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Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

Hate BitCoin or like it. Let's agree, nobody can explain this; and nobody can predict BitCoin value or usage.

Some top HN members criticized BitCoin heavily. I, for one, invested $0 in BitCoin.

But we can be sure about something: Bitcoin is weird, new and innovative. It's something completely new and has no rules. The game is open. How the market will react will not depend on your limited (or wide) experience.

Bitcoin can go all the way down to $0 and the rest is history. It can go up and widely used that it changes history. I'll be just watching though.

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I don't see how Bitcoin could go down to $0 (assuming that it's not the philosophical scenario with $ growing to infinite), unless the entire thing is somehow compromised and exploited in an abusive manner; thus, destroying the trust of anyone left with Bitcoin holdings.

1. Bitcoin can be explained if you take time and study it. It has no new or strange constructs in it. Hash functions and digital signatures were around for decades. You may also like this glossary: https://github.com/oleganza/CoreBitcoin/blob/master/GLOSSARY...

2. Bitcoin has rules and those rules are strictly followed and very strictly specified in actual software.

The block size blockchain fork was resolved on an ad hoc basis. There was nothing in the software to deal with it. Miners lost rewards over it (or at least, wasted cycles).

Software has bugs. They need to be fixed and some people may lose money. This story only proves that incentives are correctly working in favour of everyone: miners voluntarily chose to lose rewards and stay compatible with the older network to not shake confidence in it.

The point is not to have a perfect system (which is impossible), but to have proper motivations for everyone to play along instead of cheating and stealing.

Well, now we are running away from "strictly followed" and "very strictly specified".

I guess I would be happy if you always posted a disclaimer with such claims, something like "But of course all software has bugs and who knows how severely a given bug in the bitcoin software will impact the network".

The value of bitcoins is tied to the size of the bitcoin economy. If you believe the size of the bitcoin economy is going to grow over time, then the value of each coin will also increase (as there will never be more than 20m coins).

If bitcoins are to be used as a niche instrument to make financial transactions easier, the total value of all bitcoins should probably be more more than a few billion dollars.

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