Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> BBS era and ARPA Net era

These services were launched to solve a practical problem. Bitcoin was launched as the manifestation of an ideology.

Right. Everyone disagreeing must surely be on ideological basis as there can be no rational basis for disagreements. As seen in everything from politics to musical taste.

Bitcoin solved some practical problem in someone's mind too, even if that problem was "how do we get private money into the 21st century?".

Ideology played a huge role in BBSes and Arpanet too. The same kind of cyber libertarianism popular in bitcoin was popular in the BBS world, and Arpanet was created to help America win the cold war.

You sure about that? Arpanet was created to exchange short messages in case of a nuclear attack on the United States rendered all above ground communication and survivability useless. I hardly consider that a practical use case. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internet_during_the_Cold_W...

The U.S. government considered it a practical problem. That’s why they paid for it.

If it helps, replace “practical problem” with “a problem customers will pay you to solve.” ARPANET had that. Bitcoin, on the other, never had an original sale. It was mined as a curiosity and then jumped from narrative (“currency of the future!”) to narrative (“store of value!”) to narrative (“mostly goes up!”)

What the U.S. considers a practical problem often isn't. That is a shitty statement. The U.S. also considered spending 2T on a jet that was worse than the F-22. Just because the U.S. spends on something doesn't mean it has a practical application.

Nevertheless, the internet turned out to be transforming from its original purpose. We can sit here and argue about cyrptocurreny but the game is young and we wont know what it will turn into in 30 years. Just like the people in the 70 and 80s didn't know how transforming the internet would become for our society.

> What the U.S. considers a practical problem often isn't

Sure. But it’s still a customer making a purchase. That purchase grounds the project in someone’s need. A need they’re willing to trade for. The “trades for” part is important, since it references the status quo.

Financial assets, particularly speculative assets, don’t solve a need. They promise to solve a future need. (Sometimes they don’t.) Part of the discipline of speculating investing is knowing when to pull the plug.

On a scale of “practical” to “ideological” I’d say building a system to exchange messages in the event of catastrophe leans heavily toward practical. You can see this because governments of a wide variety of ideological persuasions would be interested in this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com