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Comment by crusso | Hacker News Reader

1. There's $160B of BC out there and it's still a pretty novel thing. 2. People say this every time there has been some volatility in BC. There's been a bubble that is bursting. It doesn't mean that the currency doesn't have worth. 3. Just because BC and its mechanics don't end up working out doesn't mean that a central bank is necessary. 4. Nothing is "proved" at this point.

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It is plenty proved. Nobody accepts BTC as payment for goods and nothing is priced in BTC.

> Nobody accepts BTC as payment for goods

Well not nobody.

https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@steemitguide/2017-top-list-of-b...

Printed 7 months ago. Steam and Microsoft have stopped accepting bitcoins. I don't know offhand but suspect many of the other ones probably have as well.

Microsoft added it back a week ago and several companies have since been added to the list. So your original statement is wrong as is your suspicion.

Because of the falling price forced people out of the network and reduced both network congestion and transfer fee prices.

Moon or payments? Pick one.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...

https://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time?timespa...

That has nothing to do with the current crash. The price has been going up for a long while even when everyone knew about this.

Also this "nobody accepts BTC anymore" phenomenon is something artificially caused by the BTC devs. They could have increased the block size even to just twice the size and tried to figure out the real solution in the meantime, but instead they decided to be stubborn and kick out everyone who disagreed with them.

This is not a "proof" that the Bitcoin model itself has failed. It's just that one implementation has failed, and that's fine.

So after introducing a new currency, how long is the window for people to begin accepting it before its "proved unnecessary"?

Well, Overstock takes BTC and BCH.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/01/website-glitch-let-me-ov...

Listing your altcoin on an exchange is priced in BTC, but I don't know if that helps or hurts your claim.

Bitcoin is plenty accepted in the DarkNet.

A central bank may not be necessary if there's an alternative that provides equal or better stability. Bitcoin certainly doesn't provide a stable alternative.

Yeah, who knows what entities may arise to support crypto currencies. Perhaps, multiple governments, conglomerates, or cooperatives may participate in stabilizing a crypto currency.

Instead of a central bank, a currency may develop a "decentralized central bank" whereby those independent entities take uncoordinated actions to keep a shared currency stable.

It's hard to say at this point. We've really only been thinking about this problem for a short while.

> People say this every time there has been some volatility in BC.

Kind of like how people are pretending this is like when Bitcoin first hit $1,000 and then fell back to $200x. It's just the same thing, right? It's all just volatility.

Except, that didn't involve a third of a trillion dollars of on-paper wealth being vaporized in a week across all cryptos, with tens of millions of new speculators getting smashed around the world. Slightly different than if $10 or $12 billion similarly goes missing, contained to a tiny group of people who mined it or purchased it at extremely low cost.

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