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Comment by juanmirocks | Hacker News Reader

Sending small to large quantities of wealth worldwide quasi instantly and with small fees does have a tremendous value. Ask families of immigrants.

Buffet hasn’t even invested in digital tech stocks. IMO, even after all the huge respect he deserves, he doesn’t get this technology. Other than that, I don’t doubt that many current “investors” are only FOMO movers

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When will this false narrative finally die? Bitcoin is practically useless for remittance; I know this from first-hand experience. Bitcoin has to be converted into useable money by the recipient and that process is very inconvenient, slow, expensive and possibly dangerous if you follow the advice of bitcoin enthusiasts and meet up with random sellers in the street. All of this also presumes the recipient is technically literate enough to use and secure bitcoin without the sender being around to hand-hold them through the process and we must assume that they have reliable access to a phone/computer and internet. I'm sure there is some legitimate remittance activity through bitcoin but it is very uncommon.

From the article at the bottom:

About a third of the customers queuing at La Maison du Bitcoin’s teller windows in Paris aren’t speculating on the value of the cryptocurrency. They’re sending digital money home to Africa.

“In many countries in Africa, there are far more cellphones than bank accounts,” said Manuel Valente, co-founder of La Maison. “For bitcoin, all you need is a phone.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-17/bitcoin-e...

Is it true though? Or journalistic exaggeration of some insignificant (in quantity) activity?

It is true, check for example http://mgafrica.com/article/2015-03-03-mobile-come-first-in-... . Paying by phone is popular and has much lower bandwidth/storage requirements than bitcoin will ever have: http://edition.cnn.com/2017/02/21/africa/mpesa-10th-annivers...

Western Union takes up to 10%! Of people's wages, often cash wages of low income people. You're assuming I think incorrectly that the value add won't cause people to find another way to circumvent. Either learn how to transfer BTC yourself, use a system someone else wrote that your friend told you about, or even use a different crypotocurrency.

Secure isn't a problem if you don't assume every exchange is a Mt Gox waiting to happen.

This! When a company comes along that can pull off a 1/1 mapping of an electronic token to a given currency and build out the trust less blockchain like infrastructure that allows for transactions at little to no cost that company will have value.

I'm really intrigued by things like Ripple but to me the value there isn't XRP but is Ripple Labs. But AFAIK I can't buy stock in Ripple Labs.

Why the US government is not the "company" that has done this already is a real shame and a bit baffling (except for the standard, "It's the government. What do you expect." argument). Fee free online transactions would be great for US competitiveness and give the dollar a leg up in staying the world currency. If not the US, some other country with a convertible currency should do this. They could have the defacto online currency very quickly, I think. How about it Iceland?

> Sending small to large quantities of wealth worldwide quasi instantly and with small fees does have a tremendous value. Ask families of immigrants.

I live in a foreign country, and I do pretty easily & regularly with TransferWise, with less fees than Bitcoin (another thread today mentioned $30 fee for $100 tx). Don’t see the value of bitcoin here.

> Buffet hasn’t even invested in digital tech stocks. IMO, even after all the huge respect he deserves, he doesn’t get this technology. Other than that, I don’t doubt that many current “investors” are only FOMO movers

Stop changing the goal posts. Bitcoin is not a tech stock. Originally, proponents called BTC a currency, and now they call it a store of value. That’s what Buffet was commenting on with his analogy.

Answering you here but answering many too. I don’t mean BTC in particular, I mean cryptocurrencies in general. Yes, BTC and ETH currently are suffering slow downs. These both assets and many more will overcome those challenges. The tech is relatively in its infancy.

This literally didn’t address any of my replies.

> Sending small to large quantities of wealth worldwide quasi instantly and with small fees does have a tremendous value.

Last I checked Bitcoin transactions are frequently prohibitively expensive for microtransactions if the transaction clears at all. OTOH I can send someone in my own country money from my bank account and expect it to arrive within a business day (or less).

Right now it doesn't look like BTC is a good medium for transferring money. It's immutable and publicly verifiable and maybe that's good for some kinds of transactions but I guess most people would raise privacy concerns over that (yes, you can get around that but you basically have to apply money laundering techniques).

>Sending small to large quantities of wealth worldwide quasi instantly and with small fees

Bitcoin Core cannot do that, Bitcoin Cash can.

https://np.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6rxw7k/infor... https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7cwfm5/some... https://twitter.com/gavinandresen/status/929377620000681984 https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/930276246671450112

As can Litecoin, Ethereum, Monero, and so on: https://coinmarketcap.com/

BTC and Bcash are subject to ASIC centralization. Litecoin and other scrypt based algos have had ASIC hardware attacks developed recently as well.

What do you consider a digital tech stock? He's the largest single shareholder of Apple:

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/30/warren-buffett-ive-never-sol...

Buffett describes Apple as a consumer products company, not a "tech" or pure software company. Clearly, Apple is the outlier in the tech ecosystem.

> he doesn’t get this technology

I'm sure he'd agree with you, but even people who 'get it', might think the tech may find a home someday, while steering well clear of Bitcoin itself.

What makes it so that Bitcoin will be the medium to send that wealth and not another coin if Bitcoin’s value is too volatile?

Given you can have an infinite number of crypto currencies, should one necessarily dominate indefinitely?

Doesn’t have to be Bitcoin, and, I assume, Buffet doesn’t mean it either explicitly. Often Bitcoin in many contexts in understood as a synonym of this new digital money.

Power law/positive feedback/winner take all dynamics make it likely there will be one or a few dominant ones and a lot of would-be's. Bitcoin has maintained the first mover advantage as well as the strongest engineering community thus far, so it will likely be one of those.

The whole transaction can happen in a matter of hours tho. Bitcoin isn't that volatile. And you have to realize that is a means where there was previously none. Like it's not like the people doing this might have that many options.

That being said, I've also heard of western companies using Bitcoin to transfer money cause it's cheaper than via bank.

> Buffet hasn’t even invested in digital tech stocks

Apple is not a tech stock?

He only invested in it this year, and because, by his own comments, he doesn’t see Apple purely as a tech company any more, but a services one.

> he doesn’t see Apple purely as a tech company

That doesn't mean Apple isn't a tech company (one of the biggest there is), and consequently that this particular complain isn't nonsense.

It's only very recently that he's started investing in tech stocks at all. And he's never on the leading edge. He's always been very clear about this. He doesn't want to invest in things that are bleeding edge and that he doesn't understand, and he's proud to say it.

Buffet is well-known for this and I often hear tech people dismiss his views as a result, but I think some people misunderstand what he is saying.

Buffet is concerned with companies that will have a long term competitive advantage and thereby generate stable and growing cash returns over long periods. He doesn't generally invest in technology stocks because he says it is hard to determine which companies have a competitive advantage that will be durable enough to produce long-term returns.

Look at Netscape, MySpace, or Yahoo! for companies that looked valuable but ended up not having a competitive advantage. It doesn't have anything to do with "understanding" technology---the question is the ability to pick the winners in advance.

Absolutely, and that’s always the good strategy. Invest only in that what you understand. He doesn’t have to understand tech nor invest in it; his numbers show it. I for one, and I assume many more here, often suffer from the bias that and consider that everything is tech. Wrong.

> Sending small to large quantities of wealth worldwide quasi instantly and with small fees does have a tremendous value.

Yes, that is one of the primary purposes of the interbank settlement/wiring systems. They've been around in one form or another for around 100 years...

I think the biggest roadblock to developing the next steps of bitcoin that could more easily demobstrate this value is the influx of FOMO money bogging down the system and making it less reliable as a stable, fast, inexpensive system. Maybe this is even a necessary stage, but I'd like it to be over: it's the least interestinhnpart of the social and technologic advances offered by crypto.

I agree and it makes me wonder how much the current price is drive by these FOMO investors versus actual believers. If we removed the first group does the price settle somewhere lower like $10k? I don’t really know but the surge is interesting.

You have a third group: hungry sharks who saw the feeding frenzy and are tantalizing at ripping the shirts off of the backs of the first two groups.

Heres a good thought experiment. How much would people pay for 1 bitcoin if they could never ever sell it(just exchange it for goods)?

another one is: how much would people pay if you did not know the true “market value”? ie you dont know what people are selling a bitcoin for.

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