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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

This is a typical startup contraction. Remember when the "PC bubble burst" and dozens of companies went bust, all with similar but slightly different business plans. It turned out that being able to execute efficiently was the winning strategy, not features, not fancy graphics, not custom cases. Just ruthless efficiency.

A couple of years ago I went to UAV expo in Las Vegas and even then it was clear that a lot of drone companies were technology looking for a use case. And there were demonstrations of drones that did things much better (like mapping a traffic accident scene) than existing technology that saved both time and got the highways re-opened faster.

Racing them with PoV cameras continues to be a lot of fun, it just isn't the multi-billion dollar sport yet, give it time.

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People always seem to underestimate the power of boring efficiency

> technology looking for a use case

Did someone say blockchain?

Blockchain already has a usecase: currency That's it, it's that simple

Except that that's already failed; it's used as an investment product, a get-rich-quick scheme, dealing in illegal products and services, untraceable exchange of currency (e.g. ransomware) and money laundering. Nobody pays with crypto. Except people that made a lot of money off of crypto and have a vested interest in its success.

If you look at transaction number and volume it has been basically constantly rising, so I'm not really sure what you're on about. "Haven't replaced all other currencies in all use cases" is not the same thing as "has failed".

If you look at transaction number and volume it has been basically constantly rising,

I wonder what percentage of those transactions are generated by people trading in cryptocurrencies vs them actually being used as a 'currency'.

Some 2 years ago quite a few services and shops were trying out bitcoin and offering it as an actual option for real-world payments. This trend has reversed, new offers are very rare and many companies who offered it in 2017 don't support it any more, as for any 'normal' business the amount of Bitcoin transactions they got (wherever I've talked with them) was extremely low after the initial buzz at launch.

The current number of transactions is not constantly rising. The current short term trend (https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactions.ht...) is downwards. It's now about the same or less than it was in peaks of 2017 and early 2018, and whatever the growth in 2018-early 2019 was made of, it doesn't seem to be in consumer purchases of goods and services (i.e. being used as a currency).

Sure, because it's still unstable, as more and more people use it the price will become increasingly stable.

Illegal products is an enormous market.

> Except that that's already failed; it's used [...] dealing in illegal products and services

This actually is a currency use case. It's an illegal one, but it's a really useful one.

It's not clear to me that it's a use case that requires a blockchain, but i don't think there are currently any viable competitors.

Is it, though? I'm not saying I buy a lot of street drugs, but I know some people who know some people who do, and have literally never seen or heard mention of Bitcoin for this.

You know what I have seen being used, that surprised the hell out of me at first? Venmo.

Turns out people buy their friends a lot of sushi.

Interesting. I know of one person who mail-orders interesting things, and uses bitcoin for that.

I've heard that anecdotally too, and tbh I would never ingest something a stranger sent me in the mail. I'm sure it's mostly fine, but there's a level of trust that whisper networks provide that is simply absent in an online setting. Heck, bitcoin itself purports to do exchanges in a trustless setting; trustless is the last environment you want to have for things you're putting in your body.

Actually darknet drug sites do have a review system, it's not like people just order randomly.

I've been buying drugs on the street and online for many years and online crushes IRL, just like it does for legal commerce. Online reviews have helped me always get top notch quality and exactly the product I expect. The street can't come close.

It doesn't look like it's failed from where I'm standing.

I'd say bitcoin usecase is being decrapified gold.

Except gold has a real industrial value (electronics), and is an exponentially more stable and liquid asset than bitcoin (albeit not as stable as goldbug scamsters claim)

> Except gold has a real industrial value

Apparently nobody cares because only a small fraction of gold is used for that purpose. Most is used to sit on it.

Stable... hard to tell, let's see after a millenium or two. Gold had a pretty good run till now, but hauling one asteroid towards earth or figuring out how to cheaply filter it out of ocean water will drop its value to dirt cheap.

More liquid... probably. Market for gold is still larger for now. Let's check that after a decade or two. Trends don't look too optimistic for gold when compared to btc.

> Apparently nobody cares because only a small fraction of gold is used for that purpose.

It's better for electronics than copper, so there's that.

> but hauling one asteroid towards earth

Seems impractical, expensive, and the yield isn't clear.

> or figuring out how to cheaply filter it out of ocean water will drop its value to dirt cheap.

You should check your math on this.

342,600,000 pounds of gold have been mined[1], but the oceans hold 20,000,000 pounds[2].

1: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21969100 2: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/gold-ocean-sea-hoax-sc...

This is good for Bitcoin.

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