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Comment by janandonly | Hacker News Reader

I lament the recurring fact that “the price” dictates more than anything else when and even if a news article appears in a mainstream news medium like Bloomberg.

There is soo much technical development in bitcoin that is way more news-worthy than what the market happens to be doing today ️

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What else is there? Bitcoin is an investment, so this is important in the same way that the price of gold climbing like this would be important.

Bitcoin is meant to be a way of completing payments, not an investment. The use as an investment goes against its primary purpose.

Who cares what it's "meant" to be?

You must be pretty behind the times. Most shops have stopped accepting bitcoin because of volatility and high transaction fees. Bitcoin thrives as virtual gold precisely because those two downsides make it useless as a currency.

That's the primary reason the Bitcoin Core / Bitcoin Cash split 2 years ago now was a difference in opinion about whether or not usage as a payment method mattered. Now you have two competing camps one is pushing the Bitcoin as egold and high fees while the other is pushing Bitcoin as a means of exchange with low fees.

The volatility was solved by the payment processors. In any case the big payment processors support both now. The higher than credit card fees though did kill the use of Bitcoin Core as a payment method in ordinary transactions.

Bitcoin was invented as a way to protect individuals from governments devaluing fiat currency. Payments have always been secondary to this goal. Read Satoshi's white paper.

> Bitcoin is an investment

Bitcoin fails every imaginable property of investment vehicles.

we don't really need to have the same discussion ad nauseam . People invest in bitcoin so it must be an investment

People buying Bitcoin aren’t investing just because they think they are.

> ad nauseam

Exactly.

Every cryptocurrency discussion is an Eternal September [0] that recycles the same, tired, 10-year-old arguments.

Pretty soon some smart guy will pop up to educate us on the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, how Bitcoin isn't "backed" by anything, or how the US dollar is "backed" by taxes and the military.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

As someone who’s been in the field since 2012 - yes, the tech part is what’s the most interesting. I explained to countless people that price is not what matters the most.

Having said that, I’ll shamefully admit that when the prices go up I get happy and excited :) We’re all humans after all!

That's like saying you read Playboy because of articles. Price is the single most important metric of Bitcoin's success. Price determines whether Bitcoin will (or how close Bitcoin is to) overtaking Gold and fiat in becoming the world's reserve asset and freeing people from wealth confiscation via hidden inflation tax.

I suppose it depends on what we mean by newsworthy. To anyone who owns (or doesn't anymore, or thought about it and..) bitcoin, price is what they care about. It's a little dull as news though, since all there it is a number, with all following words redundant.

The tech is perhaps the interesting part, since it evolves and has depth.

From my pov, neither are the most important part. Usage is what actually matters. That's both hardest to report on and perhaps most disappointing.. at least for bitcoin as a currency.

Agreed.

Which ones fascinate you the most?

Price is an advertising mechanism, though I do agree with your sentiment.

what i hate is that bloomberg is mainstream news now. They re a financial website.

What technical development are you speaking of? I thought the Bitcoin community didn't want any modifications to Bitcoin.

It doesn't even scale enough for mass adoption. Who said it shouldn't have any modifications?

Not me. I am trying to understand which developments the author of the parent comment is talking about.

Probably Lightning Network.

There are some nice updates in Lightning Network, e.g. I just saw that Lightning Labs released beta of a “non-custodial” mobile wallet that with good UX internally runs Lightning node on the phone: https://blog.lightning.engineering/announcement/2019/06/19/m...

I think the UX is still far from great, but it’s slowly getting there.

Why would you think such a blatantly false thing? Some recent developments include:

- Schnorr Signatures https://github.com/sipa/bips/blob/bip-schnorr/bip-schnorr.me...

- Taproot https://github.com/sipa/bips/blob/bip-schnorr/bip-taproot.me...

- Erlay (relay protocol that reduces bandwidth up to 75%) https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.10518

- Dandelion (privacy enhancing transaction relay protocol) https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/13947

- Miniscript https://prezi.com/view/KH7AXjnse7glXNoqCxPH/

and many more

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