Comment by annabellish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by annabellish | Hacker News Reader

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> But are you seriously betting against crypto-currency long term?

Yes.

>Go back and check a computer from 1950. I'm sure plenty of people back then were laughing at how ridiculous the concept was of owning a PC.

Computers in 1950 were being used for useful work that could not have been done before them. They had a track record of successes which has continued uninterrupted until today.

Cryptocurrency has yet to show a legal success story of any kind. The story on what cryptocurrency is "for" has swung wildly over the years as each attempted use case proves either inferior to existing solutions or impossible to achieve.

Bitcoin is digital cash. Bitcoin isn't digital cash, but it is for micropayments. Bitcoin isn't for micropayments, it's a settlement system. Bitcoin isn't a settlement system, it's borderless transactions for the unbanked. Bitcoin isn't for the unbanked, it's a settlement system again for different layers. Segregated witness will fix everything. Segregated witness wasn't meant to fix anything, it's the lightning network that will fix everything. The lightning network isn't meant to fix everything, it's designed to lock in vast amounts of currency and work only for those use cases that makes sense.

It's just endless. Cryptocurrency has no success stories, just a constant stream of "hope" that never goes anywhere in order to keep people hooked on a system that transfers a lot of money to a handful of centralised large-scale mining corporations and increasingly shady exchanges.

Bitcoin can be used however people want. People are certainly using it. Over 162,000 transactions have been sent today, basically all of them with a fee (meaning people actually were willing to pay to use the service).

Even on a slow day, hundreds of millions in USD are transacted through Bitcoin alone. And plenty more through Ethereum. There are tons of use cases for crypto-currency as a transfer of value.

Eventually, there will be more stable coins, there will be instant (or virtually instant) transactions, and the cost to send a transaction will be virtually 0. That's the future of crypto-currency, and you'd be insane to think that once these basic milestones are achieved, that it won't serve any purpose.

It's a work in progress, but there are definitely people using the service as is right now for considerable amounts of money.

To what ends? There's no indication that those transactions are being used to fulfill any kind of purpose, and plenty of hints that many of them are spam and intentional churn.

If nobody is buying anything, nobody is transferring money cross-borders, and no previously-unbanked people are being banked, then what are these transactions for? Nobody seems to _know_.

I can't tell you what every person uses it for. But I can say for certain that it is already being used to transfer money cross-border. And I can say for sure that people use it in nations like Venezuela, where the banking system has failed.

How do I know this? I run a business which buys and sells digital items for online games. Every single seller from Venezuela is looking for BTC. Most sellers from Kosovo as well. And tons of people are asking for BTC in general. The majority of $500+ transactions in the industry (often B2B) are done in crypto.

> Bitcoin can be used however people want.

I can't pay my rent with it, I can't pay for groceries with it, I can't pay my taxes with it.

Those are things I want.

Haha no successes? The biggest success is that it works at creating digital scarcity. That's a pretty big accomplishment. Various cryptos trade to the tune of billions of dollars a day. Ethereum has layered an open source, open computation, virtual machine on top of a monetary layer. It has inspired and spun off dozens of other blockchains each with their own takes on smart contracts. Meanwhile there are projects already implementing prediction markets, gold-backed ERC20 tokens, video games using ERC721 tokens, provably fair online casinos, decentralized exchanges (0x), automated crypto backed loans (DAI), crypto backed computation and digital storage (Sia), social networking with integrated micropayments for curation (Steemit), you've got Brave browser and it's BAT token with a novel approach to paying content creators...can go on and on. Just need to take your blinders off and do some research.

I've done plenty of research, and I know about every one of those examples. Those aren't "success stories" - none of them have succeeded.

I don't know what your definition of success is? They certainly haven't failed.

Significant usage of any kind, achieving some goal which couldn't have been achieved before without a list of massive caveats longer than my arm, or anything of that ilk. What we have right now is one neat innovation with a tonne of caveats being plugged into a bunch of stuff it doesn't work for, called "success stories", and then moved on from before people realise they aren't going anywhere.

Can you name one thing that's come out of crypto that has seen any significant usage in the market it's trying to break into which isn't just using "we have a blockchain!" as a marketing tool?

The applications which are most interesting are the first implementations of smart contracts. Most notably, truly "stable" tokens which track the price of something like the USD. One example of this being https://makerdao.com/

This is made possible through increased liquidity in crypto markets. Specifically, the movement towards decentralized exchanges for crypto to crypto transactions. As this continues to progress, interesting financial innovations like MakerDAO will be become more and more sustainable. One of the primary caveats of doing business in crypto-currency is the fluctuating value.

Imagine holding a real decentralized crypto-currency that is pegged to the USD. That will open many doors for commerce, and decrease transaction costs. The ability to swap this token back and forth using atomic swaps will allow people to remain in crypto longer, without exposure to crypto price swings.

Once this happens, people will be able to keep a portion of their net worth within crypto currency indefinitely. A stable coin is what the market needs to move forward, and it will happen within the next few years.

This is literally my point.

>most interesting

not most successful

>the first implementations of smart contracts

the latest in the long line of "no, _this_ is what cryptocurrency was always for! All the previous examples were wrong!"

>Imagine holding a real decentralized crypto-currency that is pegged to the USD. That will open many doors for commerce, and decrease transaction costs. The ability to swap this token back and forth using atomic swaps will allow people to remain in crypto longer, without exposure to crypto price swings.

Imagination is not a successful project. This is literally talking about things which _don't even exist yet_.

>Once this happens

And here we reach the crux of the issue.

_If_ this happens, not once. Just like all the previous things that would have "changed the world", if only a long series of long-unsolved problems in cryptography and distributed computing were solved.

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