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Comment by Mikeb85 | Hacker News Reader

It'll never happen. Any sort of currency needs to be backed either by an asset or a government, otherwise it's essentially worthless.

Cryptocurrencies have value because they're basically one big ponzi scheme where people invest because they are confident someone after them will buy it, but the odds of them having staying power are slim because, at the end of the day, there is nothing with actual worth backing them.

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I strongly disagree - If I know I can trade an item to someone else for something I want, I will accept it as payment. It doesn't matter what any government thinks about it, nor whether it can be used for something other than trading.

Worth can be assigned by people. There is nothing "backing" gold, we have simply decided that it is worth something.

Gold is used in jewelry and electronics. It'll always have some worth, though personally I do think it's overpriced.

Someone once said that the price of gold is a 6,000-year-old bubble. There is no doubt that the price of gold far exceeds it's utilitarian value. The same is true of cryptocurrencies.

> where people invest because they are confident someone after them will buy it

That's stock market.

Except in the stock market, you get equity in a real business with real assets, and other perks that go along with ownership.

Yes, but one difference is that if the price of a company goes low enough, someone will buy it and sell off it's assets. Depending on what sort of assets the company has, this is even something that banks will finance.

Not every scheme is a Ponzi scheme, you may want to read up on what that means.

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