Bitcoin was completely and totally missed by HN and more broadly by Silicon Valley.
Only recently the SV/HN community is catching up and waking up to cryptocurrencies - and still hesitantly.
Only recently the SV/HN community is catching up and waking up to cryptocurrencies - and still hesitantly.
I love reading these sort of things from the past.
PS if you want to do the whole "volatile prices!" fear mongering you can do WAY better than 50% price drops. You also accidentally criticize the US dollar here, USD saw a 30% decline in the early 2000s and analysts predict a possible decline of 30-35% in the broad dollar index soon. Is that how a currency "should" hold its value?
I trust the US dollar because it is very stable. There's a crisis now because we're looking at roughly 5% year-over-year inflation compared to a goal of 2% -- meanwhile crypto swings 10% every damn day!
To your point, remember when the crypto market had a net loss of almost 3000 points in a single day in March 2020?! Oh wait, that was the Dow, sorry.
So you don't trust the stock market or the assets that back it either, do you? It swings 10% or more some days!
Do you have any experience buying or using cryptocurrency in the last 10 years?
In 2009, I was starting with Scala, which had functional features way beyond what was achievable in other languages at that time. Scala was a game changer, it rode later on the Big Data (Spark, Kafka) wave (circa 2015). Many academic things that Scala proved to be production-ready were backported after to Java, JS, etc. I have built systems with Scala that were actually useful for people and organisations, while Bitcoin as a technology... I am just glad that I have predicted worse in this case.
> Bitcoin would have today 0 value because it is boosted only by FOMO (fear of missing out)
An incredibly tired take (but it's cute that you spelled out "FOMO" and abbreviated it). Compared to 2009, 2021 is the future, where the value of BTC is not 0. We don't have to speculate incorrectly as you do when you say "Bitcoin would have today 0 value," we know what value it is.
You completely failed to predict the effect of BTC and cryptocurrency on the global financial market, which supports your idea that "we cannot predict future trends." We can make educated guesses though.
The imbecilic way of saying supply and demand?
- it was actually useful for people transacting things
- it introduced the world to blockchain as a general technology, which at this point many new things (which people find useful in ways more complex and more varied than the above) have been built atop.
The idea that BTC would be worth $0 without speculation is just poor reasoning. It misunderstands the past, ignores the present, and doesn't even look to the future, so not surprised you didn't pick up on this particular trend.
Do you even know what a "permissionless transaction" or an "immutable ledger" are? Do you believe Bitcoin has achieved both?
Usually I block trolls, but in the lack of such a functionality on HN take this comment as my last interaction with you.
Of course it's not, it's simply a transaction; it doesn't need to be between two separate parties. I don't think you understand Bitcoin as well as you believe, you have it confused with an economic theory.
Reading "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" will do you good.