Hacker News Reader

Comment by apalmer | Hacker News Reader

Amazing how their is a currency who's been rising for 10 years that you actually have to 'solve' for how to spend it.

At least this one has a use case. Ever go on /r/cryptocurrency or some of the even more bonkers subs? Someone will post a new coin and half the comments look like bots and shills loving the tech and the use cases. They never actually state what the use case is, of course.

Providing exit liquidity for the creator is always use case #1.

> Someone will post a new coin and half the comments look like bots and shills loving the tech and the use cases

Oh yeah, cryptocurrency classic - just look at the outcome of this thread, basically no solid solution backed up by majority of responders, almost every response links to different shiny landing page with plenty of buzzwords.

Bitcoin is a failure. It promised privacy, low fees, decentralization, lack of censorship and sanctions. We ended up with a transparent centralized expensive block chain whose tokens are not fungible. It's just a memecoin now. It just happens to be the biggest memecoin on the market. It's the one everyone knows about.

it's a memecoin like windows 95 is a memeos.

It was possible for Microsoft to ship Windows 98. Bitcoin is so ideologically fraught that there cannot really be a "Bitcoin 2" without some massive upheaval. If you invested in Microsoft in the mid 90s you'd be doing great. If you invested in literally Windows 95, oof.

Bitcoin's biggest success was proving that a cryptocurrency could exist and have utility. In that, it's inspired the creation of many successors which are superior.

Yes but unfortunately it garnered significant network effects along the way and it is still more prominent than the myriad of superior implementations of the concepts it demonstrated.

Yeah. The development of bitcoin was a historical event. As the first cryptocurrency it will always be important and remembered.

However, it's time for it to die in order to make way for better projects like Ethereum and Monero.

If it's entirely useless how do you explain the adoption of BTC by people living in developing nations[0]?

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jul/31/out-of-co...

It's hardly trivial to accept dollars sir.

Because it's not a currency. Gold has existed forever but you won't find point of sale systems with good support for gold coins either.

"Bitcoin: A peer to peer electronic cash system" is not a currency. That's some mental gymnastics.

I'm not arguing one way or the other about Bitcoin, but just pointing something out in general: marketing/slogans/etc aren't always accurate. Regardless of the item, mental gymnastics are not required to understand that.

Edit: marketing/slogans/subtitles/bylines/etc

That's not a marketing slogan, it's the title of the paper that launched bitcoin.

Titles may also be marketing slogans.

That’s the uncomfortable facts to the aspirational blather. It’s a poor enough medium of exchange that people go off-chain even when they do take payments with it, it’s an unreliable store of value subject to wild price fluctuations, and if you think anyone in their right mind would use it as a unit of account imagine a mortgage debt denominated in bitcoin and the possibility of owing 10x what the house is worth if the coin goes up.

1 of the 3 economic roles of “money” is partially fulfilled. If that’s still a currency, so is the Confederate dollar.

Bitcoin may be largely used as a store of value like gold, but that's not what it was designed for. It's designed to be a currency.

I'm not arguing one way or the other about Bitcoin, but just pointing something out in general: "designed to be" doesn't mean it actually is. Engineers can design things however they want, but that doesn't mean it always holds up.

Sure, but the OP saying “bitcoin isn’t a currency” isn’t accurate. It’s a currency that happens to be popular as a store of value.

It was designed to be a currency, and so for it to be good at that design, it should do currency things well, like broad support from point of sale systems.

The fact that gold doesn’t have broad support from POS systems is irrelevant to its intended purpose in that context, of being a store of value.

Their analogy doesn’t work because they’re comparing what bitcoin was designed to do, with what gold isn’t designed to do.

Gold is not used a store of value, and neither is bitcoin. Both are investments. The question is whether they are good investments or not.

It's designed to be money. Store of value is the most important property of money. In this, bitcoin is very similar to gold. Another one is to be medium of exchange, which bitcoin does better than gold, and thus can avoid the centralization failure that happened to gold.

It isn't easier to accept any other currency online.

Exactly, you always got to have a middle man party. Bitcoin/Crypto is the only way that you can cut out that middleman, because you can directly view the blockchain for confirmations etc.

Who do you think appends your transaction to the blockchain? A middleman.

Your talking about bridging currency. Something that most banks still cant do easily with any customer they have. ie. HSBC, a global bank, doesnt even support instant transfers around the world (payid), yet thats there buisness for how many years?

ie. with crypto, u can setup a wallet, u can buy currency, then lend it out to a DeX for fees and apy in 3 clicks, no wait period, minimal capital expenditure. no forms to sign.

that kid at macdonalds right now can DCA into crypto using his gaming PC at night time. if u had been doing that the last 10 years, u would be retired by now. get it? the younger generation, crypto is a investment opportunity like our parents generation saw real-estate.

times have changed. the govs had there time to ban crypto, they havnt. its less volatile and more secure and more open then any 3rd world country currency. the investment bankers are in it. its not going anywhere. the masses (20-30s) have who are stacking crypto are going to be the voter bloc of the next 20 years.

Nothing in this comment makes any logical sense.

There is no limited time window on governments banning crypto.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com