolery wrote: post #319

I think the biggest failure of Bitcoin is that it was marketed as a "currency" and ended up becoming a commodity. Bitcoin isn't something you use to spend wealth, it's used to hold wealth. Unlike a stock, however, whose value is based on what price people are willing to pay for it, Bitcoin's value is determined by its scarcity. Sound familiar? That's why I hate the term "cryptocurrency". It has a lie baked right into…

The thing is, for the vast majority of civilized human history, currencies have been commodities.

Cryptocommodity does have a nice ring to it, though.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#383

Post by almostdigital »

mindcandy wrote: post #187
rjurney wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t this what Bitcoin Cash is? I’m really asking, but I thought so.

Bitcoin Cash is about trying to make transactions faster and cheaper by increasing the block size (and rate?). Upside: Might be able to use it directly to buy coffee with a reasonable UX. Downside: would likely lead to a small number of huge machines managing the world's blockchain. The Bitcoin Core group really wants people in poor nations to be able to run their own Bitcoin nodes on their cell phones eventually. Th…

No, they want Bitcoin to be a "store of value", whatever that means. Poor people being able to run a full node on a low-end phone is pointless when a transaction fee due to the artificial block size limit is more than a months wages.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#384

Post by hunter-gatherer »

addicted wrote: post #95
hombre_fatal wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the irony. The point is that Bitcoin has introduced an actual "digital cash" currency without institutional/governmental middlemen. That institutions can be built on top of that, and that some people want such institutions, doesn't change the novel utility of finally having a currency that functions like digital cash. It's like saying it's ironic that people use physical USD for anonymous p2p transactions…

No one treats Bitcoin as a currency. It’s treated as an investment vehicle. And the reason behind that is obvious. Something whose value may double in a month or whose value may halve within weeks is a terrible currency. If I expect it’s value to increase then I would be a fool to spend it. If I expect it’s value to drop I would be a fool to accept it. Cryptocurrencies are anything but currencies.

My spouse in European and before her immigration to the US happened I would send her bitcoin or litecoin when she needed money (she was in school). It worked despite the volatility. She'd tell me when she needs some, I'd send it and she'd sell. Total flight time was ~10 minutes. Super useful for sending amounts that are less than 200 dollars.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#385

Post by geofft »

Traster wrote: post #228
geofft wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not even the real danger. The real danger is that by controlling 51% of the network, authoritarian regimes can block transactions by people they don't like or cause people to accept money that turns out not to exist.

I think the point is that any of these style of attacks are quickly discoverable and immediately destroy the value of all bitcoins.

It depends on the target. If some rich, nontechnical bitcoin hodler announced "I can't spend my money because the government is censoring my transactions," do you think the response would be a community investigation (which would risk all the investigators' bitcoins losing their value) or deriding the complainer as a conspiracy theorist who doesn't get how Bitcoin's design makes censorship impossible?

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#386

Post by wpietri »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #245
ojhughes wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also need a valid ID verification to buy BTC from the main platforms now

Yeah, Coinbase changed the other year, only for US citizens, where a passport is insufficient, you need to prove state residency (i.e. for most people, a driver's license). But one of my points here is that, while I'm sure some people here are chomping at the bit to nail me with a gleeful "see? ironic!", I simply don't have to use Coinbase. I can, for example, exchange Bitcoin locally the same way I can trade USD for…

Those analogies don't work for me. I already have "digital cash". The great bulk of the money I spend never takes physical form. And I use Linux because it's demonstrably superior for the tasks most important to me. Bitcoin, though, mainly seems to solve problems for speculators and people engaging in light financial crime. Is there a niche I'm missing?

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#387

Post by bluedevil2k »

darawk wrote: post #344
bluedevil2k wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> overwhelming trend has been upwards You’re cherry picking your price analysis time period. Last year I could have said “BTC has trended down tremendously the last 2 years” and I’d have been right as well.

This is a pretty silly comment. It's you that's cherry picking. The overall trend of Bitcoin over its lifetime has been up. Any complete analysis of its time series would tell you that. Buying at any point in its history would have been a good idea.

This is the same argument Wirecard shareholders always made.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#388

Post by stjohnswarts »

Barrin92 wrote: post #3

>The scarcity of block chain space has led people to re-invent every last feature of the banks they thought they were going to be escaping. This is a pretty funny point because every time I go on twitter and see people talk about crypto, what they're essentially having is a discussion about public policy, and often they seem to try to reinvent institutions that already exist without even knowing it. From market-maker…

But in bitcoin they aren't mandatory and there are essentially no borders. I'm not a fan of it personally but you can cut out the middlemen if you like. As to if that will be the case in the future as more and more regulations (and criminal precedents are set) are added on then it because much murkier.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#389

Post by bluedevil2k »

brianobush wrote: post #379
bluedevil2k wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> overwhelming trend has been upwards You’re cherry picking your price analysis time period. Last year I could have said “BTC has trended down tremendously the last 2 years” and I’d have been right as well.

Do any simple technical analysis and you will find an upward trend over its existence. You don't look at a narrow window.

Technical analysis has continually been shown to not work in predicting future prices.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#390

Post by majewsky »

mandelbrotwurst wrote: post #320
addicted wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one treats Bitcoin as a currency. It’s treated as an investment vehicle. And the reason behind that is obvious. Something whose value may double in a month or whose value may halve within weeks is a terrible currency. If I expect it’s value to increase then I would be a fool to spend it. If I expect it’s value to drop I would be a fool to accept it. Cryptocurrencies are anything but currencies.

Bitcoin is volatile because it is not yet widely used and the market for is still relatively small. Yes, people are investing to speculate on its price, but they are also investing because it has a fixed supply that cannot be inflated away by governments. Take a look at the U.S. M2 money supply YTD and the DXY and consider what happens next as more wealthy investors begin to recognize this advantage inherent in Bitco…

Wealthy investors are exactly the kind of people who (through lobbying) designed the current financial system.
Post reply on HN