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Comment by heurist | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused about why Bitcoin is being discussed in the past tense when both usage and price have both grown significantly over the last year. Is it already dead? Could have fooled me.

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Usage in what sense? Beanie Babies once commanded a high price but they too were never a good payments system.

Many people are certainly buying in to crypto with the intent of selling it later at a profit. But that’s unrelated from its utility.

Sure. They'll sell at the peak and buy at the bottom because it's a well known 4 year cycle programmed into the protocol. If the price is expected to appreciate 5-10x from any other asset in the market every 4 years that's a bet you should make, even if the timing of the peak and trough is hard to see. But the price floor increases over time as the trade becomes better known globally and the lottery odds expand. Eventually there is so much noise it all evens out and becomes a generally smooth slide into a stable store of value. It's network science and game theory that I personally consider much smarter than anything I could create (having deployed technology built on network science in exchange for money in the financial sector). And much more democratic than is possible in the traditional financial world. Frankly, the longer I study this the more impressed I am.

Usage as in number of network participants. People investing time, energy, risk into the system. Miners, traders, validators, second layer operators. Similar to members of facebook, servers in the internet. Price as in market price. And I'm only talking Bitcoin here.

> it's a well known 4 year cycle programmed into the protocol

First I've heard of this. Do you have more information?

You can look up Stock to Flow and Bitcoin to learn more about that theory.

GP is presumably talking about the halving of coinbase, ie the mining reward, every 4 years. Currently at 6.25 BTC per Block.

Right, but supply inflation moving from 1.76% per annum to 0.88% per annum is roughly speaking utterly meaningless. People just latched onto this idea because they're using too few data points.

Agreed.

And the idea that miners have a god-given right to make $100 per transaction, $40m per day, and therefore if the mining reward halves, the price of BTC must inevitably double, is obviously preposterous.

Taking about a four year cycle on something that has existed for twelve seems the epitome of using too few data points.

Right, there's lots of interest in Bitcoin as a speculative investment, but no longer as a payment network. That's the part that people are talking about in the past tense. The idea that bitcoins themselves have utility beyond being something valuable that can be owned.

It'd be like if the number of Facebook accounts kept rising, but hardly anyone posts content anymore. If I were a Facebook investor, that would worry me.

Has non-speculative use actually grown? The ability to actually buy stuff with bitcoin looks to be on a downward trend, and the fact that the price has changed significantly over the last year feels like a negative for actual use of bitcoin.

It's an excellent way to pay off ransomware and get your data unlocked. Hospitals, cities and oil pipelines use it all the time.

Identity theft and corruption help ransomware much more than cryptocurrency ever will.

Identity theft and ransomware are different classes of financial fraud, saying that one helps the other is like saying that petty crime helps murder; it doesn’t make much sense.

The argument is let's ban cryptocurrency that'll stop ransomware, which doesn't hold true. All you need is a fake identity or corrupt banking system to siphon off the funds you stole with your ransomware.

Bitcoin's price is being artificially manipulated through at least one stablecoin, Tether.

Please provide evidence for this assertion.

Note, not speculation in Bitcoin, usage of it as an actual currency.

You didn't notice? This chat is mostly composed of people salty because they didn't buy when they had the chance. Oops!

This common retort is so tired, can we just stop with it once and for all. The price history of Bitcoin is irrelevant to the arguments given here against it.

Not to mention the opposite ill-intended argument can trivially follow: "this thread is full of people disregarding the arguments against bitcoin because they are invested in it"

I agree with you. Both versions of this argument have to stop in favor of actual discussion (which, it seems, there is a good amount of in this thread)

I should rephrase. Just buy. If you want to get involved and contribute, please do. Money in the hands of centralized figures is very dangerous.

The tech world should smash buy now and contribute in every way they can to improve the technology.

Most technology companies should hold it on their balance sheets and employ a contributor.

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