Comment by spookthesunset | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spookthesunset | Hacker News Reader

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> I think you're underestimating how truly small and how early the space is still.

What the heck are you talking about!? Kodak, the former camera company, announced at CES they were going to be selling cloud miners and have their own cryptocoin. Juice companies are announcing blockchain projects. People you run into at grocery stores are randomly bringing up bitcoin...

This is as big as bitcoin gets. And when it pops, that's it for Bitcoin. You can't get bigger than a juice company announcing it will be doing "something with the blockchain". Once it's over, Bitcoin will have lost its original purpose (a currency) and people will leave because its current purpose ("store of value") will have proven worthless too.

The ones that took out $50k from their life savings will be fucked. The drug dealers, crypto-ransomware writers, and murder-for-hire people will have moved onto some other coin. The non-criminal market will write the whole cryptospace off as a scam and go back to using VISA and Mastercard to pay for their lattes.

This is it. This is peak bitcoin. It will never get this high again because the core of Bitcoin is fatally flawed for countless reasons that have been discussed since its creation 9 years ago.

I don't think you've really understood my comment or understand the space at large. Bitcoin is only one player (and the largest currently) but by no means does it represent the entire space. My comment had nothing to do with Bitcoin specifically.

This may be the peak of Bitcoin (of which I have 0, by the way) or maybe not but it is by no means the peak of the cryptocurrency space collectively. Not even close.

"When it pops"

I hear that a lot. Many tokens have a floor, which is the actual value of the tokenized assets. Filecoin's floor is the cost/demand for actual hard drive space. Tickets to artist concerts tokenized would have a floor. Our token (Intercoin.org) has a floor represented by actual economies of communities.

Bitcoin on the other hand, has no floor. Just like Myspace vs Facebook or AltaVista vs Google, people can switch easily.

> people can switch easily.

And therefore it clearly follows that bitcoin is worth, what, $13,400 per BTC?

If the amount of crypto-coin is near limitless (hint: it is), why is any of it worth anything at all?

Which is yet another flaw in the original Bitcoin premise... that because Bitcoin is scarce, it is valuable. But guess what... bitcoin isn't scarce at all. It can, and has, and will continue to be forked. And yeah yeah yeah.... "network effects" and "first mover" and whatever. If, as you say, the switching costs are basically zero... why does any of it have any value at all?

It’s a token economy like any fiat currency. The market determines the value. As long as people are willing to exchange something for a token, the token will have value. Tokens can be usd, euro, yen, btc, eth, sea shells, plastic chips (e.g, casino chips).

> Filecoin's floor is the cost/demand for actual hard drive space.

I suppose that DentaCoin’s floor is the value of dentistry? What happens to its value if people decide they prefer ToothCoin? Or that dollars work for all of these things because fungability matters and you’ve got to pay taxes?

Imagining a significant portion of the economy using something like Monero is already a stretch, but there is no evidence that a separate currency for every product or service we want to interact with is a viable idea.

Any plans on doing an ICO?

A lot of work to do before that. Why?

> You can't get bigger than a juice company announcing it will be doing "something with the blockchain".

As in, you can't get higher than 1,000 using blockchain technology? What about 50,000,000 using blockchain techhnology. The point of blockchain techhnology is that any company can create their own token and have a decentralized currency, independent of banks or country legislations.

So in that respect, blockchain technology is at 1/50,000th of what it's made for. Peak? No.

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