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Comment by jonny_eh | Hacker News Reader

When can we call Bitcoin a failed experiment? And don't tell me it was "always about storing value", that's not in the original paper.

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A failed experiment to me would be one that wasn't able to run its full course, or from which no information can be gleaned. Bitcoin has run for a long time, we have gleaned a ton of useful information - as far as experiments are concerned this seems like it went bigger and better than expected, so it should be a very GOOD experiment!

Rather than questioning if the experiment failed, perhaps we should question if recent participants considered it an experiment in the first place.

I.e., I don't think most bitcoin miners / companies / investors saw this as a knowledge-gathering exercise.

I think it's really unfair to call Bitcoin "failed". It has unarguably changed the world. There was way too much hype about it changing everything.

> It has unarguably changed the world.

How so? I see nothing in my day-to-day life that's different because of Bitcoin.

Not really. Was the goal of Bitcoin ever to be the successor to paper money? We're here today and Bitcoin is a functional payment network. Not only that, it's a fairly large one, and it has become a household name. I don't really use Bitcoin but I think it's hyperbole to consider it a unilateral failure just because it didn't supercede traditional currency.

It’s a household name because of speculation, however, and statistically almost nobody uses it for the kind of decentralized transactions for which it was originally pitched. The number of vendors accepting it has gone down over time (e.g. Steam, Microsoft) due to the endemic problems and many of the people who claim to use it (even here) are actually using the credit card network with government currencies for the actual transactions so there’d be very little disruption if it disappeared tomorrow.

I can use Bitcoin today, right now, right here. I actually do occasionally, it's how I pay for VPN service. So is it a failure? No. It's a successful payment network. It didn't cause a libertarian Utopia or whatever, but that's a pretty lofty goal for a conceptual currency based on cryptographic hashing. I have nothing else to say here.

That nicely demonstrates my point: you’re a supporter and you use it infrequently with apparently one company. That does not sound like the revolution in personal finance we were breathlessly promised.

I'm a supporter? By what definition of supporter? This may very well be the first time I've ever discussed Bitcoin in a forum. I don't support Bitcoin the same way I don't support Hanes clothing. It's just a thing I causally use. It works. Why are you trying to pigeon hole me personally? Who promised you this revolution, did Satoshi personally?

Oksy, supporter may be too strong. The aspect I had in mind was that even someone who’d gone to the trouble of learning about it and getting setup to use it didn’t really have a need to, whereas for years here and almost everywhere else fanboys were telling us it was going to replace Visa.

That's also a goal bestowed on Bitcoin by 3rd parties. I don't think the original paper mentioned anything about libertarian wet dreams.

>nobody uses it for the kind of decentralized transactions for which it was originally pitched

You're misinterpreting absence of evidence as evidence of absence which is a logical fallacy. clearly there's enough of a market for trustless wealth storage enough to support a $100 Billion dollar market cap. Maybe you think that the world will need less and less trustless wealth storage in the future and you're short bitcoin; it looks like the market is betting against you though.

1. Before accusing other people of logical errors, check to make sure you’re not making one of your own, such as assuming that the current market cap of something is completely backed by real value. Pets.com and Webvan had plenty of market cap right until they didn’t - and a pure fiat currency like Bitcoin has a floor of zero because the only value is the network of people who continue paying to operate it.

2. If a significant number of people were using Bitcoin to replace currency usage, as per the original manifesto, they’d leave evidence behind. You’d see retail transactions, it’d show up in financial reports, the network having problems would make the news because of the inconvenience to businesses, PayPal and western union would be reporting lower usage, etc.

Pasted from another thread: If you think that Bitcoin's value is $0 long term, why not go short and make reams of money? After 10 years the market has shown that owning 100 btc has preserved more purchasing power than owning 100 USD, What's your call for the next 10 years?

> If you think that Bitcoin's value is $0 long term, why not go short and make reams of money?

"Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent."

Small correction: Microsoft still accepts Bitcoin.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13942/microsoft-acc...

> Was the goal of Bitcoin ever to be the successor to paper money?

Yes, blatantly and repeatedly.

If Bitcoin is a failure, I wish some of my projects would fail like that.

I hope my projects never hurt the environment as much as Bitcoin has.

The energy consumed from bitcoin PoW is used as a frequent rebuttal against the legitimacy of bitcoin, and it is an incontrovertible fact that the energy demands of bitcoin are non-trivial.

According to annualized energy forecasts extrapolated out from bitcoin PoW energy demands back in December 2017 (i.e. at the height of the recent crypto bubble frenzy) BTC miners are expected to use 8.27 terawatt-hours this year. That's more energy than 116 countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo.

On the other hand, the amount of energy bitcoin is forecast to consume in a year would only last the U.S. 19 hours. Additional the production of the global cash and coin supply will consume an estimated 11 terawatt-hours this year while gold mining will burn the equivalent of 132 terawatt-hours over the same period - and that doesn't include armored trucks, bank bank vaults, security systems etc...

I'm not saying it's worth it to burn all that energy to keep bitcoin (arguably) decentralized. I just want to provide some (now probably outdated) perspective to temper arguments, and stimulate others (on both sides) to advance their arguments beyond headline quotes.

Sources

Pessimistic take: http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-is-ruining-the-planet...

Optimistic takes: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-07/bitcoin-i... & https://blog.bitcoin.org.hk/bitcoin-mining-and-energy-consum...

>that's not in the original paper.

Bitcoin the protocol != bitcoin the paper.

The main point of the paper was show that you can solve the byzantine generals problem in a completely untrusted. This contribution built on prior distributed-system designs such as Paxos.

>don't tell me it was "always about storing value"

Bitcoin was always about a fixed-scarcity asset/currency given that the controlled supply algorithm was in the very first version.

Bitcoin doesn't need people's interpretations of bitcoin to be positive to come to trustless consensus.

>When can we call Bitcoin a failed experiment?

If you think that Bitcoin's value is $0 long term, why not go short and make reams of money? After 10 years the market has shown that owning 100 btc has preserved more purchasing power than owning 100 USD, What's your call for the next 10 years?

How does one short Bitcoin?

We're a pretty long way off, I'm sorry. Bitcoin is more popular than ever. The payments network (Lightning) being built on top of the financial sovereignty base layer is just getting started.

Another fork of bitcoin. So not actually bitcoin but still bitcoin at the same time. This appears to be an issue with cryptos. Nothing stops another fork later. It’s like people find a problem with a currency and start printing money in another one.

I can see blockchain currency being useful when it is backed by something solid. But right now it’s still just wasted electricity. Eg MasterCard and friends could easily create a currency and use it for exchange.

If I can’t actually use a currency to buy/sell or store value then what is it for? Or am I wrong?

> Another fork of bitcoin.

That's factually wrong. Lightning is a protocol on top of Bitcoin (like HTTP is built on TCP) and not a fork.

It has a different set of trade offs: transactions on it are instant, but one should only store small amounts on it (like what you would carry in your purse) since your money on it can be stolen if you are offline for too long (and you did not pay someone to monitor the network for you). But as long as you are online often enough your funds are secure.

If someone is curious how it works: https://lightning.network/

Different Lightning.

So have a look at this: https://chat.lbtc.io/topic/37-faq/

What makes you think that's what the post you replied to talked about?

Lighting as a bitcoin fork is at: http://lightningbitcoin.io/

And having money stolen from my wallet because I haven’t logged in recently is NOT useful for a currency.

Goal post moving. You claimed Lightning was a fork of bitcoin which is patently false. You lost your debate.

Lighting as a bitcoin fork is at: http://lightningbitcoin.io/ Which is what I was talking about. No goal post moving.

Have a nice day, bully boy.

You crossed into incivility in this thread, as well as broke the site guidelines by complaining about downvotes. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here. I know it's hard when downvotes feel unfair, but those rules all exist for good reason and we ban accounts for breaking them, regardless of how wrong someone else was.

Incivility and snark will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is. Please don't post like this again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's a technical caveat that exists now, but there's nothing categorically preventing additional technology to help users prevent this fate without much work.

One thing I don't understand is why so many people seem to have this "Bitcoin CAN not, therefore it WILL not" attitude. Bitcoin is software, it is editable, it is being actively developed. Most of us here, I thought, were familiar with the process of improving software over time by working on it, providing solutions we didn't have before.

We don't write code once and say, "welp, software cannot do this thing, because it doesn't already do this thing." What?? People would think you're an idiot.

Yet this is the most common type of argument against crypto, even here on HN.

I think anything that wants to be called a currency should be useful for buying and selling goods and useful for storing value. Cash right now can do this. Bitcoin right now can’t, and lightning on top can’t do it as per your comment about it having a vulnerability if you don’t log in.

I’m sure I’ll get downvoted for that statement as well.

This is simple bullying by a mob of people who don’t understand what a currency is actually useful for. And are happy to bully and attack someone for even mentioning an issue.

Nobody's bullying you, you just say inaccurate things or bring up things that were not your original argument. Even this response disregards my point.

Everyone agrees with you that being able to handle payments is important for Bitcoin to become a more widely-adopted currency. That's why they're working on improving it so that it can be that way.

Wrong. I can’t see any evidence of others agreeing with me.

People definitely disagreed with my statement “And having money stolen from my wallet because I haven’t logged in recently is NOT useful for a currency.” Disagreeing with that doesn’t bode well for the future of commerce.

The only possibly incorrect statement was “Another fork of bitcoin”. The person who told me I was wrong introduced a different project. I was accused of "moving the goal posts’’ when I clarified what I was referring to and got a snarky reply when I did so. So my statement about lightning being a “Another fork of bitcoin” is actually factually correct.

References: Lightning as bitcoin fork http://lightningbitcoin.io/ Lightning as protocol https://lightning.network/

You want to join the growing list of Proclaimers that Bitcoin is dead? It’s growing ever since 2011.

Edit: typo

Wild how consensus forms over time, huh?

I see what you did there.

Everyone should differ between Bitcoin the idea and Bitcoin the coin, only one of many cryptocurrencies.

I don't think cryptocurrencies are ever going away. It's simply too good to be able to accept digital money anywhere from anyone quickly and with low fees. Dark markets for example will always use cryptocurrencies.

Barring a catastrophic vulnerability in SHA256 or ECDSA, Bitcoin is going nowhere. Bitcoin has been a wild success. At this point, the goal is simply educating newcomers on its advantages (immutability, trustlessness, sound money).

Failed in what sense, and for whom? Some people made and are making a lot of (real) money from it (especially the thieves that have executed the numerous heists from exchanges, wallets, etc.) There is a definite ecosystem here that has players profiting from it that would want it to continue.

In the original sense, a faster/cheaper alternative to wire transfers.

I'd call it a successful experiment that is soon over.

> When can we call Bitcoin a failed experiment?

When nobody is mining blocks any more?

What is backing bitcoin? Gold? Cpu cycles?

Algorithm thay decides how many bitcoins exist. Bitcoin is backed by same thing art and collectibles are backed by. Scarcity.

I don’t buy burgers with art or collectibles. And holding bitcoin doesn’t help me in long or short term.

Right now I’m hoping more people will buy bitcoin so I can dump the remainder of mine.

Ask again after the next major financial crisis.

So 18 months then. Ok.

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