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Comment by hw | Hacker News Reader

The price of bitcoin may be bubbly but the tech isn't. Most of the people buying in to bitcoin and crypto right now are chasing $ and are mostly driven by speculation instead of an understanding of the tech behind it and its potential.

Regardless if the price doubles in the next year or corrects 30% in a few days, there's a ton that's going on in the blockchain space (if you look past a lot of the get-rich-quick/scammy ICO companies). Payments, cross border transactions, IPFS, security, voting, etc are all things that are being or could be disrupted by the blockchain tech

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This guys says as much towards the end -

""Sago noted that blockchain is a great technology and one day bitcoin could become a major means of settlement.

“But that will be years away, possibly more than a decade -- so there’s no need to buy bitcoin now. Since no one knows when the bubble will burst, the best thing to do here is to stay away from it,” he said."

Yeah, but any ideas who are the big players on blockchain ( on the stock market?)

>or corrects 30% in a few days,

Didn't it just do that?

It was more like a 20% correction but it's already is back up and higher than pre drop.

With abandoning of segwit, Bitcoin will step away to other coins, because of the high transaction fee. It's already too high, so only large sums make sense.

> The price of bitcoin may be bubbly but the tech isn't.

> Payments, cross border transactions, IPFS, security, voting, etc are all things that are being or could be disrupted by the blockchain tech

Oh, certainly cryptographic dilettantes will "disrupt" voting or data storage with their timestamping service.

No, the blockchain tech is a bubble. It attracts idiots who know nothing about the cryptography and algorithms and then they invent data storage layers or voting on totally mismatching thing, so very expensive for very little benefit, even if it works correctly at all. And the mismatch in cryptographic applications usually leads to catastrophic results, unlike most of IT fields.

Voting is one spectacular example. There are several cryptographic protocols for electronic voting, and none has or uses the properties exhibited by blockchain. Using blockchain for voting is just plain dumb.

you have these dilettantes in all emerging markets. The soundness off the underlying technology isn't invalid thereof. And nobody knows if bitcoins itself are validated at the correct price. We could over estimating it right now or underestimating it and a single bitcoin may be worth a million dollar in 10 years or a billion. we have no way to predict these things. only in hindsight it becomes obvious.

> you have these dilettantes in all emerging markets.

Yes, but in blockchain case the market consists almost entirely of dilettantes. And it's even worse: those dilettantes often think of themselves as experts.

> The soundness off the underlying technology isn't invalid thereof.

Only the soundness of the protocol for timestamping documents. The soundness of its usage, on the other hand, is usually invalid, except for maintaining a ledger (which is an ordered sequence of transactions, so exactly the use case for timestamping service).

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