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Comment by not_kurt_godel | Hacker News Reader

Yes, except gold, wheat, and coal have inherent value as physical items whereas crypto does not.

You see no value in having a currency that can't be inflated on a whim by your government? As in, the printing of money that reduces the purchasing power of the money sitting in your bank account. Really?

Bitcoin is not and never can be currency.

That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.

What is the max number of transactions per second that Bitcoin can support?

Lightning scales infinitely.

There are people using Bitcoin as a currency, via lightning, right now. More join all the time. The network expands.

It is a currency, is used as a currency, as sats. It is also a long term store of value as Bitcoin. You can ignore reality as much as your like, but the world has moved on from your 2017 era complaints.

Ah yes, Lightning, the system where you have to establish an escrow fund between you and anyone you wish to pay. Sounds wildly practical.

that’s not how it works. You establish a channel with a network peer, spend some to add incoming liquidity to your channel, and reach the rest of the network. Send and receive payments. Yes the limitation is the liquidity and balance in your channels, but as far as routing goes we are all only a few hops away for each other.

It is wildly practical today, and there are several good custodial solutions if you do not wish to run a node yourself. Please give it a try!

A currency that requires you to run and a node and does not allow you to perform a transaction unless you have staked more currency than you are currently spending is not viable.

Especially when it's an assertion about the definition of a word.

It's a currency now, for dozens of nations and hundreds of millions of humans.

I'm afraid your comment doesn't make much sense.

There is some value in having assets immune to inflationary money printing; indeed there are countless examples of such assets available for purchase such as stocks and real estate. My question remains: why is risk of permanently losing your money worth the alleged benefits of crypto? I am willing to accept 2% fees from Amex built into my purchases because such purchases are insured against fraud and deceptive business practice. Crypto provides none of that but it does provide a substantial non-zero risk of permanently losing access to your money because you forgot your password or lost your coke storage.

Stocks and real estate also pose a risk of permanently losing your money; for example, the company might go bankrupt, the real estate might be expropriated via adverse possession, or the government might freeze trade in the market until after you die, as has happened in a large number of cases since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Even without government freezes, Ukrainian refugees whose savings were invested in Ukrainian real estate cannot spend them now (they are illiquid) and may lose them.

I recommend not storing your password with your coke.

Commodity traders couldn't care less, and the vast majority of the use of gold is purely commerce, unrelated to its inherent value for plating electrical contacts or coating mirrors.

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