This is a very well-known blockchain project that people in the industry have been watching, so I’m happy it has surfaced here without the usual “blockchain is 110% useless” commentary HN is known for. It is a very interesting experiment.
Are there any projects that you consider to be a success that currently use a distributed blockchain?
I suspect like most people my skepticism comes not from the inherent technology but in all actual deployments so far.
A system that solves scaling, doesn’t appear to be a questionable pyramid scheme, and had even a few of the advantages of the existing financial system would be welcomed.
Would you object to me saying "bitcoin" (edit: I should be clear that I'm primarily referring to market value and making money for those involved with this one)?
It's morally ambiguous at best, but what about "dark net markets"?
Or if we just don't worry about morality, "cryptolockers"?
Of course the latter two are really just consequences of us having a reasonable secure and (seemingly) anonymous currency. The fact that bitcoin enabled them perhaps says more about the state of the rest of the world than bitcoin itself.
Like I guess they found a niche market. Maybe it will be a success in a post-national world where banks and sovereign debts aren't able to serve our needs, but until then it all feels like LARPing to me.
Bitcoin is not anonymous, this is a big misconception. It is pseudonymous at best. US dollars are anonymous.
For me, the jury is still out, cf tulip bubble.
> of us having a reasonable secure and (seemingly) anonymous currency
I'd object to that on the basis that most crypto-currencies have a public ledger, and I believe deanonymization is already somewhat effective and also only just in its infancy. I would not want to have committed anything to the blockchain that I wasn't happy for the world to know. I believe this is solvable in future innovations, but appears to be far from widely deployed. The linked post appears to be a possible solution.
Also I think the whole tainted coins concept, where a government marks transactions emanating from a wallet, and all linked transactions after that, is going to be a much much bigger deal than people think. It seems very unlikely to me that companies like Coinbase won't have to maintain a blacklist at some point in the future if they want to stay on the good side of regulators, which will lead to all sorts of turbulent effects.
Its original notion was "peer-to-peer electronic cash". As best I can tell, there's almost no significant legal use beyond speculation. [1] Even prominent Bitcoin advocates have admitted it isn't a good currency. [2] Illegal use is self-limiting; if Bitcoin becomes mainly known as the crime currency, it'll be truly screwed, as governments everywhere will further crack down on conversion and use, driving off investors, developers, business partners, etc.
I think it's especially obvious how much it's failed as e-cash when you compare it with M-Pesa, an African e-money system. [3] It started just a year before Bitcoin, but does something like 100x the transaction volume and is wildly popular in a number of countries.
[1] E.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/16/nyregion/new-york-today-l...
[2] E.g., https://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/
And no, it's not a Ponzi scheme either, it's a new kind of scam: https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/
> The SDR serves as the unit of account of the IMF and some other international organizations.
> The SDR is neither a currency
And gold is not a currency either. It's a scarce good, nothing less nothing more.
Credit predates capitalism by thousands of years and noone has shown any sort of working economy running without credit.
> So the Bitcoin faithful have tried to not only convert people, but also convince them to martyr themselves, financially-speaking, for the crypto cause. It goes something like this. - Hey, do you want to hear about the future? It's a digital currency called Bitcoin that lets you spend or move your money online without paying any fees. - Sounds great. How does it do that? - Well, Bitcoin saves you money by making transactions irreversible. - So ... if I get scammed, I got scammed? There's nothing I can do about it? - Yes. - Okay, but is it at least easy to use? - The thing is, I don't actually use it. I just hoard it. I'm waiting for some greater fools to push up the price by using theirs. - Oh. - Yeah. So you should buy some Bitcoins and use yours. - I'll get back to you on that.
If you subscribe to the hodl mantra and advocate for Bitcoin, this is exactly what you do...
That's not the same as "not being backed by". Uncle Sam seems to be doing a pretty good job of asserting his control over it[0], while the Fed isn't guaranteeing it. Worst of both worlds, isn't it?
[0] https://www.coindesk.com/goodbye-fungibility-ofacs-bitcoin-b...
I agree with you that the mPesa transactions are much more likely to be transactions for goods and services, but I don't think Bitcoin can be counted as an abject failure just yet.
I agree that Bitcoin won't be counted as a failure yet, but I think that's part of the problem. As a hypothesis, Bitcoin apparently isn't falsifiable. Consider the Fred Wilson article linked above, where a Bitcoin advocate admitted that it wasn't a good payment system. But he immediately declares it a store of value. Now that we've had it crash by 80%, it's pretty clear that it's bad for that too. If there isn't a new consensus answer to the question, "what is Bitcoin good for," then its advocates just shift to the possible shining future based on hope and potential. And note how its distributed, peer-to-peer promise has quietly drained away.
Bitcoin can apparently never fail. And I think that's part of what guarantees its failure. Nobody expects an early product to be perfect. But good products evolve and expand to better serve users. As it became clear Bitcoin was not very good for its stated purpose, it could have changed and grown. But speculation was too profitable, so it got stuck in a very deep rut. If some blockchain currency becomes actually useful, I suspect it would be one of the hundreds of competitors. But given that none of them seem to be delivering real-world economic value either, I'm not optimistic.
Citing an article about a guy trying to use it exclusively is a bit odd as a source for "almost no use".
The big payment processors process up to over a billion dollars of completely normal white market payments per year. That's likely mostly enthusiasts, but still a decent chunk to make a profitable business or two from, and very far from "almost no use".
"Cash" has a very specific meaning from those interested in private currencies, which has nothing to do with how well adopted it is. It means something that is a transfer of value (and not an IOU), that is fungible, with private transactions between parties. Bitcoin is questionable on the latter but pretty good on the former. The white paper must be understood in this context.
The fact that Bitcoin has value at all is an astounding success, compared to what most other casuals observers (myself included) thought about it.
I would love to see your data for that.
But "big payment processors" are definitely the opposite of "peer-to-peer electronic cash". We already had big payment processors. Those are much more efficient.
> fact that Bitcoin has value at all is an astounding success
It strikes me as a pretty uninteresting kind of success. Tulip bulbs and Beanie Babies both had very high valuation for a while. But in the long term, prices generally fall back to what's sustained by use.