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Comment by fortythirteen | Hacker News Reader

At this point, Bitcoin is not much more than a phantom object. Too overpriced to use for any reasonable purchase, people are literally trading nothing but zeros and ones, no more or less valuable than the bits making up this comment.

All that can change, but only if the price drops back down to its 2016 to early 2017 values, and there are too many people invested at this price to let Bitcoin survive as an actual currency if that happens.

We crossed the event horizon a couple months ago.

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Too overpriced to use for any reasonable purchase

Could one have a cryptocurrency which is always subdividable? Are there any which already have this feature?

Some are so sub-dividable they might as well be.

One in particular has 128bits of divisibility (3.4e+38 raw units)

(Disclaimer: I'm invested in it and don't want to shill)

It's about transaction fees and computing power. The cost of powering the computers that verify transactions has to be covered.

That's a serious design flaw. "It can do it, but it's just too expensive for anyone to afford to do it," is a design failure condition.

I think it's a natural flaw in the mining concept. Any coin that people use in a real sense will create heavy mining competition. That in turn raises the amount of computing power needed to successfully mine, meaning that transaction costs exponentially rise.

I think it's a natural flaw in the mining concept. Any coin that people use in a real sense will create heavy mining competition.

Are you sure it's not a flaw in pricing/incentive? If people are using a cryptocurrency "in a real sense" then the public blockchain ledger of a properly maintained cryptocurrency could be maintained by parties who are motivated to get their transaction done. This is not a natural flaw in the general mining concept. This is a flaw in Bitcoin's implementation of mining, due to the circumstance that most miners of Bitcoin are motivated by speculation in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin can change it's divisibility any time.

bitcoin is subdividable but transactions end up costing 30 bucks and taking hours because of the overinflated price

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