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Comment by altoz | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoins are reaching lottery-level payoffs. In 5 years, will be see a lot more of these stories?

In 5 years it'll become world currency and in 10 years all other currencies will hyperinflate relative to it and will be abandoned. Gold will go down too as more people will learn that Bitcoin is more flexible way of "storing wealth".

Thing is though, that the primary purpose of money is not to store wealth, but to exchange it for stuff.

Bitcoin does not beat regular coins when it comes to that yet.

Money can only be used to exchange stuff when it has value. And it has value only when people are willing to hold it. If no one wants to invest in money long-term, then it has no value and thus cannot be used in "exchange".

After all, money does not "move", it is always stored in someone's pockets and switches owners instantly. It's just everyone has different time preferences and stores different amounts of cash for different amount of time.

Knowing the bitcoin fanboys, I can't really tell if you're being sarcastic or not.

Send me a message on oleganza@gmail.com (twitter: @oleganza) in 5 years and ask for 1 BTC if Bitcoin is not yet recognized as international financial instrument. I will gladly give it to you if BTC price is below $10000 or it's still not possible to pay in Bitcoin in any major city for about anything.

Thanks for the offer! http://i.imgur.com/UnOIGpT.png

I hope Google doesn't kill Calendar before 2018.

Sure, hypothetically, but there is a lot that can go wrong.

Scalability is an issue. In the future we will probably have to rely on thin clients making bitcoin less attractive.

Governments won't peacefully accept bitcoin. Why would we let people make under the table payments, enabling tax evasion and laundering? They've ignored it so far but as it becomes more popular we could see action taken against it. You may object that bitcoin is decentralized and on the internet and therefore invincible. But if exchanges were shut down that would be devastating.

A better cryptocurrency could take its place.

1. Scalability is a solvable technical problem. Also, there are many ways to implement fast micro payments outside the blockchain and make all IOUs resolvable within a day thus preventing all sorts of fraud (e.g. fractional reserve banking).

2. Governments will die off without ability to have "budget deficits" via money printing. No one would vote for politicians because they wouldn't be able to build stuff "for free" by borrowing money from your unborn children.

3. Owners of Bitcoin have all incentives to adjust the protocol to fix all bugs and implement all useful features to not lose their wealth. Not a problem for Bitcoin and not a problem for anyone else either. Even if Bitcoin is replaced by Bitcoin2, it won't change things for the fate of the governments.

There are 2 paths a populist government can follow, left and right. Both governments persecute outsiders to the benefit of insiders. Both realise that taxation isn't a viable strategy.

In the leftist case, the outsiders are the rich and the insiders are "99%", they use deficit spending to remain in power. In the rightist case, the outsiders are wealthy foreigners and the insiders are their own citizens, they use expansion and conquest to remain in power.

Fiat currency enables leftist policies, hard money encourages rightist.

> Bitcoins are reaching lottery-level payoffs. In 5 years, will be see a lot more of these stories?

I suspect not. Whatever the long term shape of the price curve is, I think that in the moderate term its probably something like a logistic curve, and this year saw most of the steep portion of the logistic curve and is already bending into the high-end slow-growth portion of the curve.

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