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Comment by shimonabi | Hacker News Reader

I've found through personal experience that arguing with crypto people is like arguing with religious people.

There is absolutely NO argument in the world that could make them doubt their own belief that cryptocurrencies are the future of money.

Nassim Taleb says that Bitcoin is worth exactly 0.

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“Bitcoin is worth exactly 0” seems just as religious of a statement as “cryptocurrencies are the future of money”

What could convince you, as a skeptic, that crypto currencies are a technological step forward and deliver value to humans?

A use case that delivers positive value (i.e. not just enabling crime). I found some of the cryptokitties-style experiments interesting, but not when every transaction costs $50 (and the security of the chain only works if the underlying "coin" has value, so that seems inherent and unavoidable).

I suspect most people won't understand the value until they immediately need the privilege of using it--a privilege which anyone with a computer has, but no one is required to exercise (unlike every other national currency).

Needing to use bitcoin isn't going to be experienced as "privilege" but hassle, imposition.

You must be in a time machine. The security does not depend on underlying value (that's proof of stake), it depends on hash power, which is not a function of value, it is the input to the value function. If the value of the coin dropped then hash power would decline, but the rewards for out-hashing someone would also drop - it wouldn't affect security, you're all mixed up!

> If the value of the coin dropped then hash power would decline, but the rewards for out-hashing someone would also drop - it wouldn't affect security

The coin rewards would drop, but the rewards for being able to steal whatever else is running on top of the chain stay the same. So to be secure the layer 1 chain has to stay more valuable than everything else that's being secured on top of it, otherwise it becomes worth doing a 51% attack on the underlying chain to get the stuff on top.

I would like to buy a sandwich in the grocery store I go to on lunch break. It's already been 12 years, guys.

It's like when religious people say: "Jesus will come again, but he may tarry...".

That's great man, you'll be a convert eventually! But if you wait until the steps are laid out for you easy as pie, you'll miss the speculative gains! At least you can say you followed the rational doctrine!

Oh what's that? You really think 12 years of development is too long to buy a sandwich. Well if that's an issue for you I recommend you look into this thing "Quantum Computing." They can't even make those things do calculator math and its been forever. Sheesh.

You don’t pay BTC for the same reason you don’t pay for sandwiches in gold ingots. It was never really about daily payments. Probably the closest sandwich payment method is those crypto backed credit cards. Or you could buy a sandwich in El Salvador, and pay via the Lightning network.

At least or better carbon parity than existing systems, feasible transaction rollbacks when mandated by law. Sorry, not willing to accept these bugs as features. /gen

Loopring on ETH, Nano

(To your first point, not your second.)

Well the crypto will say the same thing about the non believer.

I took a pragmatic view: 1) it seems a useful hedge asset against stock market (although it becomes more and more linked nowadays) and other fiat money dominant security market. 2) it seems have some value of bringing financial products to more people (albeit today the new users are fleeced immediately when they enter the market, without getting any value from it). 3) it seems has a lot of engineers working in this space (which seems a good technical problem).

> Nassim Taleb says that Bitcoin is worth exactly 0.

It's worth what someone is willing to pay for it, which, right now, is about $47k USD.

For me, it's worth something because I own things now that I could only own because someone valued Bitcoin highly.

Maybe he has a different definition of worth.

> Maybe he has a different definition of worth.

His statements are about context. It was about BTC being worth 0 as currency due to its volatility and worthless as a store of wealth due the extrinsic values aka what someone is willing to pay for it, and its backing.

Taleb is categorically wrong - Bitcoin is worth something to a lot of people. Whether that continues or whether it's the "future of money" is debatable, but it's a fallacy to say that it's worth exactly 0.

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