Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

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I've been checking in on cryptocurrencies and blockchain things every couple of years and I tend to come away with a weird mixture of confusion and admiration each time.

Confusion because I don't understand how all of this has such an immense amount of time and capital invested in it when its actual use case for anything is extremely vague (mostly about future potential) and some that have moved away from proof of work (Stellar) seem a lot less safe?

Admiration because all of the different approaches, goals, and designs are really technically interesting (Dai using market incentives to stay pegged to one dollar, Tezos proof of stake and ability to get consensus on its own updates/formal verification, Zcash using zero knowledge proofs to keep transaction history optionally private, etc.)

I can't help shake that while the ability to hold decentralized consensus is neat, most of the current value seems to come entirely from speculation on future token price from people on reddit that have no idea what they're buying. Why do these things have any real value?

I've tried to follow the reasoning of people like Balaji S. Srinivasan from what I can find, but I have a hard time modeling a future where the current value of these things makes sense.

The value of Coinbase in all this makes sense though, if you build reliable infrastructure in a market you should make money - it doesn't matter if the underlying assets are worth anything or not.

Bitcoin has a great use case as internet native money, which can be thrown around programmatically, without being reliant on any private, corporate, or nation controlled services. Considering how much of a shitshow the payments industry is, I think this is a huge opportunity for bitcoin. Sure there are cases where regular payment methods are preferable, perhaps even most, but that doesn't mean that there is no place for true peer-to-peer permissionless money transfers.

This to me is the real value. I'm not a huge believer in Bitcoin, but try moving > 10k USD between bank accounts (just operating a small business I run into this several times a year) and you will quickly see the appeal. High fees, multi-day settlement times, raised eyebrows. It's just a mess. With cryptocurrencies you can move millions of dollars for less than a dollar in fees and it executes in as quickly as 10 minutes. There is definitely a downside in terms of price volatility, and other cryptocurrencies offer much better settlement times (beyond the network effect, they seem to offer more long term value here than Bitcoin), but having what is essentially gold that can teleport is very appealing. Sadly the ecosystem is not quite to where I would actually operate my business in this manner, but I can definitely see the value.

Transactions are about 10 minutes because that is the average block time, but you want at least 6 confirmations (blocks) too pass to really solidify things. So, it is more like 60 minutes. It is this reason (and volatility of course) that people dislike bitcoin as a regular payment mechanism. Nobody is going to wait 60 minutes at the counter to buy something.

But, if you have 1 trillion USD of value (insert the actual value that is meaningful to you) that you want to transfer around the world, you certainly want to do it in the most secure way possible. Especially without having to get permission from your local bureaucrat first. Bitcoin certainly makes that possible. The problem being that buying up 1 trillion USD worth of bitcoin is going to obviously move the market and anyone holding enough to do that OTC, makes it pretty centralized.

I do feel like there is a middle ground here and that is to look at it as more of a store of value. Just buy and hold it in the same way that people hold onto gold. If you look at the 100yr charts for gold, they are all over the place. 2008 was one of the largest dips that set things back at least 30 years! Now things have bounced back... but it is all on speculation and really has nothing to do with some sort of 'intrinsic value' of gold.

It's just not super clear to me that there is a huge need for this. Its been ten years and what services have btc integration? AliPay is outrageously more successful despite centralization, which seems to not bother most people.

Further, btc works precisely as well as a payment platform whether the price is $1 or $1,000,000. This makes the discussion of the price of btc suspicious to me.

> without being reliant on any private, corporate, or nation controlled services

Sounds good in theory until one is faced with a fraudulent vendor, a suddenly empty wallet or a transfer error due to some "fat fingers" mistake. Then people somehow get nostalgic for "how much of a shitshow the payments industry is" and how quickly it acts on chargebacks, scams or unauthorized spending.

I don’t think it’s use case for this is very good due to its extreme price volatility. Dai - sure, maybe (if you didn’t have to always convert to USD to buy something).

This plus bitcoin’s inability to handle transactions in a timely way makes it kind of useless for this.

From the other commenter I think bitcoin as a store of value could be possible, but it’d have to stabilize in the end which remains to be seen. I’m also not sure scarcity itself guarantees value, but I probably just don’t know enough about this.

I feel the same way about the dollar.

The inability to compute exactly how many there are, nor their rate of creation. Their limited use beyond a specified geographic boundary.

The confident speculation based on ever increasing underlying leveraged weakness (showing no sign of slowing) is worrisome.

Digital scarcity is why Bitcoin is so valuable (and why other cryptocurrencies not so much).

Read the Bitcoin Standard book, or Plan B's article if you honestly want to understand why Bitcoin is so crucial in the current financial climate.

Thanks - I’ll check them out.

Plan B: https://medium.com/@100trillionUSD/modeling-bitcoins-value-w...

Bitcoin Standard: https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Standard-Decentralized-Altern...

While these are undoubtedly interesting reads, it should be noted that stock to flow as a predictive model is inherently flawed in that the demand side is not taken into account. There are many who like the model though, so well worth a read. It's also led to interesting efficient market hypothesis discussions which are worth looking into, I would recommend reading some of Nic Carter's work.

Edit: 'not taken into account' is probably the wrong way to say it, rather it is assumed.

Inherently flawed compared to what model? Have you cross checked-it with other models?

I think it's amazing how well a simple model with just 2 variables can explain the difference between Bitcoin price movements in the first few years and later years.

Time based models are so much worse that it's crazy. I don't know any model that comes even close to it.

Anyways stock-to-flow predicts that for a halving of money issuance the demand for the asset as expressed in market cap will be 8x.

If course market cap is a strange and not perfect metric for demand, but that's still the best we have for comparing assets and asset classes.

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