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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

It would be interesting to see a breakdown of WHAT Bitcoin are being trading for (e.g. pure investment, black market goods, standard commercial goods/services).

Without a good understand of what drives Bitcoin's use it is hard to tell if this is an investment bubble or legitimate organic growth. I will say I don't run across all too many sites that support payment via Bitcoin, I know they exist, but it hasn't expanded to be commonplace.

But I've read the drug market on e.g. Tor is alive and well. So maybe that drives a lot of this trading.

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Check out Jim Epstein's article on how its used in Venezuela. Pretty great use case. As long as there are a few intermediary companies, i'm not sure it matters that most companies don't take btc.

Like many bitcoin users, Alberto, the miner who makes $1,200 daily, imports food from the U.S. through Amazon's Prime Pantry service. This would be impossible with bolivars because almost no one outside of Venezuela accepts them as payment, and the growing scarcity of U.S. currency has made purchasing foreign goods with dollars increasingly difficult. Though the Seattle-based retail giant doesn't accept bitcoins itself, plenty of intermediary companies do. Alberto purchases Amazon gift cards through the cryptocurrency-friendly website eGifter, using software to mask the location of his computer, and then routes his orders through a Miami-based courier service.

http://reason.com/archives/2016/11/28/the-secret-dangerous-w...

There's a great discussion of that article in Russ Robert's interview of Epstein on the Feb 13 episode of EconTalk.

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/02/jim_epstein_on.html

Personally, I've done a lot of dev work for Bitcoin for foreign nationals. It gets real annoying real fast to deal with PayPal or traditional international money transfer systems when you're talking contract work levels of money for a small company (too much for shitty remittance services, too little to make the overhead of more complicated bank-managed mechanisms worth it).

And yes, I do pay taxes on my Bitcoin payments. It's somewhat annoying to keep track of everything, but my accountant mostly takes care of it for me. I probably end up losing ~2% to overhead (very little of which is due to Bitcoin itself), which is unfortunate but comparable to even the cheapest traditional services.

Could you elaborate how you find clients like this? Do you specifically look for clients who are willing to pay in bitcoin or work on bitcoin-related projects?

Clients mostly find me. I'm honestly not sure how to optimize for that, it's usually pretty random. I guess for those clients I do seek out, they'll post about wanting developers in forums or mailing lists or whatever.

You can really only speculate, but I think it's safe to say that the strong majority of trading is for speculation.

The darknet markets certainly bring some demand, but it's high-velocity. You don't need to hold BTC, only transact in it.

The remittance market does seem to be there, but it's still in its infancy. Maybe only a small fraction from this.

Similarly, actual e-commerce is quite limited. Bitcoin offers few advantages over PayPal and credit cards for the large majority of consumers. There's only a subset of international transactions and other fringe situations where it makes sense.

I think the other significant market, after the speculators, are those that are ideologically motivated to hold Bitcoin.

>The darknet markets certainly bring some demand, but it's high-velocity. You don't need to hold BTC, only transact in it.

Except that if you're doing something illegal you pretty much do need to hold onto it unless you have a way of laundering it to a national currency.

It seems kind of pointless to engage in crime if you can never spend the profits.

You can, but you have to spend them in bitcoins.

There might even be enough of a legitimate bitcoin economy you could mostly do it, assuming you weren't a really big time criminal. Those guys have ways to launder the profits anyway.

"So maybe that drives a lot of this trading"

No data supports this. For some reason articles occasionally still make this claim, but no sources support this.

In fact I am aware of a study that reports the opposite: that Bitcoin commerce is no longer driven by "sin" activities but instead by legitimate enterprises: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers2.cfm?abstract_id=2808762

I've seen anecdotally a lot of use for cross-border payments. (Try wiring $500 to grandma, and see how many middlemen take a share)

well, there are bunch of services which make it easy (e.g. xoom.com) and allow tracking of transactions and verification of transfers etc.

Unrelated: I remember when xoom.com was an e-mail service provider with free web space back in 1999. Feels weird to see URLs recycled like this.

http://web.archive.org/web/19990508170650/http://www.xoom.co...

xoom rocks this

I just use TransferWise. Works great.

I used to use Xoom but every six months when I'd go to do a transfer they'd need more security verification and it got tiresome. Although that was a few years ago, maybe it is better now.

Services like TransferWise and Xoom are great, provided both parties have access to good banking services. But, a lot of the remittances market is people working in a foreign country sending money back home to people who may well be unbanked. Some of the startups targeting that market, using bitcoin as the transfer layer, are pretty interesting.

Most of the people around me are using it as a speculative investment / store of value. If my sample is not biased and this is the case for the whole universe, that alone should be driving the price up.

The amount of new bitcoins that are being made available is just 12.5 every 10 minutes, this is a mere 1,800 BTC a day, or around USD 2 million. If the main use for bitcoin is store of value or long investments, the available "old" bitcoins are not going to be that many. In my opinion this is the main driver of the price.

Knowing there's continual advancements in all the alternative cryptocoins, one has to wonder why anyone would find it viable to "store value" in a system that may at any moment become objectively obsolete.

More noteworthy is the assumption people have that BTC (or any other early-adopter-deflationary-investment-coin) is able to serve as a currency ecosystem when it's inherently deflationary, thus discouraging the usage of it for anything but speculative hording (which assumes there is a demand by something other than hoarders..) - or rapid short term use, which has proven ineffective and untimely for micropayments [1].

http://www.coindesk.com/lightning-duplex-scalable-bitcoin-mi...

>one has to wonder why anyone would find it viable to "store value" in a system that may at any moment become objectively obsolete.

The people of Venezuela or Kenya would say the same thing about their local currency.

And they often use USD because of that.

Gold has been the de facto store of value for thousands of years. It has more to do with consensus rather than technology. As long as the bitcoin blockchain technology meets some minimum requirements, there won't be a need to move your funds anywhere else.

Furthermore, for all intents and purposes, the technology behind bitcoin is already obsolete. So if the obsolescence hasn't affected it yet, there is no reason to believe that further obsolescence would hurt it.

  there won't be a need to move your funds anywhere else.

Long term value and volatility would beg to differ.

>Long term value

Bitcoin is inherently deflationary as coin creation slows to 0.

>Volatility

Volatility is due to uncertainty and speculation. If Bitcoin survives and is used significantly for transactions volatility will decrease (it already has but not enough).

The assumption is there is no value in a system which is currently insufficient for use as a currency ecosystem, and doomed for obsolescence as other cryptocoins prove to offer objectively more effective feature sets.

  Bitcoin is inherently deflationary as coin creation slows to 0.

This is exactly what makes BTC ineffective as a currency ecosystem and thus counter-productive for speculative hording. Speculative hoarders assume the value comes from limited supply, and so the problem is two fold; the system disincentives spending, starving the economy in paradox. Additionally, as speculators place their bet that BTC's value is derived from a limited supply, we see there are already numerous competitors with improvements over the BTC protocol, and many more sure to come.. so this supply is not limited at all.

The price of bitcoin, the price of transactions, and the ratio of bitcoin to other alts disagrees with that theory.

A unit of Bitcoin is not replaceable with a unit of some random alternative cryptocurrency.

There is a huge barrier to switch. Bitcoin has common mindshare. Why would someone want to use an asset with far less mindshare?

The history of altcoins over the past 6 years supports these points.

Ah I didn't notice that that was your longer comment above this and misinterpreted you.

I'm not convinced that the deflationary spiral argument applies to what I view as a settlement layer, but it's definitely concerning to Bitcoin's future. I will agree that as long as bitcoin is seen as more of a commodity than a transaction layer, it will have a questionable future.

Bitcoin has been "objectively obsolete" for a while (Ethereum, Monero/ZCash etc.) yet its value increases. Maybe people are investing for some other reason such as network effects.

Yeah, I have to imagine that a lot of the practical use cases would be better on Monero or ZCash where cryptographic anonymity can be had.

Especially in black market type transactions this is hugely beneficial.

That said, a lot of the infrastructure is only on the Bitcoin front still - only a few exchanges offer other cryptocurrencies.

It's actually pretty easy to get alts. Buy bitcoin, go to a site like poloniex (there are lots of them) and trade your bitcoin for the alt.

Yeah totally, but my point was a lot infrastructure still revolves around Bitcoin, not alts.

In the case of investing, isn't network effects a euphemism for bubble?

Mostly yes, although Bitcoin probably has more exchanges and more liquidity than other cryptocurrencies.

Altcoins are a concern, but as a store of value, Bitcoin is already 'good enough' that network effects are likely to make it a standard for a long time to come.

It's also good to remember that the tech world is built on all sorts of 'objectively obsolete' technologies.

BTC and other proof-of-work cryptocoins require active upkeep from the CPU/GPU/ASIC miners maintaining the network.

Hardware, and electricity investment is not static for miner upkeep. A fun feature of most cryptocoins is the ever increasing demand for hashing power, forcing miners to constantly consider the value of their real costs versus the real value of the protocol they apply their equipment to.

So by design, the network effect of cryptocoin miners will flock to whatever the current best design is on any given day.

Not with the block size limit serving the market for payments to the first competing cryptocurrency (like Ethereum) that develops a decent wallet and gets critical traction.

If there's a shift, it can quickly turn into a flood, since much of the value of bitcoin is based on speculation, rather than more robust demand from use as a payment vehicle.

Sites that support Bitcoin don't usually make a big deal about it. For example, Microsoft.com accepts bitcoin.

By far the majority of it's use is to escape currency controls in fiat currencies. Mostly from China.

I'm pretty sure active trading with BTC is mostly regarding drug dealing through dark net market places. And the conversion mostly dealers selling BTC for USD to consumers, which buy drugs with BTC and those BTC will be sold back to the consumers for USD.

As far as I can tell there is simply nothing else to do with BTC as of now ... sure you can use it in some shops and you can buy plane tickets from Air Baltic with BTC - but those purchases are always actually more expensive to cover for the volatility of the BTC value and of interest only for users who think its fun to actually use BTC in the real world.

Probably it will either establish as an illegal clandestine super-national currency or it will be hijacked by banks for whatever weird theoretical purpose.

I know plenty of people who buy and hold it for no other reason than it's deflationary. What is wrong with that? Why do people need to transact?

You forgot all the disk encryption malware that asks for bitcoins to decode your files again.

Some of our customers in this sector pay us in bitcoins in exchange for services. They are well known in the sector, so no connected to the dark web.

I'm seeing it more and more. I just saw recently that you can buy gold and silver from Provident Metals using Bitcoin.

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