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Comment by tomphoolery | Hacker News Reader

I think the biggest failure of Bitcoin is that it was marketed as a "currency" and ended up becoming a commodity. Bitcoin isn't something you use to spend wealth, it's used to hold wealth. Unlike a stock, however, whose value is based on what price people are willing to pay for it, Bitcoin's value is determined by its scarcity. Sound familiar?

That's why I hate the term "cryptocurrency". It has a lie baked right into it, the fact that this is supposed to be a "currency", when in reality it's just the same kind of digital assets that dominate all forms of entertainment these days. If the term you're using to refer to your product is itself a lie, what does that say for the rest of the product? The organization creating it?

Crypto, overall, is just hard to trust.

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> Unlike a stock, however, whose value is based on what price people are willing to pay for it

This isn’t quite right. Stocks have value because they represent ownership. The price is based on the perceived value, not the other way around.

But even if no one was willing to buy apple shares, say, they would still have immense value. Shareholders are entitled to the profits.

This is not true of bitcoin, which has no intrinsic value outside of what people are willing to pay for it.

Warren Buffett made this point in an argument against gold investing. If you were an investor in 1900 you would expect stock investments to be worth more in 2000, and for gold not to be, because stocks have productive value and gold doesn’t. And that’s more or less what happened.

The thing is, for the vast majority of civilized human history, currencies have been commodities.

Cryptocommodity does have a nice ring to it, though.

+1 for Cryptocommodity

cryptogold?

It really is a currency, however. It's not a matter of perception but rather of how Bitcoin functions. The biggest difference between a commodity and currency is that a commodity is essential for some process or product. A currency is just one of many ways of funding that process/product. You can't build a computer without gold, copper, and some rare earth metals (commodities) but you can pay for it with USD, bitcoin, yuan, GBP, etc.

Aswath Damodaran has written a lot more on this topic. https://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-bitcoin-boo...

He does agree with you in that Bitcoin will be judged as a currency, so its strengths and deficiencies as a currency will determine its fate.

A currency is a commodity whose utility is in being a medium of exchange.

This is a similar argument to the semantics of black lives matter and refund the police. Sure, maybe there's a better name to make a better first impression, maybe not. Move past it.

Ironically you already have by simply referring to it as "crypto" as most do. Things evolve, like "e-mail" becoming "email" and countless other evolutions as things find their niche and become mainstream.

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