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Comment by lend000 | Hacker News Reader

The fact that your factual, noninflammatory comment is being downvoted reflects very poorly on the state of intellectualism on HN. Every time crypto drops 30% you see the same tired arguments and cringeworthy jealousy / schadenfreude. I'm not even pro-crypto and it's painful to watch.

Luna never had a limited supply. That was its achilles heel. Bitcoin is inherently supply-limited. Whether Bitcoin will suffer a similar fate remains to be seen, but it certainly won't happen on the same timeframe (99.9% drop in a matter of days) without SHA-256 breaking or some other double spend vulnerability being successfully realized.

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As I understand, the value of Bitcoin is in an expectation that in future it will become a widespread payment method, and you can buy it cheap (well, relatively cheap) today in order to sell it later to those who will want to use it for transactions.

If my understanding is correct, then as soon as it becomes clear that there are better alternatives or Bticoin is unfit for this purpose, the price will drop.

There is plenty of marketshare that will buy Bitcoin for plenty of other reasons (store of value, protection from governments, criminal transactions, etc.), such that a lot of those reasons would have to be painfully clear to a majority of capital for it to go down dramatically (e.g. LUNA-style). What is clear to one of us may not be clear to other market participants.

Case in point: look at Gamestop stock, 15 months later. Still detached from reality, despite nobody -- even the buyers -- truly expecting the company to generate commensurate value.

> protection from governments, criminal transactions

My understanding is that besides some exceptions like Monero, most crypto is really bad for privacy.

You are somewhat correct in that yes most crypto is not private. However this isnt a binary state, often pseudo-anonymity (which most crypto can do) is sufficient.

Except to a well informed person with the proper tools, its difficult to follow even relatively basic transactions more than a few hops. How many of these kind of people do we think are employed by the IRS?

Even the FBI have been famously bad at tracking criminal funds, and they do have the expertise and tools.

It may not need to be that private. For example, a Chinese corrupt official can move his funds to the US by converting them to BTC and fleeing to the US to withdraw them. The Chinese government can track it down after all that happens but can do nothing due to a lack of extradition treaty.

Bitcoin is a store of value, like gold. Not a currency.

Yes, it's very volatile and no, just like gold, it doesn't protect you from inflation in the short run. but, it does protect from inflation in the long run. It doesn't have the adoption of gold yet, that's why there's more risk, but also more upside too.

to quote Nassim Taleb "Gold and other precious metals are largely maintenance free, do not degrade over an historical horizon, and do not require maintenance to refresh their physical properties over time. Cryptocurrencies require a sustained amount of interest in them."

if we turn off the servers then this value store would disappear.

Running a bitcoin server is relatively cheap. I have had a bitcoin full node running on my raspberry pi now for over a year (many people have had it much longer than that).

It's one of the main design principles of bitcoin, that it needs to be possible for someone to conceivably verify all transactions on a home setup. This ensures that we do not have to trust large operators to verify that the chain is following the protocol correctly.

It is one of the major problems with other coins, like ethereum, where this is not possible. This would leave it subject to pressure from political institutions in the future, which could force the reversal of transactions or freezing of accounts.

I was really disappointed that it was really easy to turn-off Luna blockchain . I was also disappointed when a hacker penetrated 5/9 Axie Infinity Servers. Both of these incidences outline that nobody has build a fast, secure, and decentralized solution yet. Maybe Cardano is the closest.

> Bitcoin is a store of value, like gold. Not a currency.

Currencies have two properties: store of value and medium of exchange.

Gold has utility outside of store of value (you can make earrings or toilets out of it). Bitcoin does not.

Bitcoin has very limited uses as medium of exchange ("you can buy a pizza with it!"), I'm not aware anyone ever actually barters with gold anymore.

Both are speculative assets that store value, but have either lack medium of exchange or have limited use. Gold at least has some utility outside of these two properties.

That's it, there really is anything else to compare the two things by.

That's an argument that people have been making since day 1 of Bitcoin many years ago. It's just dumb at this point, since clearly people see other reasons to buy it.

I'm not saying BTC is a buy at 30k or whatever price, but when you're writing the exact same post people wrote 10 years ago against the thing when it was at 10 cents you kinda gotta question whether your logic is sound.

> Bitcoin is inherently deflationary

Bitcoin is inherently inflationary - the number of coins increased each epoch. Monetary inflation is just increasing the money supply. Price can go up or down. Price inflation is an increase in price.

Comment updated with correction: supply-limited instead of deflationary.

Not a single satoshi will be added to the supply after 2140. The whole century leading up to that only adds a fraction of a percent of the total supply of 21M.

Agreed, but only partly. The GP's past reply history is telling: it is a typical pro-crypto reaction against everyone else (not just anti-crypto), just happened to be okay this time. The part I agree is the prevalence of stock arguments, which would be more entertaining if arguments themselves are evolving, but sadly that's not happening here.

What is a "typical pro-crypto reaction against everyone else" friend? I am flattered that you took the time to comb through my comments to determine whether I was on "your side" or on the "other side". And yes, I am obviously "pro-crypto", as you put it. Are you implying I am some sort of bad actor because of this? Please help me understand.

And I also agree there are no new arguments here. We've been rehashing the same pro-crypto vs anti-crypto discussion for more than a decade and at this point most of us who are not new to this debate are just arguing to let off steam. If you have anything constructive to contribute, other than ad-hominems, I'm happy to hear your side.

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