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Comment by mrb | Hacker News Reader

«No, bitcoin isn't going to become a mainstream kind of money. It's too awkward for most people.»

This strikes me as something written by someone who is fundamentally not a problem solver. It's like someone seeing the first cars in the late 19th and early 20th century: awkward, unreliable, etc, and thinking "clearly, cars are NEVER going to become mainstream".

Really? You can't think of any way the technology and tools could improve to make using Bitcoin less awkward?

«Crazy price gyrations are far too wicked for the regular money-using public to tolerate»

Objectively, volatility has significantly decreased over the last 11 years, and will continue to decrease, which is perfectly expected with maturing financial markets.

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Cars however did mature. Bitcoin does not. It just forks whenever someone wants to do significant changes. Also at that point no change could ever get it anywhere close to what other projects achieved with similar but better tech. The fundamentals in Bitcoins are de-facto unchangeable and very much outdated.

«Bitcoin does not»

This statement betrays you have not paid attention to the numerous improvements made to the Bitcoin infrastructure over the last 11 years: wallets, nodes, exchanges, payment processors, vaults, blockchain upgrades, basically all the BIPs https://github.com/bitcoin/bips : segwit, P2SH, lightning, M-of-N keys, deterministic wallets, etc. Using Bitcoin in 2020 is nothing at all like it was in 2009.

Just because there are people coding on it and made improvements doesn't mean it matured. I know very well that there where changes but none of them made any relevant progress to get rid of the growing centralization, very slow speed, limited throughput. etc. etc. Next bullrun Bitcoin will hit the ceiling again and people will says Lightning and what not will solve this soon(TM) while it clearly does not. Bitcoin itself is outdated tech incapable of delivering what it promised 10 years ago and there is nothing being done to change that.

> Really? You can't think of any way the technology and tools could improve to make using Bitcoin less awkward?

I can, I just don't see things trending in that direction. ATMs were supposed to make it easy for anyone to participate; now they are best known as a place for scammers to direct victims to. Lightning network was supposed to increase the transaction rate, where is it now? It's been a few years since I've seen a "Bitcoin accepted here" decal in real life, and they are much sparser online too.

Funny enough, I checked my history and I made a similar comment to yours when Bitcoin first hit $4[1]. But I hardly see the case for optimism lately.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2501153

"Lightning network was supposed to increase the transaction rate, where is it now?"

Lightning network is deployed and increasing the transaction rate. Did someone say otherwise?

I'm mostly just inferring from the fact that the volume on LN chatter seems to have died down; I don't follow super closely but I've been unable to find any transaction rate stats for LN, are they out there?

Bitcoin volatility has not decreased. There was a big drop in March 2020. Bitcoin's limited supply makes its price volatile. I don't think volatility will ever go away. It's a property. I chart some data from BitMex here:

https://vida.io/dashboards/ckamz2w9n00000vkzp471j0md

when cars were invented it was clear pretty quickly that the car is faster than a horse-carriage.

Bitcoin if anything is clunkier, slower, more expensive than regular tools and we're a already well more than a decade into this.

And worse a lot of this is by design to make the economics of decentralised systems work, because if there's no authority you need to put up some kind of cost to keep the system intact.

Crypto wasn't ever about problem-solving but primarily ideology driven libertarian project which has little appeal in most parts of the world. The problem crypto solves are mostly problems that crypto itself has invented.

Slower than regular tools?

In Australia we have some of the most profitable banks on Earth. If I send $20 to my friend on a long weekend Friday morning it won't reach him until midday Tuesday. The fee is $2, 10% charge, 4 days wait.

It's been a decade since bitcoin was created and they only just got around to realtime payments, though still not all banks have implemented it.

The alternatives offered by the banking system is hardly a shining beacon of innovation for an industry that takes so much and has the government footing the bill for whenever it fails.

anglosphere banking systems seem particularly slow but then just use venmo or cashapp, paypal, doesn't even have any fees.

Or wechat pay and alipay etc.. frictionless money exchange is basically already done without resorting to crypto. The things crypto adds mostly general users don't really care about.

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