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Comment by osrec | Hacker News Reader

An interesting way to put it... Almost like saying the market cap of the British Pound is bigger than Goldman and MS!

Except people are actually using GBP for something. BTC is just people holding on to it hoping it goes up.

Put differently, are there any circumstances where people would buy GBP expecting it to go down? What about BTC? That right there tells you the difference between the two.

This is a fair point ... today.

An interesting question to ponder though is what is the potential in the future. What is the probability that GBP becomes used for something beyond a medium of exchange in the UK?

vs.

What is the probability that BTC becomes a unified international medium of exchange?

Directly proportional to the probability of everyone having a computer and the tech understanding to get a bitcoin wallet.

I'd challenge this. You only need a smartphone to use bitcoin (not a computer). We are looking at about 3B smartphone users today [0] and close to 6B smartphone users by 2020 [1]. That is nearly ubiquitous coverage.

Also, we are in the early stages of bitcoin today, so yes, you need to have some tech understanding. This will all be abstracted away soon. Do people need to understand TCP/IP to use the internet? Understand the internal combustion engine to drive a car? The same will happen for cryptocurrency.

[0] https://www.strategyanalytics.com/strategy-analytics/blogs/s... [1] https://techcrunch.com/2015/06/02/6-1b-smartphone-users-glob...

Not really. I get paid in BTC and I pay my bills with it, buy things on amazon via Purse with it, etc.

There are a great many people building businesses on the unique features of BTC.

This "nobody uses BTC" meme needs to die-- yes, it is still the early days, it's a new technology. We're still in the "hey I got a personal home page on the information super highway!" stage of adoption-- but that didn't mean the internet was useless.... and we haven't even gotten to the bull market and pets.com era. It would be silly to say the web was useless since nobody needs their own homepage.

You pay your bills with BTC? Don't you mean that you pay your bills with USD, which you buy by selling BTC?

Depends on the bill. But yes, you can use a bitcoin backed credit card for a lot of bills, and the biller gets paid in dollars which are converted from the bitcoin balance on the card.

It is a bit of a challenge.

> I get paid in BTC

Out of curiosity: Do you get paid x BTC per month/week or do you get x $/€/£/etc. in BTC?

I tried for a fixed number of bitcoin per month, but they, not being fools, didn't go for it, and I get a USD salary converted at the exchange rate on the date of payment. This has worked out quite well in a bull market, though.

Yes that may be true, but that also means BTC is essentially in a deflationary period as the buying power of the currency is currently going up with time (unlike most Fiat, which the buying power tends to decrease during an inflationary period) so holding BTC makes sense to a lot of players with it. So there is a bit of an incentive for its use as a speculative instrument.

A lot of the speculative buyers don't really understand how volatile BTC can be and that it is a usable currency.

The reason I say its in a deflationary period (while demonstrably false as more BTC are being produced by miners) is because its BTC / person interested in BTC seems to be decreasing.

Yes, effectively we are experiencing deflation against fiat as the price is going up... and also %80 of all bitcoin has been mined, at the next halving and the one after that the rate of new supply will be cut twice.... which means over the next 8 years, its all going to be about adoption of the ecosystem.

It may turn out that bitcoin is not used for buying daily necessities for awhile, but there are a great number of potential new businesses that will be built on and around bitcoin.

Just like the internet gave us Amazon and Facebook, bitcoin will give us next generation companies that are quite different from the current economy.

"Bitcoin is the internet of money" is really applicable slogan.

Perhaps you don't know anybody who uses BTC on a daily basis, but we are certainly out there, and there are probably a lot more of us than you think.

I think you'll find more people use GBP to speculate than to buy "stuff"; in that sense, it's fairly similar to BTC.

It's not. What you say is true, but there's a crucial difference. 65 million people live in the UK and all of those have to pay their taxes in GBP. Also, all listed companies in the UK are listed in GBP. That guarantees that there will always be significant demand for GBP. Not the case for BTC. Note that I'm not saying that there WONT be other reasons that could generate demand for BTC, I'm just saying that BTC is nothing like GBP.

Your point is also valid, however, it had not eluded me. I was just saying that from a speculative perspective, the two are similar (hence, the use of "in that sense"). Essentially what you're saying is that one is government backed and entrenched in society and the other is not - I obviously do not disagree, as this is undeniably true!

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