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Comment by cel1ne | Hacker News Reader

I'm flabbergasted about the carelessness of these companies.

The world basically figured out that everyone can have their own currency, so now every little company starts to print their own money?

Why are people buying monopoly/play-money for dollars? Because CPU-time was wasted to make it unforgeable?

What use does unforgeable money have, if it's not irreplaceable?

Why are buyers not concerned that their freshly purchased ToyCoins are rendered useless in the blink of an eye by the issuance of ToyCoin-2, perhaps by the same company?

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> The world basically figured out that everyone can have their own currency, so now every little company starts to print their own money?

The so called "cryptocurrencies" aren't currencies at all. They are simply goods which exist for the sole purpose of being traded around in speculative markets. They are no more money than beans or trading cards. These companies know that and invest in the creation and promotion of a new set of trading cards to pump the value to dump them afterwards.

Indeed. This becomes more obvious when we consider the fact that any individual can produce an infinite number of cryptotokens that are fundamentally interchangeable and indistinguishable from any other, this makes sense when we think about the fact that the "tokens" are not actually discrete objects but really just the practical manifestation of a gignatic balance sheet recorded in a distributed ledger. The cool technical aspect of a blockchain is that we can trust that the data encoded in the ledger will always follow the consensus rules, but if we extrapolate this idea out and imagine a paper ledger with the same properties, it becomes obvious that there is no fundamental reason why any arbitrary ledger is any more intrinsically valuable than another.

That's quite true, and this cryptocurrency mass hysteria has all the markings of a new tulip craze. Meanwhile, sellers keep on pumping the value hoping it's high enough to start dumping on unsuspecting fools.

It might be useful to explain the difference between 'non-currencies' and 'currencies'.

Regular currencies are also imagined-up things which have only a few practical differences. The one difference is usually various government contracts/taxes are only payable with specific currencies and therefore have value because they are 'needed' to pay obligations.

> Regular currencies are also imagined-up things which have only a few practical differences.

That's not true. A currency is designed to serve as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and and a store of value.

These so called "cryptocurrencies" fail to meet the basic requirements of any currency as they are designed specifically to inflate their value in speculative markets while serving absolutely no purpose of being either a unit of account or even a medium of exchange.

In fact, beans are far better currencies as these so called "cryptocurrencies" as their value are far more stable and are free from speculative drives such as the one discussed in this thread.

Additionally, real currencies have inherent value by being adopted as the official and exclusive medium to pay taxes to governments.

Does what something is 'designed' for really make a difference? Is that the thing that makes something a currency or not? Or is it some other thing that makes something a currency?

The value of some currencies have fluctuated in their value wildly in the past, so stability isn't a some intrinsic thing that marks a currency.

I'm not say I don't agree that the word 'cryptocurrency" isn't banded about far too much, but saying "They aren't currencies" should be supported by some kind of description of what makes a currency a currency otherwise we can tie ourselves in knots.

Saying that the 'design' or 'stability' define whether something is a currency as it is really just using proxies (that might work most of the time) for what makes something a currency. I think.

>That's not true. A currency is designed to serve as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and and a store of value.

And yet, after all the designing (a post factum attribution more likely), they're still just numbers on ledgers.

> And yet, after all the designing (a post factum attribution more likely), they're still just numbers on ledgers.

No, they really are not, and that's a very ignorant thing to say. Mere numbers on a ledger don't have central banks dedicated to implement economic policies to actively stabilise their value nor do they get accepted by state institutions as official and in some cases exclusive form of payment.

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