Comment by toss1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toss1 | Hacker News Reader

I also used to be enthusiastic about the prospects for Bitcoin (and the lot of cryptocurrencies).

But they massively failed their core challenge, which would have made them great successes — they never solved the problems of security and usability. (and no, wallets, cold-wallets, hardware keys are all still vulnerable and clumsy to use, and confirmation times randomly jumping between 50-2500 minutes in the last month [0], not usable). The result was clear years ago when many vendors who had started taking BTC and ETH payments started quietly dropping the option.

And the people thinking BTC is a Store Of Value for prepper-survivor-type collapses are hilarious; you can dig up your hoard of gold, but when the electrical grid and the internet dies, good luck transacting in any cryptocurrency.

So, the only thing setting it's value now is the Greater Fool Theory — the expectation that a greater fool will come along to buy at a higher price. The BTC whales cannot cash out at the paper "value" they see today. Which is exactly the scam Musk is trying to run on the US Govt. The "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve" will fleece the US citizens and taxpayers into being the buyer of last resort, allowing the whales to cash out.

Sad ending to a technology that started with so much promise. All because those in the field never really did the hard work of ensuring it was broadly usable, instead just focused on promoting it.

[0] https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_confirmation_...

There are plenty of cryptocurrencies out there that don't have the trouble with confirmation times that BTC and ETH do (like Solana, Algorand, Agoric, etc.) Your points about usability are on-point, and things like recurring payments over cryptocurrency are still very cumbersome (e.g. the payer has to initiate the payment, there's no simple UX to create a monthly bill of any sort.)

At the current moment I think there's a lot of value for BTC, ETH, and cryptocurrencies in places/industries where access to stable financial infrastructure is either difficult, limited, or otherwise unavailable. Until the UX problems are fixed I think cryptocurrency will just not find the adoption it needs to drive volume beyond speculation, which is the volume it needs to hit some form of stable pricing.

The average confirmation time is actually explained by very old transactions that have been in the mempool for weeks or months finally being included due to transaction fees being low enough[0]. This of course raises the average confirmation time metric, but the average time for a new transaction to be included was on average 10 minutes like it always is assuming fees paid are above block minimum.

[0]: https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...

>>n average 10 minutes like it always

Ummm, not in my experience. I washed my hands of the lot some years ago, but was seeing ordinary transactions (with good fees paid) taking 6-24 hours to get confirmed. This was after getting accustomed to watching confirmations start popping in within minutes. Yes, I understand this was partially resolved, but "partially" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, and I see no assurance that the network will not again see such conditions, for no apparent reason to the end user. Of course there are also other better-performing coins, but none have gained the traction of BTC.

Of course we technologists can better understand and so tolerate these delay issues, but just the fact that we must explain it means it will never see wide acceptance. And that is even if the other usability and security problems are solved. When I'm reading this week of people losing millions or hundreds of millions in BTC, ya they got phished, got caught at a low-attention moment, etc... it's a problem, especially since those are experts familiar with the ins-and-outs. There is no way an average Joe & Jane would even consider putting their kid's college funds in crypto, nor should they.

If you have to explain your product like that, you are already lost. Once again, the crypto industry must do the HARD work of solving those problems. But at this point it may be too late.

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