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Comment by anm89 | Hacker News Reader

What a crock. By his definitions succeeding is when everything goes perfectly right, 100% to plan, forever, according to every third party observer.

By his definition all of FAANG (or whatever) are total failures. You could poke minor semantic holes in their accomplishments!

CNBC lists bitcoin price next to the S&P. It's up infinity percent. There are regulated financial products. If asked at the time he would have unequivocally said those things would not have happened because bitcoin was going to fail because he was dead wrong.

It would have been much braver and more respectable to just say "yeah, I really was wrong on that one"

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>CNBC lists bitcoin price next to the S&P. It's up infinity percent. There are regulated financial products. If asked at the time he would have unequivocally said those things would not have happened because bitcoin was going to fail because he was dead wrong.

there is a difference between "succeeding somewhat in the original goal" and "succeeding in a way different from the original goal all together". the former seems to closer to start ups that made it big - they had a product that became successful even if the endproduct isn't 100% as the original product

with bitcoin, wasn't (isn't?) the original goal to create an alternative to mainstream financial system? just based off the example you listed, among other things, it seems like Bitcoin has completely 100% has failed in that regard since it's just become another feature of the mainsteam financial system

sure bitcoin and crypto are still here, but they're just another asset class at this point. sure it's not "failure" - it certainly is successful by a different set of metrics from the original, but I'm sure this isn't what Satoshi had in mind

Who’s to say what “the original goal” was? Satoshi wasn’t that vocal and explicit about their vision in many ways.

As for the early community, there may be as many narratives as there were bitcoiners.

And even if satoshi would have posted a more explicit manifesto, who’s to say that they are the authority to dictate the goals of a project they abandoned almost a decade ago and that others have picked up?

Saying “nobody buys their coffee settled and priced in bitcoin; that was the whole point and should have happened in <10 years” is simply a straw man.

Hell, several of the “failures” points the author brings up are considered features by some.

The existence of permissionless and liquid cryptocurrency markets have political and economic implications. That you do not agree with them does not make it a failure; you just have a different perspective.

All that aside, I think it’s too early still to call Bitcoin’s success or failure.

"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."

That’s been the case for years. One self-hostable payment solution is btcpayserver (also supports lightning).

(PayPal recently rolled out allowing users to use crypto assets including btc for any PayPal payments but arguably that is not “real adoption” in context of payments, as merchants still get paid in fiat with PayPal’s partner Paxos acting as intermediaries)

But Bitcoin hasn’t succeeded. It doesn’t allow you to do anything useful except (1) buy drugs on the internet, and (2) move money out of authoritarian countries, both of which he acknowledges in the article.

The fact that a lot of people care about blockchains and are willing to make speculative bets on them doesn’t mean that the idea is actually useful for much.

The FAANGs at least have made some real products, some of which some people find useful.

Maybe Bitcoin doesn't, but as for the rest of the ecosystem, the gentleman author seems to have little idea of what he is taking about.

As far as I know, no blockchain has ever proven useful for any purpose other than illegal money transfers. Do you have any counterexamples?

https://satoshidice.com/fair

An unregulated betting platform sounds like illegal money transfers to me.

Betting is not just money transfer, it's something more.

Illegal gambling?

Online casinos predate Bitcoin.

> Online casinos predate Bitcoin.

You missed the "provably fair" part.

https://qz.com/1260191/metoo-activists-in-china-are-turning-...

bitrefill.com

Filechain might be worth a look, distributed storage to allow people to rent out unused storage capacity in exchange for coins and based in IPFS which isn't blockchain but is neat.

Or Internet Computer, which is more or less a blockchain equivalent of the internet allowing you to for example host a website on it versus say AWS or GoDaddy, which has some potentially very positive benefits for data security and users being able to manage their own data as practical benefits.

https://messari.io/article/an-introduction-to-dfinity-and-th...

Everything you listed is useless. Slow, hard to use and limited in functionality.

Data is useless to you? I think you're just showing how much you're unwilling to attempt to stray from the religion of anti-crypto.

I'm not really a big fan of crypto, but you do have to admit that some of the projects would do some good for the world when they catch on.

I would love to have an easy system to distribute ML models and databases for projects without having to pay AWS fees for example.

What data? We are talking about projects and those projects are useless.

> but you do have to admit that some of the projects would do some good for the world when they catch on.

The will not catch on because they are useless for real world use. The most cost efficient way to do processing or data storage is within someones datacenter.

> I would love to have an easy system to distribute ML models and databases for projects without having to pay AWS fees for example.

I would love a free meal as well. It does not make sense for me to expect free lunches though.

It's not a "free lunch". I would advise you to look into projects like these, as it appears you have a lack of expertise in this field. That knowledge gap isn't filled by dismissing projects with a religious like attitude

> distributed storage to allow people to rent out unused storage capacity in exchange for coins

How is this any better than S3, which lets me rent storage space in exchange for USD?

Filecoin storage is about .02% the cost of S3, at least according to this calculator.

https://file.app/

> Do you have any counterexamples?

There's an entire blockchain-based industry being built in the gaming space as we speak, to allow player to trade NFT's (unique items in games).

There are many more.

> other than illegal money transfers

To address your point more directly: depending on the regime you live under, illegal money transfers are a life-saving device, so just that use case makes Bitcoin worth it.

But Google hasn't succeeded! It was supposed to do something useful but all it does is mine data for ads. They were supposed to not be evil but they are evil.

But Facebook hasn't succeeded. It was supposed to do something useful but all it does is mine data for ads. They were supposed to connect everyone but all they did was corrupt our political system.

But Apple hasn't succeeded. It was supposed to do something useful but all it does is pump out a new Iphone color every year and remove a port. They were supposed to revolutionize computing but all the did was figure out how to sell shiny junk made by poor people in developing markets to middle class people in developing markets.

See how easy it is to play that game?

Somehow I'm guessing most people who like bitcoin in 2011 aren't reeling from the failure of bitcoin.

Your analogies miss the mark because in addition to the negative things you’ve pointed out, Google Search, for example, _is_ useful.

Comparing the usefulness of Bitcoin to Google Search or the smartphone is asinine.

> Somehow I'm guessing most people who like bitcoin in 2011 aren't reeling from the failure of bitcoin.

Of course not — they’re all extremely wealthy. That’s irrelevant to the discussion; I’m sure the author of this piece understands that Bitcoin has increased in value, but that’s not at all what the piece is about.

How ridiculous to suggest that there is some objective trait called useful that you have a monopoly on determining.

Turns out that various people may find all of these various things either useful or not useful because it is subjective.

What is useful about Bitcoin? I genuinely don’t understand what use people see in it. Do you have a use? It seems to me the main use is “get rich on vetting it will go up” because I haven’t been able to find any other articulation of why i might ever want to use it.

Can you not imagine a future where the value of the USD is continually inflated by the FED to benefit particular segment of society, and wanting an out? What if there was this currency that no government could inflate away for political reasons, that you could really rely on to be free of short-term economic thinking?

> What is useful about Bitcoin?

No quasi-governmental agency can unilaterally decide to print gobs more of it & drive inflation through the roof...

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1

Have you never eaten with a friend and had to pay them with Venmo? You could also do it with paypal, or even hugs.

Or Monero. It's a bit more stable since people use it as a currency more often.

You have options, which pretty much depend on what that person wants to receive. It's not that big of a deal guys, stop the hate. It's a bit childish really

Okay, how about you give us an example of its utility aside from being a speculative instrument

How about instantaneous, near free payments and money transfer anywhere in the world? Please take a look at the lightning network.

Oh yeah, the comparisons of Bitcoin with XML and a train wreck are much better and much more accurate than the commenter's analogies.

I think you were being sarcastic but yes all your points are correct (except Bitcoin has still failed)

And yet a VAST majority of people would label all of those companies successes and would also label bitcoin a success (comparatively from where it was 11 years ago)

>> It was supposed to do something useful but all it does is mine data for ads.

Gmail, docs, sheets, slides, drawings, calendar and geez just 1000 other things disagree with you. Yeah I know the ad network is paying for that stuff: that's the bargain that people who use their ecosystem of software products have made, just as people on Apple's ecosystem accept their tradeoffs. It just seems extremely cynical to suggest Google has done, or is doing, nothing useful. If there was no utility flowing the other way in return for the eyeballs and profile data I don't think they'd have a business.

I don't think Google has succeeded, for the same reasons you state ironically. "Making money/having power" isn't "success", it's "making money/having power". I don't find it at all ridiculous to say that Google and Facebook are failures, I (as the author) contest the synonymity of success and money. It's actually telling of how shit our society is that you (and most people) say "success" and mean "money", and find attempts to separate them laughable.

Nobody buys drugs on the internet with Bitcoin in 2021.

It's incredible for long term savings.

a) in fiat terms and b) has been up till now

> a) in fiat terms

It's true that if your measuring stick is toilet paper, the current price of Bitcoin doesn't tell you much.

> b) has been up till now

Past performance is no guarantee of future ... etc

Sure, that's what every traditional investment prospectus says in the first paragraph. They usually then proceed to explain how well they've been doing and why you should therefore invest.

There is something called Baye's rule. Ignore it at your own (opportunity cost) risk.

You can buy tons of stuff with Bitcoin (not just drugs). You can transfer it around the world basically for free (transaction fees amount to the equivalent of pennies no matter how much you send). It's immutable. Basically it does the things it's supposed to do. It's gained widespread adoption, a whole economy, thousands of businesses.

It is, without a doubt, successful.

> You can buy tons of stuff with Bitcoin

You can also buy tons of stuff with USD. The only innovation of Bitcoin is that it allows you to do illegal stuff.

A more expensive and cumbersome way to do what you could already do with other tools is not “success”.

> You can transfer it around the world basically for free (transaction fees amount to the equivalent of pennies no matter how much you send).

This is also true of, for example, TransferWise.

> It’s immutable

This actually makes it worse than the existing financial system, because being able to reverse fraudulent transactions is a feature, not a bug.

> It’s gained widespread adoption, a while economy, thousands of businesses.

Also true of USD. You still haven’t demonstrated any advantage of Bitcoin other than illegal transactions.

>This is also true of, for example, TransferWise.

Not for small to large amounts for less than pennies

>A more expensive and cumbersome way to do what you could already do with other tools is not “success”.

You're vastly underestimating the amount of people trapped in regimes where they cannot spend their funds abroad or risk having them devalued at whim.

Bitcoin is the definition of getting devalued at whim

> or risk having them devalued at whim.

doesn't that describe a lot of cryptocurrencies? or are you suggesting the people in these regimes use cryptocurrencies as an intermediary to transfer their local currency into more stable foreign currency?

This reasoning is really strange and reeks of bitterness. Do you have anything backing up your claim BTC is used for mostly illegal activities? Please provide some very clear citations for that claim.

I never claimed that, and have no idea whether it’s true.

Much more illegal activity happens with USD than with Bitcoin.

There are very few things you can buy more easily using Bitcoin. And average fees to send money right now with Bitcoin are 2-3%. Which is not great, considering the current financial system offers lots of much cheaper options for sending money.

take a look at Bitcoins Lightning network sometime, you'd be surprised.

> It's gained widespread adoption, a whole economy, thousands of businesses.

What percent of those business denominate their prices in bitcoin?

What percent of those businesses do anything but immediately convert the bitcoin back into fiat the moment they take possession?

So because Bitcoin hasn't overtaken fiat currency as the de facto international standard means it's a failure? All of the critics in this thread sure have some narrow goalposts, don't they?

I think you’re missing the point that Bitcoin is at zero percent for this metric.

(2) is enough to say it completely succeeded.

I agree. I personally donated Bitcoins to WikiLeaks.

Don’t forget (3) scams and (4) ransomware.

> (2) move money out of authoritarian countries

To move money out of an authoritarian country, you have to know someone who wants to move money in. The only reason it works at all is because the total amount of Bitcoin doing this is comparatively very small compared to local corruption and mining which can support this use case.

To make this transaction someone else in your local authoritarian country has to have Bitcoin, and be willing to exchange it for local currency. It's no huge surprise a lot of mining power ended up in China, because of course this is a transaction you do not want to do in China: you want to originate Bitcoin and then get some Americans to pay you nice clean USDs into bank accounts outside of China.

Which of course works because electricity consumption in China is relatively unsuspect (or was: naturally China has cracked down on this and is having ongoing power shortages to boot).

Which of course creates a weird compromise: if Bitcoin is good at getting money out of authoritarian countries, then either you're outsourcing to someone who can move currency around locally, or you are outsourcing an increasing fraction of the Bitcoin mining compute, and thus control of the network.

Thankfully people that can’t admit when they’re wrong despite almost absurd evidence of their wrongness just don’t matter that much in economic bets.

The people constantly predicting Tesla failure and shorting the stock lost all of their money. This guy won’t matter.

You’d think people would learn to change their mind and update when massive economic incentives exist to do so, but often they don’t. Confirmation bias is a powerful thing.

The most amazing thing about bitcoin is that it turns every disadvantage to an advantage.

For example, the bias you are talking about means that the open minded and more virtuous people will adopt bitcoin earlier, and those who profit from the existing exploitive system much later.

This produces a massive wealth transfer from evil to good.

Michael Burry was dead on the money that a crash was imminent in 2008, but he was still in serious danger of going bankrupt before it happened and his short would pay out.[1]

"The market can remain irrational longer then you can remain solvent" is a saying for a reason.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry#cite_note-Burry-...

He was also wrong about Tesla.

There was a crash in 1999, but the underlying economic shift created by the internet was real and major companies survived it.

I suspect something similar is likely here.

You are not addressing the point: having enough capital to support a completely valid short position against an irrational market is staggeringly hard to do, to the point the most reliable short in history was still in danger of wiping out the person who was right about it and ended up making a huge amount of money from it.

It’s somewhat of a tired point.

You’re right of course and Michael Burry made a great trade recognizing the CDO issue and bad incentives around reselling mortgages leading to banks giving mortgages to people that couldn’t afford them and not taking the risk directly.

It was also time bounded (he knew when the rates would change and they’d start to fail).

That said, people often use the “market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent” line as an excuse - basically to say they’re right about an “impending crash” on an infinite timeline. If you can’t predict it within a bounded timeframe than your prediction is useless and ultimately equivalent to predicting nothing.

In the case of the OP he was clearly wrong, and instead of updating is spinning it as he was kinda right anyway. I think that’s dumb.

Which might be relevant if it was 20 years later, but it's not. Tesla's stock run-up preceded a number of unprecedented events that are all notably not associated with it's actual fiscal success. So it's incredibly vapid to a year later saying "see! It's not going to crash!"

I mean sure...put your money where your mouth is on that one, but I'm not buying TSLA at $1096 per share.

The claim was that Tesla wouldn’t ship Model 3s successfully and would fail. That claim is false.

The stock price today may be a bubble, I don’t know. But Burry’s comments were before the current run up.

The original comment was nothing about Burry. Burry is relevant because he did sucessfully make money off the GFC by spotting the issue. Barely: he was facing stockholder revolt over the fees involved in maintaining the position, even though it resolved.

Which is the point: the market can (generally) remain irrational longer then you can remain solvent. Even when you're right.

Michael Burry seems to be a broken clock. He was right once and wrong all the other times.

A minimum threshold of dogmatic people does not a good idea make. Crypto’s value basis versus its fervor is a mirror image of any bubble we’ve ever seen. The smart ones will figure out how the bubble pops. My guess is power outages.

Is BTC a currency?

No it's a coin. Bit coin.

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