First comment of any bitcoin thread on HN is always something like this, generally negative and a bit grumpy.
And not entirely wrong.
Bitcoin is now just a commodity play: it doesn't have to be rational to make money. Humans assign "value" to all sort of arbitrary things:
I get it but I’d say if you’re mad about Bitcoiners you should be a lot more angry about much of the financial industry and property speculators, two other huge groups that get rich without creating much value (or even by creating negative value).
There's a lot of value-free getting rich lately. People call it "late stage capitalism," but that frames capitalism as the villain when in fact it's a symptom of capitalism having created so much wealth we don't know what to do with it. The problem is that we're allocating it in incredibly dysfunctional ridiculous ways. I think what we're seeing is the symptoms of an early-stage post-scarcity society in denial.
The dysfunction arises from our clinging to scarcity-era puritanical ideas that only those who do a lot of work or do miraculous things "deserve" wealth. So we create all kinds of elaborate games and then convince ourselves that the winners of those games are somehow superhuman or superior in some Calvinist sense when they really just won a video game.
In a post-scarcity society baseline levels of wealth become like oxygen in the atmosphere. You don't "deserve" it. It's just there.
We are not quite post-scarcity yet, but we're close enough that craziness like $100k Bitcoin is possible. A few more key innovations will do it. Another order of magnitude drop in solar/battery prices and/or successful demonstration of a net-positive fusion power plant will do it. Embodied AIs that can do factory jobs will get us pretty far too, making the cost of manufactured goods almost equal to the cost of raw material inputs and energy inputs.
Why does the Federal Reserve US dollar have value? Because people trust other smart people who say they've done the work and trust other smart people who work for the Federal Reserve.
Money is a thing people agree upon as a medium of exchange. It is not value itself. Value is the people, places, and things that make up the actual economy. Bitcoin has no value but neither does the USD. Can't eat them. Can't build a house with them.
My problem with Bitcoin is that I don't think a hyper-deflationary currency is a good idea. Bitcoin is even more deflationary than gold due to breakage (loss of keys) and a hard mining limit.
This is what I keep telling people. No government will use BTC because of this.There is a reason the US went off the gold standard, so they can print create money without causing inflation tied to money supply. Inflation now is not tied to money supply, but to money spending. (ie. if people did not spend money buying things there would be no increase in prices.) In the past, if you printed more money inflation would be immediate since it, in effect, immediately devalues the price of gold.
BTC has value because it’s backed by a sufficiently large group with encryption.
Mechanisms which are difficult to bypass have value. You can’t eat an RSA private key but private keys have immense value.
I know of only one obvious dimension where the life standards of the average person have declined significantly since the 1970s: housing affordability. The entire developed world has a housing affordability crisis driven by cartel-like behavior among homeowners and bad zoning policy among other things. This is a policy failure resulting from bad regulation and undue influence / corruption.
Most other things have stayed largely the same or improved. Food is better and more varied, and while restaurants and some types of food have increased in cost they are still available. Health care is more expensive but also vastly better, especially when dealing with diseases like cancer or heart/circulatory issues. A cancer diagnosis is much less of a death sentence today than it was in the 1970s. Access to information is absurdly, exponentially better. Travel is probably about equally available. Communication capabilities are infinitely better. Appliances, gadgets, and other manufactured goods are significantly cheaper.
HN is unbelievably apolitical, apart from it's baseline tendency towards the left and whatever silicon valley demands people believe.
If you were anywhere near a post scarcity society (applies to USA) you wouldn't be hurtling towards national sovereign debt default at a rate of knots, and you wouldn't have the most expensive healthcare in the world.
As it happens, what appears to be a "post scarcity society" is just pathological misallocation of capital due to a political failure (that shaln't be spoken of here) that has the entire west circling the bowl at the moment.
Now there doesn’t seem to be any use case other than hoping it goes up higher, and enabling crime.
Not really.
NIST has a good blockchain explainer with a handy flowchart that has questions you should ask to see if blockchain is a useful solution:
* PNG flowchart: https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/Projects/enhanced-distribut...
* https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/enhanced-distributed-ledger-t...
* https://www.nist.gov/blockchain
And other things are probably a better fit for the majority of people's needs.
I understand this can be just as easily done with banking system in more developed countries but blockchain is much better other parts of the world