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Comment by spookthesunset | Hacker News Reader

The problem with Bitcoin is it is a horrible currency. It’s slow and it doesn’t scale beyond a few transactions a second.

I’ve been following Bitcoin for more than seven years and absolutely nothing about it has fundamentally changed. It has always been a “currency” majority owned by dodgy shadowy characters. It’s always been slow. It’s always been unscalable (by design!). It has always been a get rich quick pyramid scheme.

It doesn’t matter what its USD value is. It’s a scam. Always was, always will be.

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I feel like beating a dead horse, but there's tons of L2 technologies at this point, lightning payment channels or rollups on eth, etc. The blockchain itself is like a settlement layer.

Our current financial system is also layered similarly btw. When you buy something with your credit card, it doesn't settle right away.

But then the issue is that the settlement layer becomes an arbitrary implementation detail. The second layer is the thing that really matters. The settlement can happen in dollars or some stock in a portfolio of assets like what Libra wanted to do.

Is Bitcoin the best thing to use as an settlement layer?

The 2nd layer always maps to the settlement layer as in you're still transacting in Bitcoin, you just don't broadcast the signed transactions to the whole network because you expect to continue your transactions.

You can use eth or any of the thousands of other crypto-currencies, Bitcoin benefits from being the most secure and also having the largest network effects due to being the earliest. When it comes to money, security is the most important thing and Bitcoin offers the most secure settlement layer.

If a credit card is the example of a layer 2, with dollars being the base layer, would you say that dollars don't matter then, and the only thing that matters is the layer 2?

You have it backwards. With credit/bank cards the second layer is dollars that we're transact in. If financial institutions decided to settle amongst themselves with commodity stocks, government bonds or FedCoins would you even notice? It just happens that in the US dollars also make a good settlement layer.

There's also Monero which is everything Bitcoin was supposed to be and much more. Why bother trying to fix bitcoin when a solution already exists? There's absolutely no need for this layer 2 stuff.

There are thousands of other cryptocurrencies that claim to have better tech than Bitcoin in terms of privacy, speed or fees.

This is the case of having a better technology doesn't matter, Bitcoin came at a very lucky time and also grew organically for many years and had arguably the fairest coin distributions (most coins nowadays are shilled very heavily by it's developers and investors). It's also the most secure and well-known.

Because of those things, it'll be very difficult if not impossible to unseat Bitcoin when it comes to store of value/currency. Bitcoin also sees development in form of lightning network. For all other use cases, I think eth covers most bases and has also developed a very large network of users and developers.

So whatever next big crypto project comes needs to be not just "better", but like at least 10x better.

> There are thousands of other cryptocurrencies that claim to have better tech than Bitcoin in terms of privacy, speed or fees.

Monero isn't just claiming this though. It actually delivers on its promises. It's actually private, authorities are having trouble tracing it. Criminals are already switching to Monero. Transactions are fast and the fees are low. It's mineable by ordinary CPUs, no centralized ASIC/GPU mining operations in China. Since mining is more decentralized, nobody opposes improvements to the Monero blockchain like the bitcoin and ethereum miners do.

> at least 10x better

Monero is pretty much infinitely better. If any coin is positioned to unseat bitcoin it's Monero. If there's any sanity left in this cryptocurrency market this will happen one day.

Monero is pretty much infinitely better, that's why gov hates it.

Fair coin distribution is easy to solve in new coins if all the bitcoin owners get equivalent proportion of the new coin and developers/founders get nothing. But how many are brave enough to create such coin?

Bitcoin: Market Cap: Fr 926,647,481,214 Volume: Fr 54,697,251,981

Ethereum: Market Cap: Fr 261,435,750,490 Volume: Fr 39,931,852,584

Its not like Bitcoin is standing up there alone. Sure still far stronger, but the times where its only bitcoin and the others is likely over.

> There's absolutely no need for this layer 2 stuff

If XMR usage got big enough it would very much need layer 2 even more, the developers themselves acknowledge this and are upfront about it. These very basic computing problems that have been repeated ad nauseam for a decade now do not magically go away and are actually a lot worse for monero due to ring transactions being much heavier.

Are you really going to store a 2 TB blockchain that needs days of compute to initially confirm so you can transact with your friends privately? The first layer has insane amounts of PoW security baked in at this point, it's not for general consumption anymore.

> worse for monero due to ring transactions being much heavier.

As well as all the rangeproofs that further bloat the chain size. Other confidential blockchain designs allow the removal of rangeproofs for all spent outputs (ie the vast majority).

> the developers themselves acknowledge this and are upfront about it

I'm sure they'll be able to solve any problem that comes up. Monero isn't plagued by miners blocking progress like bitcoin is. I believe the coin will continue to improve.

> Are you really going to store a 2 TB blockchain that needs days of compute to initially confirm so you can transact with your friends privately?

Isn't it possible to prune the blockchain on local nodes?

Do you actually need to confirm the entire history in order to publish transactions? You've already got the result of hashing everything right up at the head of the chain.

Bitcoin is an amazing invention. For me personally it is the best store of value ever, I just need to remember my private key and travel the world and cash out in every country. The fees are totally acceptable, you can use lower fees and wait a bit longer for the transaction to get into a block. Bitcoin is definitely not a scam!

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