Hacker News Reader

Comment by bamboo2 | Hacker News Reader

It would be more persuasive if you could point to something that has utility and viability in the here and now. A killer app or something that benefits society and offsets the much talked about negative externalities. From the outside it’s hard to see the good and so the crypto community would benefit greatly by focusing on pr at least as much as the technology itself. When I talk to working class people, the view of Bitcoin is as a tool for the wealthy young tech overlords to make even more outrageous fortunes. Punctuate that with news about ransomware and child trafficking and you can imagine. They hate it a lot. Crypto shouldn’t be an enemy of the poor, but it is according to every poor and working class person I ask. That’s a problem worth solving IMO.

View on HN

Trustless banking is the killer app.

Credit card payments, bank deposits, stock holdings: nearly everywhere humans hold value currently is a trust-based system that leaves you at the whims of more powerful counterparties.

If the bank decides to zero out your account balance, they can. You can sue them, and should be able to get you money back if you take them to court, but they have the absolute ability to destroy your wealth.

Bitcoin gives technologically savvy people the opportunity to store value in a way which is not subject to any other party. If I lock 1BTC up in an encrypted wallet, nobody can deprive me of that 1BTC without my consent and participation. That is the killer app.

>If I lock 1BTC up in an encrypted wallet, nobody can deprive me of that 1BTC without my consent and participation. That is the killer app.

And that's where you went wrong.

Its not "nobody" instead its everybody who participates in this who collectively decide where the price goes.

It doesn't matter at all that nobody can take your BTC the only thing that matters is the value of it which can be taken away while you still have it.

The value is defined by supply and demand and thus collectively moved by thousands of people by their actions. If enough people would sell the price would go so low that miners go out of business and the hash rate drops to the point where its no longer secure. At that point the value is essentially zero. You simply hope that there will never be enough people selling at the same time.

Yes, Bitcoin is much more volatile, but literally everything you said applies to every other currency or monetary instrument.

There is no guarantee that Tesla stock, or t-bills or the dollar will have value in 20 years. Money is a collective hallucination and can disappear as soon as people stop believing in it.

I called out whats wrong in your logic. I never claimed anything about fiat/stock or whatever. Its irrelevant, the only point you made FOR bitcoin (namely that no one can take it away from you) is moot because the value can still go away there is just no one to sue/blame if it happens.

You missed the point.

Bitcoins value can go to zero.

Stocks, bonds, cash: all monetary instruments' value can go to zero. Non-crypto assets can also be taken from you against your will.

Part of why Bitcoin is valuable is because it cannot be seized without consent of the owner (if owner is diligent about security).

Your criticism of Bitcoin broadly applies to all forms of "saving money" or preserving value. Value can go away from any vehicle you park your money. Your argument essentially boils down to "I believe Bitcoin in particular will crash more than other monetary instruments, so it doesn't have value" - which could be correct and you could short BTC if you feel confidently about that, but I wouldn't recommend it.

No you missed the point. There was never any comparisons between BTC any other "money". There was just your claim that no one could take away you BTC which is true but irrelevant because you dont want the BTC you want the value. Which can be taken away form you any time. It doesn't matter that this is true for other money types as well. You specifically said that his is unique to BTC but its not true. No one said the claim you made is true for other types of money. Its just wrong for BTC.

>Your criticism of Bitcoin...

No, it did not it pointed out the flaw in your claim. Your logic is nonsense. Thats not a critic on BTC at all.

>Your argument essentially boils down to "I believe Bitcoin in particular will crash more than other monetary instruments, so it doesn't have value"

Again no, that was not my argument nor what I said and not even implied. You make shit up on the go to deflect from what I actually said which has nothing to do with bitcoin but everything with your nonsense claim t which you already agreed on that is is wrong as you said ... >"....applies to all forms of "saving money" or preserving value."

A decentralized marketplace is more akin to what you would see in ancient bazaars of Mesopotamia.

It will allow vendors to collect more money for their service while at the same time allowing customers to pay less for the same service.

This is because a decentralized service does not need a thousand people and billions of dollars of VC funding to run (take Uber for instance).

Instead there will be the smart contract (which will require funding so there will be a very small fee per transaction), the governance body (which is going to be like the shareholder system of the stock market so token holders), and the vendors themselves.

Multiple layers of waste will be cut (middle management, needing an actual corporation to provide a service) and it's a more natural way of doing business. It's a pretty radical shift from the way we're doing things now and the wheels are in motion which is why so many people are excited.

> Instead there will be the smart contract (which will require funding so there will be a very small fee per transaction)

So you are saying there are still middlemen who take a cut of the transactions?

You are on YC's forum!

I suggest you learn how the price of a product or service changes based on regulation, cost of employees, the amount of money a business owes in loans, basic stuff!

More overhead adds to the cost.

A smart contract infrastructure will not have zero overhead, but it will be close to it. Much less than a centralized service provider.

There is no "middlemen" but more just one "middleman" which is the smart contract which each will have a different protocol and how they handle fees.

Some will use it to pay for API calls, others will use it to do some automated token buy-backs. Depends on the contract. And the beauty is, the contracts are all publicly available so you can read it before requesting to the service.

The miners who charge fees to process transactions, are they not middlemen?

Centralized processors have infra costs, perhaps they have found a good price point already

You could also be more respectful if you are on HN

yes you are right, but still:

(staking fees && smart contract fees) <<< (overhead of running a multi-billion dollar corporation)

You're still missing a bunch of other skims off the top in crypto.

You are incorrect to make that logical jump since anything crypto is still very early stage and has yet to produce viable, long term business models

Note that hiring devs in crypto is more expensive than other industries, due to its bad rap. There is no amount of money that could get me to work in crypto

This is a great answer. I think my problem is explaining it to poor people, who see Elon musk and jack dorsey, pushing Bitcoin as “for the people” and they just think, oh it’s for those rich guys to hype their startup options into the stratosphere, not for us folks living in debt on the verge of homelessness. I want to help those people get in on it, so they aren’t left even further behind if that makes sense.

Yah I totally agree and I don't like the fact that tech giants like Elon & Jack are using their influence to fluctuate the price of crypto so they can make a few bucks. I find it greedy and disgusting.

I think these guys have become pretty delusional with the amount of power they experienced the past few decades.

The true crypto movement inside the developer circles of ethereum is trying to displace these assholes by flipping the value infrastructure to the actual service provider rather than the one who sits at the top of the centralized pyramid.

It will help poor people in the long-run when it allows more accessible services like driving and food delivery to pay more to them.

It may not work, but it's worth a shot and theoretically possible.

This current system of mega-billion dollar centralized tech businesses is actually very unnatural and strange in my opinion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com