Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. Cryptocurrencies have shown that the new generation (as well as the old one) can embrace new and decentralized technologies.

The decentralized web is already a "successful" idea. The correct implementation for its wide use is not there yet. But it will be there.

It is just a matter of time before we have a bigger "dark web", a decentralized web, decentralized payment networks, and still have Google, Facebook, and the likes.

As the internet population grows, and as people move to more digital lifestyles; the people won't be limited (or gravitate) to a single portal. Instead, they'll spread over different networks/infrastructures for their different needs. Facebook can still be successful and grow while the decentralized internet happen.

The Internet is growing both in number (population) and in use. People today use the Internet to surf, chat, read the news, buy stuff online, book flights and hotels, pay taxes, work, study, find partners, buy drugs, etc...

Cryptocurrencies are used for financial speculation, fraud and illegal trade. With only tiny fractions of the cryptocurrency-using fraction of society using them for other purposes. I would not call that nonsense the embrace of a generation.

* are used for financial speculation, fraud and illegal trade.

* gold, diamond, stocks, paper money, etc. would also fit the bill

This is a disingenuous comment, all of those other things are primarily used for something else; so you either miss the point he's making or you're being unnecessarily pedantic.

Making an overly generalizing statement of a revolutionary technology based on how some people use them in just the first few years they were invented ("cryptocurrencies are used for bad things") is disingenuous and disregards their future potential.

No, it's a factual statement of where the tech currently stands. You're confusing your hope of what it might become with what it currently is.

"factual"

As I said elsewhere in this thread: you have provided no data to back up your "facts".

I am annoyed at people who constantly claim to know how are cryptocurrencies used, but... it's just what they think and have no data to show it.

Well hey, I'm annoyed by people who think their delusions of what something could be is the same thing as reality. I'm a huge fan of crypto, but the OP is correct about what it currently is and who's mostly using it. Demanding evidence of people's experience with things is just a cheap cop out to avoid discussion. Anyone involved in the space knows the value is largely speculation driven at this point and if you need that proven to you, then you don't know the tech or the community well enough to be conversing about it.

"Anyone involved in the space knows the value is largely speculation"

I agree value appears to be driven a lot by speculation, but you are changing subject. We were talking about usage. It's pretty obvious from payment processors, from people in the industry (have you ever attended a Bitcoin conference and talked to users? I have), from usage metrics (increasing tx rate, which is normally not related to speculators, as buying and leaving coins on exchange doesn't create a tx), and from other sources, that usage of cryptos is growing.

So, no, you can't say you "just know" cryptocurrencies aren't used by anyone.

PS: I am a crypto dev, wrote miners, founded TAV (mining ASIC integrator), and have been in the Bitcoin industry for 7 years. I know a thing or two.

I agree usage is growing, but that is not the topic. Most coins are moving not because of usage but because of speculation, people are buying largely because of speculation, trading because of speculation, and selling because of speculation; the majority of transaction volume is not coming from using Bitcoin as a currency to buy goods and services, it's from speculators entering the market due to the price rise.

Speculators do NOT (typically) cause coins to move. Buying, holding, and selling BTC on an exchange does NOT create transactions on the blockchain.

(Withdrawing and depositing BTC creates transactions, however most speculators do not do this, as most people leave BTC on exchanges.)

And I would put gold and diamonds in the same bin as cryptocurrencies - a waste of resources that achieves very little good, beyond their industrial uses. Stocks are headed that way. The original use of providing capital to productive enterprise has waned. Paper money is still overwhelmingly used to facilitate legitimate trade, though obviously on a decline.

So? They are being used. The market cap of cryptocurrencies is over $100b which is significant money; and the exchange of these currencies is liquid as of date.

Imagine how much they'll be worth when they do something useful...;)

It's tiny, no more than the size of a single company in the real market. Crypto is cool, no need to exaggerate its size as more relevant than it really is, right it it's a tiny drop in a huge ocean of capital, it is not significant. The market cap of just the top 500 companies is $17.4 trillion.

This comment sort of annihilates itself.

If the market cap of the top 500 companies is 17.4 trillion then that averages out to 17400/500 which is a bit under 35 billion each. Which makes bitcoin as large or larger than a good chunk of those F500 companies.

I'm sure you could have picked a better example to illustrate just how tiny bitcoin is.

Uh, bitcoin is the size of a single company, that's a pretty good example of how small it is. It's 1/6th the size of Google, that's not a world changing amount of capital.

Again, that's incredible to me. Just think about it: something that was launched less than a decade ago in 'fire and forget' mode is right up there with one of the tech giants. It's not quite world changing but let's wait until it is over until we call that one.

I'm a big fan of crypto, I'm just saying don't count your chickens before they hatch; it isn't world changing yet, might be or might not be eventually but no need to exaggerate.

> it isn't world changing yet, might be or might not be eventually but no need to exaggerate.

Agreed. But think of it as my expectations of what Bitcoin would become being rather lower than where it is already. I'm absolutely amazed at how far it has come.

Well, how about it is larger than the GDP of Morocco? (I know GDP is not Market Cap, but $100bn is no way small).

8 years after forming Google, the company wanted to raise $2.7B USD in their IPO. 8 years after Bitcoin was released, BTC has a market cap of $70B USD.

Bitcoin is great for playing poker and buying ... y'know, things. That's because bitcoin is the bitcoin of cryptocurrencies. What are the other 999 actually used for day to day?

Crytocurrencies provide people with the ability to execute censorship resistant transactions.

Who else would want to send censorship resistant transactions other than people who are at risk of being censored?

The modern era is still relatively free of censorship, and thus the people using cryto are pretty far on the shady end of the spectrum.

But trend toward censorship in the modern era, is worrisome. Perhaps a whole lot more people are going to have to protect themselves against censorship in the future. And by censorship, I mean censorship done by ANYONE, including both the government, AND ultra powerful corporations that may as well be the government.

"The modern era is still relatively free of censorship"

Don't take this as an insult but what an ignorant comment... Financial, political & journalistic censorship (all inter-related) is rampant. Start by reading: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_press

And follow up with 'Manufacturing Consent'.

I don't disagree that these things are bad. But all things are relative.

Perhaps I just have a bleaker imagination of how bad things COULD be.

I worry that as bad as things are today, we will look back on this era as a comparative golden age of freedom.

"tiny fractions"

Citation needed. You have no data to back up your claims.

In my circles, cryptos seem to be primarily used either for person-to-person transactions (housing rent, beer money, small loans between friends) or--interestingly--B2B payments (US company paying their Chinese suppliers; Bitcoin excels at fast international payments.)

> cryptos seem to be primarily used either for person-to-person transactions (housing rent, beer money, small loans between friends)

I would be pretty miffed if someone as paying me their share of rent in crypto. No merchant I interact with accepts them, so it would be more than a hassle to convert into USD (fees, rapid valuation changes, etc).

But you might do it anyway, if it's enough of a value to your customers (like accepting a credit card payment)

If OP would put substance to their claim, I might be willing to look into that. It's nice that cryptocurrency is used as intermediate in your circles but surely you don't seriously disagree with my 'tiny fractions' of society being like that.

Can you give details about those B2B payments?

B2B: https://blog.bitpay.com/understanding-bitcoins-growth-in-201...

Recently, an international client was hosting a website surrounding a global sporting event. At a critical moment, their servers came under a DDoS attack. They needed our protection and they needed it immediately. The sporting event would have been completed by the time their financial institution could initiate a wire transfer. And it would have been several days later before our bank would have received the payment. However with bitcoin, the customer was able to pay quickly and we were able to activate the protection immediately. Bitcoin is hands-down the fastest way to secure an international payment from a new client in the event of a DDoS attack.“

LOL, maybe not the best source to post when we are talking about legitimate uses.

Something must be going over your head (hence the downvotes that you deserve)... You understand they are not paying the hackers, right? They paid a reputable InfoSec company for urgent DDoS protection. That's a perfectly legit use case.

That's an interesting claim that I'd like to see proven.

> Cryptocurrencies are used for financial speculation, fraud and illegal trade.

You mean like cash?

> With only tiny fractions of the cryptocurrency-using fraction of society using them for other purposes.

Well, tiny datapoint from tiny fraction: I've only used bitcoin for totally legit stuff. But I concede that all the other transactions might have been financial speculation, fraud and illegal trade. But I can't prove it either way, and I suspect neither can you.

> I would not call that nonsense the embrace of a generation.

Well, I would not call it nonsense either. And it probably isn't the embrace of a generation. But it is moving the needle.

> You mean like cash?

I would guess that the OP means 'yes like cash, but cash is also used for other things whereas crypto currencies are not practically used for anything else.'

"crypto currencies are not practically used"

Again and again: no data demonstrates this claim.

The burden of proof isn't on the claim there is no practical usage. The default hypothesis is no usage.

The burden of proof is on the claim that non-speculation uses are greater than the speculation uses.

"The default hypothesis is no usage."

Says who? I agree speculators are a big fraction of crypto users, but you are making the even bolder claim that "crypto currencies are not practically used". Consider that lots of hard & anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15094514

> Says who?

Says the burden of proof. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof

Here's your data, a single sample size:

- I live in a US city with a population over 1M. - I have about 0.5 BTC - I have never - ever - seen a place in the Real World where I can spend it. - I cannot be sure of this assertion, but it's worth saying anyway: The only place online I can recall seeing that accepts BTC as payment is PIA vpn service. I cannot recall any other place (this certainly doesn't mean there aren't any!).

If a reasonably tech-savvy person cannot spend it in the real world, it does not meet my standards for something being 'practical'. Period.

I spend my bitcoins on: my CPA, computer gear (Newegg), games (Steam), VPS and domain names (Vultr, Gandi), furniture (Overstock), etc

Also you fail to realize it but Bitcoin's practicality extends to more than just payments: it's great for informal person-to-person transactions. I gift bitcoins to my family overseas, I pay back lunch money to coworkers in bitcoins, etc. In fact I think person-to-person transactions is one of Bitcoin's most promising use case...

It seems fairly uncontroversial to me to state that the vast majority of people who own cryptocurrency are treating it like a commodity, not like a currency. There's nothing wrong with that, and these people have made a lot of money (dollars) so far, but there's certainly a distinction to be made.

> There's nothing wrong with that, and these people have made a lot of money (dollars) so far,

They have only made a lot of dollars when they sell their crypto currency. Until then it is all fantasy, which is something a lot of .com millionaires would agree with, especially the ones that sold their solid companies for stock in less solid companies.

Some of the speculation investors really believe in a future with cryptocurrencies. They want to be able to use it for all payments.

I would love to go to any country without needing to buy foreign currencies, and do conversion calculations on the spot. I would love to own a currency that is not controlled by governments and banks. I would love to wire transfer money on Friday evening and let it clear on Friday evening instead of Monday or Tuesday.

I'm sure it's also more convenient for a European airline to buy a Boeing without needing to time it right for their European bank to transfer the money first to a New York bank and then to Boeing, because of the time difference and bank opening hours. That's crazy, and reality.

What a retarded system are we living in? Time for some disruption! Then we will really find out which currencies are in a bubble.

The internet is growing in users (http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/) and sites (https://news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-surve...) BUT this growth means most of it goes to Google and Facebook (see case Latin America: https://www.sandvine.com/resources/global-internet-phenomena... and https://blog.parse.ly/post/2855/facebook-continues-to-beat-g...). Basically the internet grew about 7% in users from 2015 to 2016, but FB/G mobile traffic share in Latin America grew 16%. It's hard to get better statistics, but the statistics we have point to indeed a FB/G domination.

As for cryptocurrencies, as long as they are dependent on ISPs, they aren't actually decentralized. They're quite vulnerable, and the only way out is to not depend on ISPs or the whole wired internet to be honest. Blockstream is a good way forward.

Basically, the new decentralized web must be wireless-first: http://ssb.staltz.com/view/%25a1xQAO6/UCC370Cq+HcWjEni1ziXH+...

But all of things will never be found, if google or facebook don't point you to them. The author was saying, these 2 portals control access to everything else. Without join those 2 platforms, you have no visitors, thus the dark web.

Basically all decentralised systems share the same flaw. You have to download the entire dataset or use an index for every possible query which means the index will be larger than the data itself.

What? Why would the index be larger than the data itself?

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