Digital coins may be on the verge of going mainstream

> When Hotbot was launched and could actually search with some degree of efficiency it wasn't mainstream.

That was 1996.

> When I could post on Twitter and Facebook it was starting to feel like it was mainstream.

That was 2004. So roughly a gap of 8 years.

Bitcoin started in 2009. It's now 2017. A gap of 8 years.

So, uh, how much longer is a "a long way off"?

I can also remember using Altavista and Lycos before I ever heard of a Google. My mom introduced me to google to help me research papers for school. She showed me how to do complex searches and is by no means good with technology.

Absolutely agree bitcoin is not ready for main stream. It's daunting for non techies. It wouldn't be mainstream until I can use it as easy as cash or card. Or mom and pop places accept it.

And so on. The early web was really fucking useful as it started to mature. It solved a lot of real problems.

What is cryptocurrency going to help these people do that they can't do already today?

Rusty Russell has a nice talk about this: https://medium.com/@rusty_lightning/transcript-my-20-year-jo...

I think the relevant question is "are digital coins an important part of future money?"

I think it's telling that this article is mostly concerned with investment, fortunes risked, fortunes made. Salacious and dramatic. Not so relevant right now to that question.

Investment has a role en route to "mainstream" but this isn't the bottleneck in 2017. Use is - buying goods and services.

On that front, the article has little to say.

I'm skeptical that cryptocurrencies will last unless a lot more people start buying and selling things, paying bills, receiving salaries... Even if they do last as digital investment assets, I'm not sure it matters much.

Not all digital currency has keys. World of Warcraft gold, for example. One would imagine there would be a bank of sorts. Coinbase plays that role, at the moment. They supply cold storage.

It does need to become easier to secure your shit -- given. Most ppl aren't going to be verifying a SHA256 hash function output of their client binaries or use (pseudo)-cypherpunk's public key to verify said hash function is correct against a known good output. Unfortunately!

It was in schools by that time. Youngsters could well embrace crypto long before the rest of the normies. I would have loved it when I was a kid. Anyone got kidos who grind crypto?

If you're reading the nytimes for crypto, then you're behind the curve. Bigly. Digital coins. Fucking morons.

& if you're reading the nytimes for crypto investment advice, then you're probably exposing yourself to risk with limited upside. Find someone who is investing in this shit full-time & give your money to them. Even tech VCs invest in crypto hedge funds. Polychain Capital is an example. Olaf Carlson-Wee (who runs it) was on the cover of Forbes recently (I believe ). They're the type of ppl you want investing for you. You could also bing Ari David Paul &/or Chris Burniske. The former is opening a fund. The latter will probably open a fund after his book 'Cryptoassets' is released (I think that's the play).

In fact, there are still many countries who are not using the Internet for "everything". The point being made: If you can do it through the Internet, why have the brick and mortar office in the first place?

The web revolution is just "getting started". I watched Bloomberg the other day where they were trying to make a point on the Nasdaq: This time it is different. The 2000 bubble was an exponential period of exponential growth (in stock prices, and not the underlying)

This time it is not the same. The growth is linear, and most of the companies have infrastructure or even profit to back it up. (Apple eps is not bubbly)

Bitcoin might be easy if you're a techie and interested in it. I am not interested in it and I barely even know where to start. What does it mean to mine stuff? Blockchain? What.. There is no way my parents would remotely get started with Bitcoins at this point. And I believe that once it becomes easy enough for mainstream, it will be as abstract as anything.

The difference is that the entry on a regulated bank's computer can be used to settle a tax bill, or a loan. The entry in a blockchain can do neither.

So at some point you have get the right sort of money to settle debts imposed on you by wider society.

Blockchain 'currencies' are just intangible bottles of wine, artworks, or tulip bulbs and will go through the same bubble and bust as all those things have previously.

"I am hodling." https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=375643.0

Then there's the cost in securing the money, transferring it, and keeping track of it add the cost of fake notes, lost and damaged notes and you should see where I am going with this argument.

Then lets talk about "application of btc for edge cases" moving money internationally is not an edge case, it is something that makes the world go round and disruption in that area is no trivial thing. Its not an edge case. As for crypto being used by people to avoid detection, well, you can do the same things with fiat currencies. Why do you think there are organisation like the FBI hiring highly skilled people to track and trace what people do with their money. In a crypto world there is a better chance for law enforcement to catch criminals.

The best thing about the blockchain is it helps us solve the problem of trust, ofcourse I agree there are problems with this model right now, for example how mining pools can technically launch a 51% attack on the major block-chains and the wole tx/s problem. But what you need to realize is these problems are being acknowledged by the community and are being solved little by little, the technology is progressing there's billions of dollars worth of money tied up in this project. One more point, the block chain is not just about currencies, there's so many more areas where they can be useful. Take a look at the Ethereum project.

Therefore I am someone who really believe that block-chains are here to stay and they are going to effect every single one of us.

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Early merchants used cuneiform impressed tokens (or equiv) to represent some kind of trade, for convenience. You and I agreed to trade 100 bushels of wheat for 10 jugs of wine. I give you 100 bushels. You give me 10 wine tokens. I later redeem tokens for actual wine. Or trade my 10 wine for 2 silk. Or whatever.

Those tokens only became "money" when they became ubiquituous enough to become units of measurement (of value) onto themselves, independent of their original intent.

Meaning the escrow medium became currency. A phase change.

Maybe that happens with bitcoin. I don't see it. For me, bitcoins are akin to collectables, like limited edition baseball cards. Precious bits of data that you might be able to pawn off onto someone else.

Until bitcoin becomes currency (a ubiquituous form of escrow), bitcoin investments is just a form of gambling.

Anyone wanting something like bitcoin to supplant something like US dollars should build towards that future by tackling the escrow use cases.

Taking gold as an example, the ten largest central banks hold a total of about 33,000 tonnes of gold, worth about $1.6 trillion. If bitcoin could cut into, say, one quarter of that, it implies a market cap of $400 billion, or a price of about USD 20,000 per BTC. (Of course, there are good arguments to be made that central banks will never use bitcoin as a reserve asset like gold, but this just shows one example of a rough reckoning for bitcoin's value.)

The price forecasts get more zany & bullish the larger the market you look at, and the larger share you assume bitcoin will take. I personally view it as an option on the potential creation of a new monetary order (with all the risks implied in option ownership). The more that governments and banks use their control over money to dictate the financial lives of their denizens and depositors, the better bitcoin will do.

(I'm only being half-serious. But it's amusing that there isn't a consistent definition. It's basically "you can buy an asset I created out of thin air that may or may not have any utility.")

My girlfriends father was an investment banker during the 80s and is long on gold. Every time I see him he asks me about Bitcoin.

Note: I am not a crypto expert.

There is no difference between a paper bill, a coin and a cheque other than the account it references.

It's actually crazy how much of what most people think about money (such as the above) has actually no anthropological or historical evidence.

But this is the same as "conservation of energy". Everything is zero-sum, and yet we still do stuff.

> It doesn't create wealth.

Well I have two answers for this. One is simple: these are financial products, and people need those. The other answer is a question: what is wealth ? Or, what is value? And these questions are like koans, they are both profound and also without solution. Wild price gyrations on exchanges going back hundreds of years are testament to this.