Hacker News Reader

Comment by cheema33 | Hacker News Reader

> Those "meaningless hashes" help secure hundreds of billions in savings of Bitcoin for hundreds of millions of people.

Can you back that up with actual data? Other than something that a crypto bro on the Internet told you?

The market cap of Bitcoin is hundreds of billions, and estimates put the number of people owning Bitcoin in the hundreds of millions. You can find the data yourself.

Thats not the best counterargument, because Bitcoin has privacy qualities by default. You can hop on to any block explorer and accept every address as another user, but you cant verify that (without expensive analysis, on a case-by-case basis) those are not owned by the same guy. Same with Tor, while some data like bridge usage is being collected somehow (i havent looked into it) you cant reliably prove that thousands/millions are using it to protect their privacy and resist censorship.

It's pretty obvious that the majority of transaction volume and value is rubbish. Bots buying, selling, and trading to each other with millions of addresses. The actual real user count for crypto would be a very tiny % of the active addresses. And the real value not even close to the claimed market caps.

It costs real world dollars to transact so it's not nothing. This argument can be made for stonks as well, right?

How can you verify that? Other than, you know, "something that a anti-crypto bro on the Internet told you?"

I'm being slightly salty here but i dont get the backlash on crypto. It has a huge potential for safeguarding privacy (Monero) and avoiding corporate walled gardens and banks.

I'm not talking about "crypto", I'm talking about Bitcoin. Bitcoin is not free to send or trade. The vast majority of Bitcoin is held by long term holders and hasn't moved on chain in years. Saving in hard money is the primary use case. Hashing secures those Bitcon from being reversed out of your wallet right back to the very first block.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com