Ask HN: What do you guys think about future of Bitcoin? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you guys think about future of Bitcoin?

13 pointsgeswit2x24 comments

And this is not another thread on Internet asking about its future price, I know here there are the most brilliant minds of the world. I want to know what do you think about its future. This coin has a space in our world, we need bitcoin? Or is only a cyberpunk manifesto wannabe? I think is like not for me. I feel comfortable paying my taxes, but I have some friends that they are bitcoin maximalist and a little anti-government. I don’t know if it’s correlated. And finally, what do you think about the last so heavy demand, is only a FOMO? Future threats about our fiat economy that I don’t know??

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The future is bright. Bitcoin serves as a scarce asset with a fixed supply, tradable globally without any intermediary. It protects your capital from currency inflation, banks, and bureaucracy.

Both decentralized and centralized technologies (Lightning and Liquid) for instant payment are maturing, so in the future there will be more means to trade Bitcoin instantly off-chain.

Privacy improvements like CoinJoin continue to be implemented, so the future will provide more means to conduct private transactions.

I used to be a skeptic when BTC hit 20K the first time around, but now that PornHub is accepting payments using cryptocurrency due to the whole MasterCard-Visa conflict the future is looking bright. I wouldn't be surprised if OnlyFans and other (legal) sex workers started accepting cryptocurrency in an effort to sort of deplatform payment processing. Interesting times!

Bitcoin may become a way of bypassing prohibitions against financial transactions. That's a future, but it's a fairly niche one.

that's world-changing potential

For a relatively small set of people. But for them, yes, it changes the world.

It might be the "college dorm" start Bitcoin needs.

Since 20 dollars of 100 has been printed the past 12 months due to Covid, I am happy something like bitcoin exists. For me it’s a hedge against quantitative easing.

In that sense, I see bitcoin as a more robust store of value than fiat currency.

Correct.

To quote @Travis_Kling:

Bitcoin is a non-sovereign, hard-capped supply, global, immutable, decentralized digital store of value. It’s an insurance policy against monetary and fiscal policy irresponsibility from central banks and governments globally.

It's the world's first globally accessible, decentralized, transparent, immutable ledger.

I still don't see any other utility other than digital gold for bitcoin and speculation for all the others.

I own some because I thought it was a neat idea when I was in grad school and talking about these concepts with other comp sci folks, but I have had a hard time finding use cases beyond speculation that aren't covered by other options today. Re: taxes, bitcoin should not matter at all unless these people are hiding money illegally and bitcoin is making that easier. You don't get to avoid taxes because you're using bitcoin. There are a lot of people who have not realized they owe money to their government when buying and selling crypto, which has caused major issues for folks who aren't prepared and put aside taxes appropriately.

Bitcoin is complicated:

- buying and holding actual coins feels feels like investing in other nonperforming assets, like other currencies, or art, or gold

- the world does seem to need / want a decentralized store of value that bitcoin provides

- if you are worried about fiat currency, then just don’t hold most of your wealth in currency, just keep enough float to cover expected transactions

- bitcoin seems horrible for actual transactions, as others have stated, it can do very small number of transactions per day

- some other crypto currency will nail the online transactions part, when that happens, that will be super interesting

It's more like a store of value as it has a fixed supply, and if you think about it, over time, people lose access to their wallets, so really in 30 years, there will be even less accessible bitcoin, thus increasing its price even more.

The real value is once we get the cross blockchain projects that facilitate transactions between different blockchains. That will unlock the true value of all block chains, as they will be interoperable.

The US with its strong world currency has no use for bitcoin, in fact it is an enemy of the dollar-based economy. For the rest of the world , the bitcoin economy may become a weapon to dethrone the dollar, and with it a large part of the US influence.

Not sure if FOMO, but central government abuses seem to have found yet another competitor.

For the rest of the world , the bitcoin economy may become a weapon to dethrone the dollar

Hundreds of thousands of transactions in US dollars occur all around the world every second of every day. Bitcoin can't even handle the currency transaction needs of a large shopping mall. The bitcoin blockchain is limited to about 7 transactions a second.

A cryptocurrency of some sort may eventually become a threat to the US dollar but bitcoin is clearly not it.

each of those transactions can be $billions. the important bit is that it overrides checks/sanctions etc

The important bit is that bitcoin is not technically capable of being a threat to the US dollar or any other major currency. As currency for use in real world transactions, bitcoin is a huge step backwards.

Bitcoin can't even handle the currency transaction needs of a large shopping mall. The bitcoin blockchain is limited to about 7 transactions a second.

That's the main chain only; Lightning Network and side chains have no such limitations. There are over 36,000 lightning channels that can clear bitcoin transactions without using the main blockchain.

In a shopping mall scenario, most people would already have open channels with their favorite stores, similar to how store credit cards work today.

A cryptocurrency of some sort may eventually become a threat to the US dollar but bitcoin is clearly not it.

If it's going to happen, bitcoin will most certainly be it. The dollar is starting to lose its place as the world's reserve currency; Russia, China, Iran and other countries are cutting side deals to use currencies other than the dollar when they can [1].

Sure, smart people will continue to buy their morning coffee with dollars but they won't be saving for a rainy day in dollars.

The Fed has already printed trillions and trillions of dollars, with no end in sight; it's just a matter of time before we have either negative interest rates or noticeable inflation or both. Regardless, it's losing its buying power daily.

That's why a company like MicroStrategy borrowed $550 million at 0.75% to buy more bitcoin—and that's after a $425 million purchase a couple of months ago. Mass Mutual—an insurance company—just bought $100 million in bitcoin [2].

These and other companies wouldn't have done this if they were confident that the dollar would retain its value.

It looks like the beginning of a speculative attack, which was predicted 6.5 years ago [3].

[1] https://www.lynalden.com/fraying-petrodollar-system/

[2] https://www.kevinrooke.com/post/microstrategys-bitcoin-debt-...

[3] https://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/speculative-attack/

BTW, the Speculative Attack article is available as a podcast: https://pca.st/episode/ecb7a2bf-ad11-467f-b9a4-66f393073603

In a shopping mall scenario, most people would already have open channels with their favorite stores, similar to how store credit cards work today.

I don't have any "store credit cards". Too cumbersome --- and so are "open channels".

I think it is inevitable that there will be some kind of "digital currency" in the future. The idea is just so useful, and obvious.

However I do not believe that bitcoin itself will be that currency, for the simple reason that people are hoarding it, schilling it, and gambling with it rather than actually spending it.

Bitcoin is totally ineffective as a real world currency. By design, the max transaction rate is about 7 per second. Visa says their transaction rate is better than 60000 per second.

Fiat currency is going to be around for while.

The only thing bitcoin is really effective at is speculation and manipulation by unregulated exchanges.

It's going to get interesting when climate change becomes even more critical - there's no easy way to kill Bitcoin now that the genie is out of the bottle in terms of miners competing for rewards around the world.

It’s an arbitrary investment vehicle. It’s unlikely it will be anything more due to its volatility relative to currencies actual people use.

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