To be fair, stock in Morgan Stanley is not marketed as "decentralized."
The decentralized claim refers to a decentralized network where the miners and nodes connected to the network are decentralized and no single entity controls 51% of the network (if they did it would collapse). Ownership of coins is not the same as hashing power.
Nowhere do people claim that the coins themselves are decentralized.
Bitcoin was heavily marketed as a currency. It failed at this.
Bitcoin was heavily marketed as decentralized where no single entity owns 51% of the network. In fact Bitmain likely already does or soon will control 51% of the network [1].
The remarkable thing here is that despite these clear, observable failures... Bitcoin will go on. The true believers will continue to HODL and while shorts may pile on in the absence of fundamental economic data there's little reason to buy or sell. The price now is purely a popularity contest.
[1] https://bitcoinist.com/bitmain-51-percent-bitcoin-hashrate/
You could say the same thing about many open source software programs or apps.
What I was saying is that there is no company behind Bitcoin that represents it or speaks for it. When you say “Bitcoin was heavily marketed” you mean that people explained it that way to others.
He or she did not care about getting rich since the original coins have never actually been touched. The creator did not even know that people would start to exchange existing currencies for Bitcoin at the time the paper was published or that it would catch on at all.
I am not trying to rewrite history. I was only stating that Bitcoin is not a company. There are no big corporations controlling it. There is no sales team. There is no marketing team. Anyone who promotes it is doing it out of their own free will.
So let me repeat an important point that you just now glossed over yourself: Your attempt at rewriting well known history is insulting. Hacker News is not the proper audience for your Bitcoin marketing, not the proper venue to insult people's intelligence. Please stop insulting us by acting like it is.
YOU by your own free will and greed and behavior are an integral part of the decentralized marketing team whose existence you deny, and it's insulting that you keep repeating the same things while glossing over what other people keep telling you.
At least some of the people who got in early, seem to know how to spend money on advertising.
That said, my point was that any “marketing” was not done by a dedicated team or company. It was done by individuals who got interested in the technology and wanted to share it with other people.
The reason I find it more inexplicable is that when you think about just the idea of peer to peer programmable finances/money without requiring any trusted intermediary that is a huge idea. In my opinion, it is almost as revolutionary as the internet itself.
I guess we will see how things progress over the next 10-20 years.
It was a Bitcoin advocate who said "nothing is cheaper than proof of work", given the precondition that you don't trust anyone. Curiously, they saw that as an argument in favor of proof of work. Bitcoin detractors see that as an argument in favor of trusting someone, because proof of work is insanely expensive and an ecological disaster.
For one, while our civilized world is built on trust and you may trust Banks, Governments, Tech companies etc, the majority of millennials do not trust Banks or Governments. Numbers outside the US are even lower. For more information about this I would recommend watching this presentation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGberGnxiJk
I believe money is something that you should be able to have full control and ownership of. Governments and banks can lock or seize accounts/funds for any reason. Banks can limit deposit/withdrawal/transfer amounts. I don’t think that right now this is a big problem, but in the future, imagine banks getting hacked and funds stolen or even a bank run. There are a lot of scenarios where I can see our financial system failing. If inflation rates increase then it will drive more people towards things like Gold and Bitcoin. Look at what has been going on in Venezuela.
As far as the electricity use, please consider taking a look at this article:
https://medium.com/@dergigi/bitcoins-energy-consumption-6dd7...
It also links to a couple of other sources that show how gold mining, paper currency/minting, and electricity used from the banking system all use orders of magnitude more electricity than Bitcoin mining does. If ultimately Bitcoin can replace banks or even gold, then it will have done the world a favor. Most miners also use renewable energy such as hydro and solar which would otherwise just go to waste.
Andreas Antonopoulos makes the argument that it will actually help the world come up with cheaper and more efficient power by allowing people to subsidize the costs by mining Bitcoin:
I asked you why anyone but an anarchist should consider it "revolutionary" to burn crap-tons of electricity so you don't have to trust anyone.
The most you addressed that point is to tell me "actually millennials are anarchists", which is one of the sillier things I've heard about millennials recently, and that's saying something.
I personally find the idea of having complete control over your own money, being able to program it, and being able to send it to anyone in the world fairly quickly and cheaply without any intermediary revolutionary. It doesn’t hurt that it is impossible to counterfeit, and your money can be stored completely in your brain.
If you don’t find those ideas revolutionary that is fine, but I think 10 or 20 years from now you may be surprised.
Outside of any of the technical feats, there is also the fact that Bitcoin is the best form of money in terms of the properties of money. Limited/fixed supply, divisible to 8 decimal places, can’t be counterfeited, easy to transact with, etc. I don’t see how anything else can even compare.
I am also curious why you think burning crap-tons of electricity to run the current financial system where you have to trust everyone is any better?
The irony of this whole argument is that people are holding BTC in the hopes that the price against USD will get higher over time.
If that doesn't sound stupid, I don't know what does....
This seems obvious to me? Saying "bitcoin isn't marketed because it isn't run by any particular company" in response to people saying it is "marketed" in certain ways seems like missing what was clearly meant to be communicated.
[0] https://www.ccn.com/bitmains-mining-pools-now-control-nearly...