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

Bitcoin's Golden Future

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 147 posts

Re: Bitcoin's Golden Future

#11

Post by VikingCoder »

delegate wrote: post #6

Bitcoin and other crypto require a well functioning internet infrastructure, otherwise it's just data on a hard-drive. Disconnect a country from the Internet (or filter the traffic) and you're forking the chain. Spend on both networks by buying other (unfiltered) crypto. There are states (even large ISPs) that can do that. Also, the first thing to go in case of global conflict is the global Internet. Countries will t…

"Crypto currencies will be useless in this case, losing all of their value."

Pedantic nitpick - there are crytpocurrencies which are not distributed proof-of-work blockchains, and would not necessarily lose all of their value.

Re: Bitcoin's Golden Future

#12

Post by rm_-rf_slash »

imaginenore wrote: post #5

"Digital currencies have no fundamental value" That argument never made any sense to me. What's the fundamental value of $1? People assign value to all things based on how desirable they are (the demand). There are rare exceptions, like when a government ties their national currency to something like the dollar, but that immediately creates a black market, where it trades for its real value, and because of that, the…

The fundamental value of $1 is the full faith and credit of the United States Government and the economy of America.

The fundamental value of cryptocurrencies is a shared agreement of value amongst investors.

I imagine some snotty 14-year old would argue that there is no fundamental distinction between the two but that's not being economically serious.

Re: Bitcoin's Golden Future

#13

Post by Cthulhu_ »

python1234 wrote: post #7
thecopy wrote: post #4

Transaction time and energy inefficiency makes Bitcoin's future not so golden, imo.

This I can agree with after selling some code from bitcoins it can take hours before I get my coins. I'm not sure they can do anything about it at this point.

You'd probably see similar delays in banking if all banks had to record all their transactions in a central database. It's simply not a scalable system.

Re: Bitcoin's Golden Future

#14

Post by TACIXAT »

imaginenore wrote: post #5

"Digital currencies have no fundamental value" That argument never made any sense to me. What's the fundamental value of $1? People assign value to all things based on how desirable they are (the demand). There are rare exceptions, like when a government ties their national currency to something like the dollar, but that immediately creates a black market, where it trades for its real value, and because of that, the…

The dollar is tied to the American government and the American economy. It is not created for profit, but rather for stability. I see this as a sharp contrast to Bitcoin, which is created for profit (by miners) and only supported by speculation and the online drug trade. It is incredibly deflationary while the dollar is incredibly stable. While the dollar doesn't have a tangible 1:1 backing, it is backed by 330 million people (+many others who do business with the US) participating in the largest world economy.

Re: Bitcoin's Golden Future

#15

Post by criddell »

_lbaq wrote: post #3
vocatus_gate wrote: post #2

The big mystery to me is whether Bitcoin is the Myspace or Facebook of digital currency. Only time will tell.

Just like Facebook, the usurper have to do something allot better to drag people away.

I think it's easier to unseat Bitcoin than Facebook. With a cyrpto currency, it seems like all you would have to do is make mining more profitable on your currency than on Bitcoins.

Re: Bitcoin's Golden Future

#16

Post by Cthulhu_ »

murph37 wrote: post #8
vocatus_gate wrote: post #2

The big mystery to me is whether Bitcoin is the Myspace or Facebook of digital currency. Only time will tell.

This is a large concern for me. If cryptocurrencies begin to attract more users and widespread adoption, what is preventing a new coin that corrects Bitcoin's inefficiencies from ultimately gaining more users and superseding it? I would love to know your guy's thoughts.

Nothing, and it's actually easy to make the argument that that was the intent, in the open source, freedom of choice, no centralization, heck the powers kind of environments Bitcoin became popular through.

Re: Bitcoin's Golden Future

#17

Post by 1ba9115454 »

murph37 wrote: post #8
vocatus_gate wrote: post #2

The big mystery to me is whether Bitcoin is the Myspace or Facebook of digital currency. Only time will tell.

This is a large concern for me. If cryptocurrencies begin to attract more users and widespread adoption, what is preventing a new coin that corrects Bitcoin's inefficiencies from ultimately gaining more users and superseding it? I would love to know your guy's thoughts.

There are plenty of coins already that are technically better than Bitcoin. It's just that Bitcoin has the network effect.

So perhaps one day a new coin will overtake Bitcoin, but my guess is that the coin will need a very distinct advanatge to gain traction.

Re: Bitcoin's Golden Future

#18

Post by optimuspaul »

imaginenore wrote: post #5

"Digital currencies have no fundamental value" That argument never made any sense to me. What's the fundamental value of $1? People assign value to all things based on how desirable they are (the demand). There are rare exceptions, like when a government ties their national currency to something like the dollar, but that immediately creates a black market, where it trades for its real value, and because of that, the…

I think fundamental is the wrong word. Dollars have a fundamental value. There only purpose is to transfer debts. You can argue that if the government(s) fell that the value is diminished or reduced to zero, but that doesn't remove that fact that it has fundamental value.

I think that the same argument could be held for digital currencies, they were created for a similar purpose and then would also have fundamental value. The value that digital currencies has is far more tenuous than fiat currencies or gold.

But don't get me started on the value of gold. Gold has the same issues as fiat, it's just more likely to be stable after the complete breakdown of society.

Re: Bitcoin's Golden Future

#19

Post by hectorlorenzo »

criddell wrote: post #15
_lbaq wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like Facebook, the usurper have to do something allot better to drag people away.

I think it's easier to unseat Bitcoin than Facebook. With a cyrpto currency, it seems like all you would have to do is make mining more profitable on your currency than on Bitcoins.

This could easily lead to a race to the bottom. Maybe adoption will be the determining factor? What could determine a successful adoption rate for a cryptocurrency: governments, citizens, corporations? Amazon accepting a specific cryptocurrency and thus making it useful for the general public?

Re: Bitcoin's Golden Future

#20

Post by imaginenore »

m_mueller wrote: post #9
imaginenore wrote: post #5

"Digital currencies have no fundamental value" That argument never made any sense to me. What's the fundamental value of $1? People assign value to all things based on how desirable they are (the demand). There are rare exceptions, like when a government ties their national currency to something like the dollar, but that immediately creates a black market, where it trades for its real value, and because of that, the…

I think the comparison to gold does make more sense than to Fiat. Fiat has inherent value in that you can buy all kinds of goods with it. Crypto so far has hardly another use than to trade against Fiat, which atm. is similar to gold (which does have industrial applications but its price would also collapse if all the reserves got dumped). This may change in the future, albeit probably not with BTC given its tech stac…

Do you realize Bitcoin is accepted in orders of magnitude more places (as in physical stores) than gold as a direct method of payment?

And then Bitcoin is accepted in tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of online stores.

Also only something like 10% of gold is used industrially, the rest is regular hoarding.

And Bitcoin has other uses as well.

But even if you ignore all that, you still can't answer what the fundamental value of 1kg of gold is - it's value is determined by the supply/demand, and has a lower limit, which is it's mining cost, which also changes all the time due to depletion, fuel costs, technological advanvements, land costs, etc.

Post reply on HN