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I think a lot of negativity here towards bitcoin comes from not getting in earlier, I had the chance to get in 2016 but I didn't, I was an idiot, other than this we should support it, because f... the banks, money printing, corrupt governments... etc.

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I think the negativity (particularly in the tech community) is from the notion that we don't totally know why its value is so huge yet high. I watched bitcoin going from dollars to the first $300 spike and thought "wow, that's peak". I stopped watching it then heard it hit like $4,000. Now I'm being told its peaked $10k but has developed issues with transaction times and fees.... I thought it was a currency and now the community seems to decide what its value is based on the phase of the moon (at least in the communities I hear about it; I don't go out of my way).

It confuses a lot of tech people that it has something of value to it that we don't totally understand and we keep thinking that it'll crash or the bubble we're all certain we're seeing will pop.

But we know why - because since spring of 2017 Bitfinex is pumping Bitcoins indirectly with fantasy Tethers. The only remaining question is not if they will stop this but when.

The amount of tether doesn't even come close to accounting for the upward price movement.

I once thought Bitcoin could be useful and be used as a currency. I loved that idea and even used it as such in its infant phase for meaningless fun.

What it is now is a disgrace.

It's really telling when the only news about it is how much people are buying it for.

Not a new use case. Not a new retailer accepting it. It's worth more because the same people who bought it last year will spend more to buy it this year.

Retailers accepting it just isn't "news" anymore. This isn't 2012.

If Amazon started accepting Bitcoin directly (as opposed to accepting gift cards that you can buy for Bitcoin elsewhere), that would be enormous news. One of the reason the "retailer X accepts Bitcoin" stories have died off is that almost all of those retailers were ones nobody cared about.

Square Cash, Amazon rumors, Wall Street interest, progress on scaling, emerging custody solutions, retail banking integration (Fidelity and USAA), improving regulatory clarity.

$170B worth of value today? No. But price is current value + potential future value * likelihood of getting there. People are starting to understand the potential, and working towards that future.

What exactly is a disgrace about it?

that it's trying to be a currency when it clearly doesn't cut it as one - just like gold used to be but is impractical now.

also china.

Interesting how even with good foundations, a tech is not good until tested at large.

The developers are actively trying move away from the original vision "p2p digital cash" to simply a "store of value".

Therefore the fees are often too high, and the confirmations can be delayed a lot unless you pay a lot, for it to be very useful. For example it often doesn't make much sense to pay for games on steam using Bitcoin as the fees take a large portion of the payment.

I'm so tired of this uninformed critique.

How do you propose we increase throughput on a competitive space without compromising the byzantine fault tolerance of the bitcoin network?

Go on, I'll wait.

It isn't just 'make the blocks bigger'. That's like telling a developer to just ship more code. We didn't scale the early internet by making packets bigger. Open your mind and stop repeating things you read just because you read it. Think for yourself and if you are uninformed about a technology then do not open your mouth to speak. You don't reach scale and adjust a hundred billion dollar network by hacking fixes, you do it by carefully making calculated changes with science and testing behind your decisions. The developers working on bitcoin today have done more to contribute to the growth of bitcoin than detract and the sheer volume and scale are unprecedented. Nobody is equipped to say one solution is obviously better.

Which coin can be used as a currency today? Ethereum, Stellar Lumen, Monero?

Bitcoin has become to slow and expensive (transactions) for that...

Monero is pretty good if you need privacy, Ethereum is okay if you need it a bit faster, you can get a confirmed transaction in about a minute with average price (about 20 cents or less in worth)

Ethereum devs are also working on the raiden network which I believe is atm on the testnet and might release sometime the next months.

It has become the gold of the cryptocurrencies world. Nobody uses it to buy stuff but only as a store of value. I'm also disappointed in what it has become, and I say that while currently owning bitcoin.

In practice you need merchants to accept the coins for them to be very useful. So far no coin has come ahead although there has been some uptake for Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash.

You can also use services which convert your coin of choice to Bitcoin, for example using shapeshift or for Monero xmr.to which is excellent. You can't avoid the fees on Bitcoin if you do that though...

There are many coins which have cheap and fast confirmations, for example Ethereum or Bitcoin Cash.

Ethereum isn't inherently better as a currency. It still has the same scaling limits as bitcoin, just lower utilization at this point.

It has much higher limits though.

Bitcoin is limited to a fixed blocksize and ASIC mining while Ethereum has a dynamically adjusting blocksize to fit the network usage and capabilities.

And IIRC Ethereum is atm handling more Transactions than Bitcoin and ETH TX are arguably more complex, yet the network hasn't broken apart.

I had the chance to get in 2016 but I didn't, I was an idiot

No, I think it was just as smart to avoid it then as it is now.

Agreed, passing on the opportunity to buy a lottery ticket does not make you an idiot, regardless of whether it turns out to be the winning number. It was a missed opportunity, but that doesn't make it a bad decision per se.

Yes, I think it's fine if you treat it like gambling, or like buying penny shares I.e. accept there's a good chance you could lose your money, and that it's nearly impossible to assess it's true value, anymore than whether the next roll of a dice will land on 6.

My negativity toward bitcoin is that it’s used by con-men to scam naive techies out of their money. These kinds of financial operations never end well, and when they do, people will lose their life savings, their retirement, and many will respond by taking their own lives.

And people won’t be able to get out in time. When the price begins dropping in earnest, liquidity will dry up completely.

All of this has happened before, and will happen again. This is the most predictable thing in history, including the fact that Cassandras will be ignored.

And that makes me bitter.

I had the chance to get in when Bitcoin was at $3 in 2011. I didn't.

But I also don't regret it. Because I also clearly remember that when it hit $9 I thought at the time that if I owned any Bitcoin I would certainly sell now. With the amount I would have invested I could have maybe earned $1k.

But it's foolish to think that you would be rich by now if you just had invested a bit because you can't know when you would have sold them again.

It's strange to think that selling some means selling all. Why wouldn't you have bought some at (say) $10 and sold half of them at (say) $100 and kept the rest? You would have made a tidy profit in dollars and a tidy profit in Bitcoin.

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