Comment by BoorishBears | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BoorishBears | Hacker News Reader

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Hasn't time already proven the skeptics right?

The biggest sources of skeptism were around logistics and value as a currency:

Is there a cryptocoin that has successfully solved logistics without disastrously failing as a currency?

Even if you ignore the environmental aspect... has any coin that has achieved scale not experienced deflation that would make the Great Depression look like a hiccup?

To me the skepticism has always been "you can't have a functional decentralized currency". Some people take that at face value and proudly proclaim "people will accept your BTC/ETH/etc."

But most people mean it in the sense we think of currencies belonging to non-failed states: aka being a somewhat stable store of value. More widely used for payment of productive economic output than fraud and speculation...

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I see crypto as I see Tesla, maybe there way a point but it's long buried under the mania.

Disclaimer: Due to that mania I keep some as hedge, but again, imagine saying I keep dollars under my pillow as a hedge that next year they might have 10x'd in value...

Has it?

Bitcoin is bigger than ever before. It's far more valuable, it has far more users, processes hundreds of thousands of transactions moving billions of dollars worth of value every day on-chain alone, has very healthy L2 layer growth (1ml.com), has hundreds of exchanges worldwide, it ticks every 10 minutes and will keep ticking for the foreseeable future. We have a small country that adopted it as a legal tender with more countries coming on the Bitcoin standard potentially this year.

People only see the fiat currencies and forget that we've run on gold standard for thousands of years and fiat currencies are barely 50 years old and riddled with financial crises left and right. Bitcoin is digital gold, strictly better than gold. But anyways, we'll see what happens in the future.

Does that answer anything I brought up?

You know, the whole "relatively stable store of value paying for productive output rather than speculation and fraud?"

We moved off the gold standard for a reason (and it's not all geopolitics...)

Bitcoin's volatility is not because of the fixed supply. If nothing else, new Bitcoins are still being issued. It is of course true that inflation encourages spending etc., but the difference between -2% and 2% does not cause 50% daily price movements.

Bitcoin cannot be stable relative to other currencies as long as 90% of its forex volume is speculation. If there are businesses having long-term obligations and trade denominated in Bitcoin, providing for a large base of regular demand and supply that outweighs the speculation, it will stabilise.

This is obviously really really though to achieve, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the "tech" (which is essentially a spreadsheet). This makes the debate around the volatility and whether its qualifies as a "currency" rather boring. It will happen, or it won't, and we can try to predict the future, but it is not really about Bitcoin at all, just marketplace behavior.

Where did I say Bitcoin's volatility is because of fixed supply.

Or even remotely imply it.

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Once again the reply doesn't actually answer the basic question, because the answer is inconvenient.

I'd love one honest reply to the point grounded in any crypto, not even Bitcoin, being a "relatively stable store of value paying for productive output rather than speculation and fraud?"

Relatively stable being defined extremely generously in this context might I add! I won't hit you with a "gotcha!" because your coin of choice is widely used to pay for goods rather than fraud and speculation but it happened to fluctuate 10% or something, USD does that too...

Strictly better than gold is not true.

Gold can be traded without leaving an audit trail, and without a per transaction cost.

You still have transaction costs in the form of transport costs to get the gold to your personal location.

Yep, and obviously any kind of transportation like that will be tracked and easily traced, with exact weights and sizes.

By hopping on the lightning network, you're essentially anonymizing your payments as well as making them practically free.

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