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Comment by IamLoading | Hacker News Reader

i found this funny. bitcoin's first HN post, and commentor claiming its cute, but no will entertain the idea.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=600813

And everything they said is still true. yes there are some believers but most crypto lovers are nothing but trying to get rich quick. No real world practical adoption after 15+ years.

Except for it creating the possibility of transferring wealth digitally, to anyone, across borders, without any centralized intermediary you have to trust. That's pretty amazing, especially for people who live unbanked, or in hyperinflationary economies with totalitarian governments.

Except in practice western union does almost all of that (minus centralized intermediary) more reliably, hence why the overwhelming majority of the third world doesn't use or rely on crypto despite these supposed benefits (which seem tailor made to help the third world out)

The (centralized) part you put in brackets is quite important. That's the differentiator.

Both systems can obviously co-exist. Much like how gold co-exists with fiat money. Or how there's bittorrent and S3.

And it is true the adoption part is still tiny (just equivalent to one of the top S&P500 companies in market cap) compared to its potential. And the numbers show that as adoption increases, volatility goes down.

A third world with a reliable govt doesn't need it. You need trustless currencies only when the centralised alternatives are actually untrustworthy.

I don't disagree that it had promise but it has failed to live up to the hype and after 15 years, we can safely say it has failed. A tiny minority may be using it for transactions but it did not gain the actual adoption it was supposed to and never solved the problems it was supposed to. Funny thing is that it created companies like Coinbase that is the exact opposite of what De-Centralization and anonymity was supposed to be which is supposedly the biggest problem solved by Crypto.

How can you "safely say that it has failed"? Bitcoin is in the top 10 largest assets in the world, just below silver. I think few people would've expected that 15 years ago. That's a pretty high bar you're setting.

The "Asset" is just about speculation and getting rich quick. Again, it failed because there is no real world application in day to day life for transactions to replace the Fiat currency and be de-centralized. You did not address any of my points in earlier comment btw.

Which of your points isn't also true for physical gold right now?

Maybe put those forward, and someone will address them for you.

> No real world practical adoption

You can quibble about which parts of the world are "real" or not, but the adoption of Bitcoin ($1.3T) dwarfs 99% of company market caps.

Well, I mean it's not absolutely wrong. Who today has faith in Bitcoin as a currency ?

BTC is 60k+ right now. Since, the price is based on supply-demand. That should explain, atleast 1 person has enough faith to put money on it.

In some ways, it's not wrong.

Since Bitcoin fans have entirely pivoted away from “peer-to-peer electronic currency” to “no actually it’s a store of value mumble mumble gold mumble ETFs”, that old comment was on point.

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