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Comment by binary132 | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin is at 93k so I don’t think it’s entirely accurate to say blockchain is insubstantive or without value

There can be a bunch of crazy people trading each other various lumps of dog feces for increasing sums of cash, that doesn't mean dogshit is particularly valuable or substantive either.

I'd argue even dogshit has more practical use than Bitcoin, if no one paid money for Bitcoin. You can throw it for self-defence, compost it (under high heat to kill the germs), put it on your property to scare away raccoons (it works sometimes).

Bitcoin and other crypto coins have a practical use. You can use them to buy whatever is being sold on the darkweb with the main product categories being drugs and guns. I honestly believe much of the valuation of Crypto is tied to these marketplaces.

Don't forget scamming people out of billions of dollars of their hard earned life savings.

And by "dog feces," I assume you mean fiat currency, correct?

Cryptocurrency solves the money-printing problem we've had around the world since we left the gold standard. If governments stopped making their currencies worthless, then bitcoin would go to zero.

This seems to be almost purely bandwagon value, like preferring Coca-Cola to some other drink. There are other blockchains that are better technically along a bunch of dimensions, but they don't have the mindshare.

Bitcoin is probably unkillable. Even if were to crash, it won't be hard to round up enough true believers to boost it up again. But it's technically stagnant.

True, but then so is a lot of "tech". There were certainly, at least equivalent, social applications before and all throughout Facebooks dominance, but like Bitcoin the network effect becomes primary, after a minimum feature set.

For Bitcoin, it doesn't exactly seem to be a network effect? It's not like choosing a chat app because that's what your friends use.

Many other cryptocurrencies are popular enough to be easily tradable and have features to make them work better for trade. Also, you can speculate on different cryptocurrencies than your friends do.

Technically stagnant is a good thing; I'd prefer the term technically mature. It's accomplished what it set out to do, which is to be a decentralized, anonymous form of digital currency.

The only thing that MIGHT kill it is if governments stopped printing money.

Beanie Babies were trading pretty well, too, although it wasn't quite "solving sudokus for drugs", so I guess that's why they didn't have as much staying power.

very little of the trading actually happens on the blockchain, it's only used to move assets between trading venues.

The values of bitcoin are:

- easy access to trading for everyone, without institutional or national barriers

- high leverage to effectively easily borrow a lot of money to trade with

- new derivative products that streamline the process and make speculation easier than ever

The blockchain plays very little part in this. If anything it makes borrowing harder.

I agree with "easy access to trading for everyone, without institutional or national barriers"

how on earth does bitcoin have anything to do with borrowing or derivatives?

in a way that wouldn't also work for beanie babies

Those are the main innovations tied to crypto trading. They do indeed have little to do with the blockchain or bitcoin itself, and do apply to any asset.

There are actually several startups whose pitch is to bring back those innovations to equities (note that this is different from tokenized equities).

If you can't point to real use cases at scale, it's hard to argue it has intrisinc value even though it may have speculative value.

With almost zero fundamentals. That’s the part you are glossing over.

Uh… So the argument here is that anticipated future value == meaningful value today?

The whole cryptocurrency world requires evangelical buy-in. But there is no directly created functional value other than a historic record of transactions and hypothetical decentralization. It doesn’t directly create value. It’s a store of it - again, assuming enough people continue to buy into the narrative so that it doesn’t dramatically deflate when you need to recover your assets. States and other investors are helping make stability happen to maintain it as a value store, but you require the story propagating to achieve those ends.

You’re wasting your breath. Bitcoin will be at a million in 2050 and you’ll still get downvoted here for suggesting it’s anything other than a stupid bubble that’s about to burst any day now.

It’s hard to understand how people can be so determined to ignore reality.

Quite the opposite, if you need to defend a technical idea with its price in the in a largely speculative market, you've already lost the argument.

That people are greedy and ignorant and bid up BTC doesn't prove anything about its value.

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