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Comment by jhiska | Hacker News Reader

It's not Wall Street's fault or whatever boogie man's fault that the Bitcoin tech doesn't actually work as some idealistic libertarian creator imagined it would; the fault is in Bitcoin's design itself. Even if the price wasn't fluctuating like crazy it simply doesn't work well as a currency due to technical limitations (eg, the time and cost it takes to process a transaction in the real world has always been impractical), but it shows promise as something that holds value (like gold).

The Outline creates articles with pureed facts written in a carefully standardized "no-nonsense", language-as-spoken-today linguistic style for mass consumption that are often deceptive, political or just technically wrong. Don't trust it.

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I feel like it's a parable about lofty libertarian ideals -- everything's peachy until there's large sums of money involved. Bitcoin is fixable but now there's a financial incentive for never fixing it.

You're probably right about Bitcoin not being fixable as a currency, and I say probably because I almost never speak in absolute terms. There are alternative cryptocurrencies that stand a chance of working out; the idea is mainstream now.

To me, it's a parable about the danger of following a pseudo-philosopher with no academic credibility and whose relevant oeuvre is fictional literature and not reading what Adam "Greed Is Good" Smith actually wrote about free markets AKA unregulated capitalism, which was that an economical system of people acting in their self-interest ends up promoting a greater economical and moral good for everyone but only as long as there are significant safeguards against abuse, but that's just my opinion.

I should google it but I'll just wonder out loud, how would libertarians use money anyway? Doesn't money need something to back it up, i.e. a central bank?

Libertarians still believe in government, I believe the normal solution to this they propose is to move the money back to the gold standard with the gold held by the government issuing the money.

Something this volatile is considered a good value store? The reason gold is a good value store is not only because of it's general acceptance and obvious physical properties but also because it's a non-volatile element physically and monetarily. Gold doesn't experience 1000% gains in like a week followed by equivalent losses.

Right now, no. It's in a bubble. But in the long-term there are people in Wall Street who look at it that way -- which is part of the reason why Bitcoin Futures are coming.

Being able to short Bitcoin should keep the value more in line with reality -- even if people eager to short might lose money as bubbles sometimes go for longer than they reasonably should.

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