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Comment by marvin | Hacker News Reader

People should be required to place a monetary bet whenever they make a bold claim in public. I think we would see less comments like this one.

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For all we know, the comment might be proven right next week/month/year. It's just right now that it's plainly wrong.

How much is your monetary bet then?

Which brings us to an interesting question... how long does something have to go before we consider it a success even if it fails later? When something comes along to defeat Facebook, are we going to call Facebook a failure? Was Myspace a failure?[1] The fact that Bitcoin has ran this long, given some huge payouts and legit(albeit small) businesses accept it as payment, I'm almost ready to call bitcoin a success even if it fails 6 months from now.

1. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/aug/13/observerre... Myspace listed among the top 15 most influential sites.

Telegraph... colossal fail. But note that the first wire transfers in 1871 were done on western union's telegraph system. Yours is an interesting question. The tulip mania bubble people like to reference was less than a year long, so BTC is already beating that.

And if/when it fails, Bitcoin can reasonably claim to have shown that distributed computer-based currencies are feasible and people will use them. Even if a successor comes along and solves Bitcoin's problems, you could justifiably say that it only succeeded because of Bitcoin.

The claim, as claimed, is wrong. Plenty of people have faith in it.

In a sense, knowing about Bitcoin in those early days and not buying any at all was a monetary bet. A very costly one.

That's exactly what I did earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6754061

I actually expect I'd have lost the bet if they'd taken it, due to my way too generous terms but that's not the point.

The point was to try to illustrate that "oh it'll crash" is a nonsense prediction.

Be concrete, and put your money where your mouth is, or realise that you haven't actually thought it through.

You know, of all the problems that this community has, I don't think "the echo chamber is far too dampened" is one of them.

They did presumably bet by not buying. At the time, even just a small purchase of Bitcoin then would be worth a million dollars today.

I think we would see fewer comments that technologies like Bitcoin (or cold fusion, or for that matter Google) would be successful if monetary bets depended on them. Or a lot more broke futurologists :)

It's an idea for a startup.

Then the meta-bets, will said start-up fail? If you bet "yes" and you're right, there won't be anyone around to facilitate the payout ;)

Isn't everything?

The commentator did place a monetary bet, by not buying or mining BitCoins.

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