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Just because someone expresses skepticism that makes them a hater?
Skepticism is different from hating, absolutely, but the user didn't say they were skeptical - they said there was "no way". That's hating and you have to ignore it - skepticism and critical feedback you value, treasure, and seek out.
>Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency. Hah!
People should be required to place a monetary bet whenever they make a bold claim in public. I think we would see less comments like this one.
How much money would you have made if you'd bought $1000 worth of bitcoin on that day?
But there is no doubt that buying that many bitcoins at that time would have been difficult. The few sellers you would have been able to find would have probably raised their price when seeing your interest.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/29/bitcoin-fo...
That four-year-old submission has just two comments: one expressing doubt, one expressing optimism. Interestingly, despite growing worldwide adoption of Bitcoin, comments about it on HN continue to be more or less evenly split between doubters and optimists. And I wouldn't be surprised if comments to this submission are evenly split between those same two camps. No amount of evidence or reasoning seems to persuade ei…
But it is not that black and white, is it? While it is quite clear that Bitcoin has "value" as long as people are willing to trade it (i.e., indefinitely), there is still no reason to assume that it will ever stop having these extreme fluctuations. To the contrary, I'd say that, as time progresses, we observe Bitcoin having the same problems that the gold standard had, mixed with an additional proneness to speculatio…
At scale, things gain stability. If a newborn loses a pound, that's 10% of their weight. If I do, it is .5% of mine.
It is also possible that people here on HN do not have enough intuition about ideas, which could possibly change the world just like bitcoin is doing it right now. It's fun to read retrospective posts here on HN, but apparently innovation starts elsewhere..
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The value of a currency lies entirely in the perception of that value. I don't consider bitcoin different from a traditional currency, except that its rate of production is known in advance. It will keep having value because by now enough people think it does.
Bitcoin is different in that is the purest form of a fiat currency in the sense that it is backed by nothing and thus has no intrinsic value whatsoever. Traditional currencies, on the other hand, are at least fractionally backed by (usually) gold and government bonds which in itself are backed by a government's ability to tax its citizens. There is also a second problem in that BTC is deflationary by design. Deflatio…
HDTV's have had strong deflation for years, but I still have one.
>Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency. Hah!
People should be required to place a monetary bet whenever they make a bold claim in public. I think we would see less comments like this one.
and let's revisit this discussion 5 years from now. right now there is so much fluctutation within BC it might as well be tulips. maybe it will become a stable currency, maybe it won't.
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Exactly. I was a bit taken aback that the tone of this submission was, "See! Bitcoing worked !" Uh, no one outside of a few small circles has any idea what it is. And any currency as volatile as Bitcoin is broken.
That's like saying populations or startup stocks are broken. Do you think Facebook had a very smooth, progressive, and always upward growth? The stabilization comes at the end of the S curve. And Bitcoin isn't just a currency, it's a lot of things. One of them is a store of wealth, like gold, and it's doing wonders in that role.
Just one of the many, many ways bitcoin is better than gold as a store of exchange-value: embedded security. No armored trucks, no vaults.
And look at China. BTC's recent rise is partially attributable to the fact it's a so-far-legal method of moving ¥ out of the country. And their government looks to be in support. The reason it's illegal to exchange yuan for foreign currency is so it doesn't leave the system and lose value. With BTC, the yuan is received by the buyer as something of value, instead of something to be "disposed of," thereby not diluting its value.
Ie. BTC can move currencies without making them lose exchange-value. That's not a small deal.
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People should be required to place a monetary bet whenever they make a bold claim in public. I think we would see less comments like this one.
It's an idea for a startup.