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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Forgive my ignorance but that makes no sense to me. Things were good when they were good. But Bitcoin has proven to be incredibly unstable. I want my currency to be consistent. My understanding is that currencies like the USD have a central authority that pulls levers and knobs in attempt to make its value consistent across time. What mechanics exist within Bitcoin to do this?

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Bitcoin isn't really attempting to fulfill the currency use-case anymore. It's pretty much sticking with digital gold. Likewise with Ethereum, the currency is primarily used to run the protocol. Low price volatility is not a pressing design goal for either system.

For a token that does have the levers and knobs, check out the Dai whitepaper: https://makerdao.com/whitepaper/DaiDec17WP.pdf

"Bitcoin" doesn't really "attempt" anything.

I attempt to use Bitcoin as a currency, but that doesn't mean you have to.

>> Bitcoin isn't really attempting to fulfill the currency use-case anymore

... because it failed miserably at it, due to technical limitations.

Now we hear a story about "digital gold", but you know what that story really is? It's just the people who bought Bitcoin on its historical maximum (near 20k USD) refusing to admit their loss and hoping for a miracle.

They weren't technical limitations. It failed due to problems with its community. They deliberately drove it off a cliff-edge and claimed the new broken Bitcoin was better than the old working Bitcoin.

I thought that those insane transaction fees and processing times were due to technical decision to use too small block size, and to hashing algorithm used. But I'm no expert on technical side of Blockchain so I might be wrong about that.

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