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Comment by silexia | Hacker News Reader

There have been lots of other currencies privately traded previously, but since the state has the guns the state can outlaw it. If it truly started competing with major currencies you would see it outlawed.

It also is not secure as China is controlling a majority of the mining now and the majority can control the currency. Further, Google has a computer that can hack the encryption and you will see a lot more organizations have them soon.

It consumes more power than Switzerland. It's bad for the environment.

It's just a bubble and can be popped anytime.

Not to mention that it is just unusable for actual legal transactions on a regular basis.

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> the state has the guns the state can outlaw it

The state has the guns to outlaw a lot things. Yet many of those products, I can still purchase on the local street corner. Simply having a monopoly on force isn't enough to totally stop trade in some good. Especially when that good is easy to hide, and easy to move. Crypto is pretty much the easiest good to hide and move in the history of mankind.

> Google has a computer that can hack the encryption

Citation needed

I believe that they are referring to quantum computing

Vaporware still, at least for practical applications.

I think this is a roundabout way of saying Google has a quantum computer.

Bitcoin does not involve encryption, and it's a common mistake by journalists to toss that buzzword in there.

All addresses are derived from public/private keypairs

I am guessing the poster is referring to quantum computers, which are not yet even close to breaking cryptographic hashing algorithms as far as I understand.

According to this article: https://decrypt.co/28560/quantum-computers-could-crack-bitco...

It looks like you need a lot more qubits than the most powerful quantum computer we have now. Also, it's fairly trivial for Bitcoin to adopt a quantum resistant algorithm with consensus.

I think the far larger problem would be every non-quantum resistant encryption on the planet being broken at once.

A QC to implement shor's algo at a practical level would need millions of non-ec'ed qubits. At least publicly, we are likely quite far from any such advance.

Integer factorization (ie. Shor's algorithm) would only be useful to break RSA, not Elliptic Curve cryptography...

ECC can be theoretically broken with Shor's algorithm:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic-curve_cryptography#...

It's perfectly usable for actual legal transactions on a regular basis.

Which government exactly would do the outlawing? We're actually seeing the opposite.[1]

[1]https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/japan-cryptocurrency-re...

> It's just a bubble and can be popped anytime.

That's been said for years since Bitcoin emerged, this is starting to get a little old as Bitcoin survives longer and longer.

> It consumes more power than Switzerland. It's bad for the environment.

Compared to what? You think fiat money has a zero environment footprint?

I've always thought a monopoly on violence trumps a monopoly on logic. I don't see how blockchain overcomes this.

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