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Comment by janvanbergen | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin will never become a standard currency, it's slow, it has zero privacy (if I send you money once you can see ALL my transactions), it is EXTREMELY energy inefficient. Even if you believe crypto will one day become the standard (which I dont), it won't be bitcoin because there are better alternatives; proof of work is dumb, bitcoin has a finite supply of bitcoins, etc.

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Other comments in this thread are claiming bitcoin makes it much easier to launder money. So which is it? Zero privacy or increased privacy and anonymity?

Decreased privacy for everyday users. Increased privacy for those with the time, resources, and incentives to find ways to orchestrate transfers that can't be tied back to them. In other words, the worst of both worlds.

How come so few Silk Road market place vendors were arrested if it decreased privacy? Many people on the SR were just everyday users. I don't think the argument that it's a step down in privacy is valid at all.

It's completely possible to remain anonymous with btc, but a big enough pain in the ass that only people who are committing crimes will do it. Everyone else will at some point link their identity to their wallet and all of their transaction and transaction amounts are then public record.

Yes, but the option is there. How does one protect their identity with a credit card transaction? The argument that BTC is not private doesn't seem to hold up.

I guess we could go through a challenge. You set up a Stripe page or some such thing and someone else can set up a BTC wallet. I will spend a dollar with my CC on your Stripe site and I will spend a dollar equivalent to that BTC wallet.

Then I will make two other secret transactions with the CC and the BTC wallet. You can each then try to identify the targets and the sums spent in the secret transactions.

Whoever identifies gets some sum of money from the other. I'm happy to escrow for you.

Let's be real: Everyday users just resort to credit cards, which have zero privacy. Only those with the time, resources, & incentives to transact away from credit cards get increased privacy.

My CC statement is not on a public distributed ledger.

You are fooling yourself if you believe using a credit card affords you any kind of privacy.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/consumer-privac...

My CC statement is not on a public distributed ledger.

Who cares? You have the option to completely anonymize your transactions with BTC, this option does not exist with credit cards, in fact you have no idea who is doing what with your data. If privacy is your concern, BTC is the superior option.

> If privacy is your concern, BTC is the superior option

Bitcoin is a public ledger. It is AT BEST pseudonymous. At best.

You'll notice users of the silk road who were risking life in prison used BTC, not credit cards, as their form of payment. If it truly was trivial to link a wallet to your IRL identity every user of the site would have been charged with multiple felonies, and yet that never happened.

If you want to launder money, you need to shuffle your cash through a dozen shady shells at a fee. If you want to just send people money, that's not anonymous at all.

The finite supply is a feature, not a bug. I agree there are many aspects of bitcoin that suck, but not this one. We are right now witnessing many governments printing more and more money, which makes it less and less valuable. Bitcoin avoids that.

There is absolutely nothing about bitcoin that sucks. It is exactly what it needs to be: the world's hardest store of value.

Every design decision comes with trade offs. All the right trade offs have been made. If you'd reinvent it from scratch, you'd end up with the exact same thing.

The only thing about bitcoin that sucks, is that nocoiners don't have any. And they won't have any until it's $1M.

Nobody wants to be the first. But everybody wants to be second.

Central banking does have some benefits. Printing money can make a currency more valuable if it reduces volatility, because that draws more participants into the currency.

> The finite supply is a feature, not a bug.

Finite supply means that a guy who mined a bunch of bitcoin in his dorm room in 2011 because the university gave him free electricity can move the price when he decides to sell.

Feature that can be changed. Specially if armies come to play... After all whole feature set is consensus of miners, not the users...

State actors have good handle on violence. And then you better be on the same chain as they are, or it's jail time...

Features that can't be changed. Certainly not when armies come to play.

You can change the bitcoin source code to have more coins and deal out half to yourself first. That's the easy part.

But then comes the part where you have to convince the whole world that your chain is the one, true bitcoin.

Good luck with that.

Limited supply does not make things valuable per se.

It does if there's demand for it.

And there's been growing demand for bitcoin for 12 years and counting.

It's deflationary by design. But by all means, stick to your government money.

Printer goes brrrrrrrrr.

You realize deflation is bad, right? There's a reason why the central bank deliberately keeps inflation at a steady 2%. Slow, steady inflation is the ideal.

Store your value in fiat then, if you enjoy watching icecubes melt so much.

Nah, I keep it in a mutual fund. That's the point of inflation — spend or invest, but don't just sit on it.

I invested my inflationary fiat in deflationary bitcoin.

I sit on it while it appreciates.

Number go up.

The value of bitcoin increases because people speculate, not because the number of them is fixed. I bet there are hundreds of crypto currencies that have fixed or decreasing stock that keep losing value, or are already worthless.

As per Satoshi himself, the value of bitcoin increases because people speculate, start using it more, speculate more, start using it more, etc.

The reason why it is capable of increasing, is because the number is fixed. Inflation would outstrip its value, if it weren't.

Bitcoin is useful. It has organic support. When it comes to storing value, other coins do not matter (nearly as much). Just ask PayPal, Mastercard, Microstrategies, Tesla, JP Morgan, GrayScale, etc.

https://bitcointreasuries.org/

https://hope.com/

It's a shitty feaure advocated for by people who are proud of being ignorant. Fiat currency and monetary policy is largely responsible for the economic success of the last century.

There will be greater economic success in the current century, due to better money: bitcoin.

These are all the same uninformed arguments that every newcomer thinks of. It's all incorrect, and if you'd want to learn correct info, then you'd be able to do so.

It's important that you do it yourself. Because when I tell you it, it isn't going to land.

Your ideologies don't matter. The world won't let you force them onto it. The reality of the situation, is that all the big money believes bitcoin has a large role to play in the future of the world economy.

And this is true.

Screenshot this. Message me in 2030. Let's reevaluate.

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