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Comment by charlesdm | Hacker News Reader

Same boat as you -- I wanted to buy some in the early days but ultimately didn't for various reasons. At the time, it was an experiment.

But today it's becoming more and more clear what it'll eventually end up being: not a payment network, not a private way of transacting, but digital (yet secure) gold. That's all Bitcoin will most likely ever be and that is totally fine.

There is something to be said about an asset that is held outside of the traditional financial system. I'm not a Bitcoin bull, but I also wouldn't be surprised if a coin hits $100,000 (or more) sometime in the next few years.

Ethereum though.. I'm more curious about how that will turn out. Seems to have many potential interesting use cases

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Is gold a good comparison though? Gold has value beyond fiat in manufacturing. If Bitcoin cannot provide value for exchange then why would it be a better store of value?

and clearly as you've just proved, a good store of value does NOT require an intrinsic value. All that is important is that people place trust in the asset. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies have attributes that make it easy for people to place trust in it.

The fact that people trust in something doesn't automatically mean that thing is good, remember that many people (even the same as those who put their trust in *coins) also trust in sky wizards and celebrities. I realise you may just be stating that that's how the world is.

Trust here is in the context of assets used in trade, not in literally anything people can have "trust" in.

They're stating that "intrinsic value", e.g. gold being usable for things other than trade, is not necessary for a tradable thing to have value. It is only necessary for people to be able to trust that the thing has value and having "intrinsic value" is one way for that trust to be gained.

With cryptocurrency, it's gained with a bunch o math.

Gold has value beyond store of value, but not nearly as much as you would think. A lot of what makes gold valuable is people's faith on it, and in that sense it's not significantly better than bitcoin. That's not to say that bitcoin prices are reasonable, but just that there's an irrational component in almost everything.

Unfortunately, it does not. There's 2 kinds of Gold people invest in.

The non-loony ETFs, Swiss vault storage, etc. Let's simplify to "the GLD ETF" [1]. This of course isn't really gold, it's paper gold (and has in fact been fractional-reserve-banked: there is far more paper gold than actual gold).

The loony gold storage: gold bars under your pillow. Unfortunately, the gold people use for payments is extremely regulated, specific grades of gold, guaranteed by a very small number of financial institutions (and numbered). Whilst at least these are obviously not oversubscribed, if you have one you can't sell it (aside from the subdivision problem), because there's no easy way to verify the guarantees, and there are an untold number of fakes in circulation.

[1] tradingview.com/e/?symbol=GLD

As long as people like it as jewelry and are prepared to dig it up the price of gold will approximate the cost of digging it up as it has done for 2000+ years. Bitcoin doesn't have that.

When the lightning network is completed, it will effectively re-enable the use of Bitcoin as an ultra-low-overhead transaction mechanism. Right now, Bitcoin is only cost-competitive with credit cards for reasonably large transactions, on the order of $70-100.

Even at that amount it's not really worth it. I paid with Bitcoin for a $70 purchase the other day and paid $2.50 in fees. I won't do that again. Compare that to the past when my fees would be less than a penny and not worth worrying about.

As for lightning network, let's wait and see once it's actually completed. Can Bitcoin afford to wait that long? The core developers are taking an awfully big risk when Bitcoin cash had shown that bigger blocks are not an issue.

With Stripe it would have cost $2.33, at 2.9% + $0.30

Though it wouldn't have taken hours, potentially up to a day, to complete the transaction.

It takes 90-180 days for a credit card transaction to clear, while it takes a bitcoin transaction ~10 minutes. You’re comparing the wrong thing. Retailers typically just eat the CC chargeback fraud costs, while bitcoin stores don’t (because the transaction clears pretty fast anyway).

And a SEPA Credit Transfer is about 30 cents and soon enough will be done in less than 15 seconds (SCT Inst).

Why bother with Bitcoin if my Bank can do it cheaper and faster, even with lightning?

There's still not an entirely compelling reason to believe it's digital gold and not digital Beanie Babies.

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