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Comment by samsonradu | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, heard this 100 times already. But why does it have to be like the dot com? What if it just stays a niche market for 50 years? What you say implies that crypto is as full of potential as the internet was to make it possible for businesses to grow as big as Google, Amazon. Not mentioning of course a lot of other factors that made Google, Amazon big like political influence, globalisation, lack of competition/regulation in certain areas etc.

Not trying to be pessimistic but genuinely curious why so many people make the analogy to the dot com period.

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> What if it just stays a niche market for 50 years?

That would still be a collapse, just a silent one. Niche market means that everybody has on some subconscious level accepted that a large stack cannot be liquidated and plays along by "hodling" so that they can continue feeling rich. This is what is eventually happening to most collector's items: trading volume drops faster than the price and before you know it, there isn't enough trading going on to regularly call out an updated market price. The last occasional buyers will happily buy at close to the price from the last time there was an active market, but potential sellers are not even trying to sell in bulk, knowing how little money they could expect. It's less frustrating to just forget about it than selling for a dime.

Did you just "coin" HODL as a verb, hodling? Because I gotta say I have not read that usage before. Hodling is my new word of the day.

"HODL" originated from a drunken rant on Bitcointalk during the 2013-14 bubble and MtGox exchange collapse.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=375643.0

And it's such a fascinating term! Holding is what Warren Buffett does, after having applied his unique evaluation skills before buying, hodling is what a True Believer does. "If you are not a True Believer and cash out early, you are not deserving of eventually entering the paradise of a bitcoin bet retirement."

And to people who self-identify with the term, I think it might also be a kind of rhetorical last line of defense for when someone criticises their trust and belief: "those may be fine arguments or not, see I don't care, I HODL which means I just don't take it as serious as you. Mind your own business and let me dream my dream". Could also be motivated as a psychological hedge for the day after, "sure, it was expensive, but look at fun we had!"

As a self-identified HODLer - I like to think it's because holding isn't nearly as easy as it sounds. Ignoring what 'Mr Market' is offering you for your property on any given day and overruling your herd-following instincts is not easy, else Warren Buffet wouldn't be such an outlier.

And yes, the HODL mantra is a way of reminding myself that I shouldn't make emotional decisions in the heat of the moment.

The dot-com period was just the latest example of what happens when a new technology is widely adopted. Automobiles famously went through a similar period early last century. Many new entrants crowd into the field, there's a free-for-all as everyone tries to make the killer app, then through a weird alchemy of vision, execution, and luck a few brands eventually buy up or force into bankruptcy enough competitors to dominate the field. In recent history at least, explosion and consolidation of new players is the norm when a new technology is introduced.

As to your second question - which I would rephrase as 'why would this technology be widely adopted?' I would say, if the role of a trusted third party can be automated, it will be because nature abhors inefficiency. And trusted third parties aren't a niche field - not just banks but also a large part of any civil service can now replace humans with algorithms. That's a lot of disruption.

> Not trying to be pessimistic but genuinely curious why so many people make the analogy to the dot com period.

Because most people are not creative nor critical thinkers and the extent of their brilliance is superficial pattern matching. To most people the dot-com bubble seems to fit all the patterns so by their logic it must have the same outcome. If you think critically about the differences of the crypto craze and the dot-com era, you’ll see how irrational it is to make a strong comparison.

Bitcoin is not Pets.com. Bitcoin is Google.

I don’t think Bitcoin is Google, with the limit of 7 transactions per second, it just can’t scale enough to be the Google of currencies.

Do you think the only thing that makes cryptocurrencies valuable is transaction rate?

> Bitcoin is Google.

I'd say it's probably AltaVista or Yahoo!...

It's hard to say 'Bitcoin is x'.

Perhaps the Bitcoin/Cryptocurrency situation is a close repeat of the dot-com boom/bust/rebirth.

Perhaps it's a close repeat of Tulip Mania.

Or perhaps it's a new category, and the rise of the next technology a decade from now will be a callback to what happened with Bitcoin.

This'll all seem obvious in a year or three. For now, we speculate and wait.

Or there may not be any long term winners in this arena as people realise just how bad most if this stuff is for actual transactions and consumer protection.

> superficial pattern matching.

> Bitcoin is Google.

Is this satire?

Google provides a valuable service that saves me time.

Bitcoin, uhh...

If you can’t see how Bitcoin provides millions of others a valuable service, you have a poor imagination.

Please do explain this service! Because as far as I can tell it's got no real utility outside of speculation.

How about the ability to move large sums of money around the world without having to trust or be limited by any government or bank?

Not really that useful to many millions of people IMHO.

Millions, yes it is... the world is a lot bigger place than you think it is.

Sorry, I don't believe being able to transfer large amounts of money around without having to trust or be limited by banks or governments is much concern to 'millions'.

There really aren't all that many people that have problems with that, who are that distrustful of existing infrastructure.

There are millions of millionaires in China alone that are very concerned about the future security and mobility of their money. Now consider India, Russia, Iran. This isn’t fiction.

This has been thrown around for years on the BTC scene, and it's just not a killer app. Nor do I believe that such people are willing to use cryptocurrencies for such transfers, in their millions.

And that's before we get on to whether it is moral to facilitate such anyway...

Looking at the market cap, it's about half Google. Probably much larger (2x) by and of year according to Tom Lee.

You’re right. I meant, if anything Bitcoin is Google, but it’s not even that.

I would liken it to Apple myself. First mover advantage does count for quite a bit in software.

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