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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

The fact Bitcoin is worth $90 billion and has survived a decade of endless criticism, means blockchain is successful beyond anyone's wildest dreams a decade ago. I would say Bitcoin and Ethereum have been way more successful than Watson has.

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People kept investing with Bernie Madoff for decades too, because his investments kept giving returns. People will keep shoveling money into Bitcoin as long as its value keeps swinging wildly. That's hardly a measure of success.

How much will Bitcoin have to be worth, and for how long, to make it successful in your eyes? Or is the entire idea of a digital asset with intrinsic value impossible to you?

The thing I think is odd about Bitcoin and it's future is how energy intensive it is to run the network. It is known that bitcoin miners use huge amounts of electricity, which costs money, but you can't yet pay your electric bill with bitcoin, nor can you pay taxes in bitcoin. Just seems a bit unsustainable to me.

It's not about how much Bitcoin is worth when translated to another currency. It's about how much Bitcoin is worth on its own.

How much is Bitcoin worth without translating it to another currency? Schrute Bucks and Stanley Nickels.

Slot machines pull in a lot of money too, I guess you would label them a success?

USDC (https://www.circle.com/en/usdc) is a dollar-backed cryptocurrency operating on Ethereum. Over $260 million has been converted into USDC, and it is used all over the globe to move small or very large amounts of money securely within seconds (https://etherscan.io/token/0xa0b86991c6218b36c1d19d4a2e9eb0c...). This is a novel application of blockchain technology that is beyond a slot machine.

The hype around blockchain is far more than just cryptocurrencies, which have done well by many measures.

The person you're replying to is saying that all the hype around blockchain for contracts, identifiers etc. is most likely way overblown and we will look back in a few years and see it as a mostly useless fad

The Federal Reserve is worth maybe every dollar on the planet. It's survived almost a hundred years. It bankrolled Bitcoin with it and most cryptocurrencies depending on dollars for investments, paying employees, etc. From centralized banking to sustaining decentralized platforms, the Federal Reserve is successful beyond anyone's wildest dreams in the 1910's. Except maybe the people that created it.

See why your argument doesn't prove Bitcoin is a good thing in the long term and/or if you're a believer in its superiority to centralized banking?

I made no comment on Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies replacing the Federal Reserve. I am arguing that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are, 1) Not worthless, 2) Not a scam, 3) Have interesting technical properties that are worthy of study and improvement, 4) Have real-world utility, and 5) Should not be immediately dismissed by HN groupthink.

And blockchain peddlers can certainly over-promise/under-deliver without contradicting any of those points.

And VC funded startups in Silicon Valley over-promise/under-deliver to their investors and employees. Welcome to tech startups

TIL IBM is a tech startup.

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