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Comment by uberswe | Hacker News Reader

It's impossible to predict the future. If everyone holds bitcoin as a store of value then the value should drop as it's not being used for anything one would think. I believe the best outcome is that people start using bitcoin for every day purchases and the hope is that by 2140 the price is relatively stable. Most likely there will be many large holders as there are with real money.

However, someone could maybe do a 51% attack on bitcoin at some point. Maybe there is a unforeseen flaw in bitcoin. Maybe something better comes a long. It's impossible to know.

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" bitcoin for every day purchases and the hope is that by 2140 the price is relatively stable."

This is fantastically impossible.

It will about as stable as any other commodity plus the additional swings due to public stampedes one way or another, and the fact that there is no 'underlying value' to anchor the price (like Oil).

Feasibly, if exchange rates are razor thin (unlikely) then it might be possible buy milk and bread with BTC simply by doing the conversion on point, but that of course requires someone to do some 'investing math / intuition' every time they buy a stick of gum.

It can't be a functional currency, at least as it's designed.

And the notion that it consumes gigantic amounts of energy for no net value gained should have everyone up in arms.

> It can't be a functional currency, at least as it's designed.

Citation needed

> And the notion that it consumes gigantic amounts of energy for no net value gained should have everyone up in arms.

For what it's worth, bitcoin aims to deprecate every single brick-and-morter bank as well as all the armored trucks driving paper currency to and from them.

When you start to add up all of the energy that would be saved if bitcoin succeeds, the energy costs associated with mining start looking quite a bit smaller.

"Citation needed"

I literally just explained it to you.

The price of BTC has always been highly unstable. There is absolutely no evidence it will ever be stable, to the contrary in fact, all evidence points to the fact that it will remain unstable.

Every single commodity or currency extant to an economy is unstable relative to the currency of that economy. The only thing 'stable' in terms of USD are things closely tied to the managed USD.

Just the mere fact that it's highly unstable - all other things notwithstanding - make it impossible to be a currency.

"For what it's worth, bitcoin aims to deprecate every single brick-and-morter bank as well as all the armored trucks driving paper currency to and from them."

It's really bizarre that anyone would believe this.

Starting with the fact that 'digitization of currency' is already well under way and so there are no 'truck rolls' in the future.

But of course, the implication that banks only provide a 'place to store' money is completely false. Financial Services are an entire industry. Lending, transactions, authorizations, contracts, accounting, risk management, asset allocation, it's a gigantic industry.

But it's moot, BTC will be the same in 20 years that it is one, something to talk about.

"Financial Services are an entire industry. Lending, transactions, authorizations, contracts, accounting, risk management, asset allocation, it's a gigantic industry."

Right, this is all on ethereum

I dont know much about Ethereum but the mere existence of it threatens Bitcoin's "world domination" aspirations and who knows, maybe something will come out that will threaten Ethereum.

Bitcoin and Ethereum are both legacy blockchains.

There are many contenders. XTZ and ADA are both technologically far beyond what BTC or ETH can ever be.

So Etherium will do credit checks? Evaluate the legitimacy and valuation of major assets? Validate small business plans? Check creditor references? Do due legal and IP due dilligence? Foreclose? Evaluate the credibility of executive teams? Evaluate contracts? Resolve commercial disputes? Do risk assessment of various kinds?

Etc, etc. etc?

The complete lack of understanding of anything financial postulated by the crypto crowd is really painful.

The notion of 'crypto' is actually interesting, and large swaths of the financial world would actually buy into it, but most of it makes no sense unfortunately.

Yeah, using the magic of DeFi I can easily get a loan for $100K with no bank approval and no wasteful bank employees checking my credit.

All I need is more than $100K worth of crypto assets I can tie up as collateral for my loan. So I'll be able to buy a car or a house, as long as I have more than enough money to do so already. Banks don't know about this one weird trick that makes them obsolete!

Can't reply directly to the sibling comment on DeFi, but that solves the issue raised above e.g.: I have 100k worth of BTC, I want to spend that on something but I expect the value of my BTC to rise, so I use it as collateral for a pegged coin (say USDC or DAI) and make a purchase.

I am protected from losses of spending my BTC. As with all finance yes I also carry the risk of BTC falling and liquidating my loan - but assuming I have not also lost my loan I am protected from a major fall, as my collateral will be taken and I still have my loaned coins.

>For what it's worth, bitcoin aims to deprecate every single brick-and-morter bank as well as all the armored trucks driving paper currency to and from them.

Is this supposed to be some joke? No it doesn't. Someone had to create a fork of Bitcoin called Bitcoin Cash just to increase the block size. You've had your chance and you blew it.

What's going to happen from now on is that Bitcoin will be absorbed by Visa, Mastercard and Paypal who build an actual payment layer on top of Bitcoin and then people will use Visa, Mastercard and Paypal as their bank. It's the Bitcoin you know and love that is going to die.

Or maybe there's a foreseen flaw in bitcoin. It's based on public-key cryptography which can be broken by quantum computers. Those don't exist yet (at least not in any form relevant to cryptography in practise), but I think they will by 2140.

If they are physically realizable at all in practice, then they very likely will be by 2140.

But I think there's a non-negligible chance that the theory of quantum mechanics will break down as we move to superpositions of 2^1024 classical states that must be faithfully represented with physical elements.

People often bring up the Bitcoin algorithm to make arguments against it, but don't seem to acknowledge the fact that the protocol is mutable.

If the sha-256 algorithm was cracked such that BTC blocks could be solved instantly, the existing miners would have to choose between:

1. No more income, or

2. Adopt a quantum-resistant protocol.

Market economics being what they are, I think it's safe to assume that BTC would survive the "quantum apocalypse." There's too much money at stake for any other choice to be the logical outcome.

From my understand, and I'm no expect, but the only known quantum attack against symmetrical crypto like sha-2 is [Grover's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover%27s_algorithm), and the recommended advice is to double the key size, so sha-256 would probably see a huge boost in "hash rate" but not be broken, a move to sha-512 would work probably work.

The problem is that Shor's algorithm breaks asymmetrical crypto used in the wallet signing, that means you can forge ownership of any transaction outputs, which would completely shatter confidence in the coin before they could migrate all ownership of all funds to a new post-quantum signature scheme, this problem is a lot harder to solve compared to a hash algorithm upgrade.

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