Hacker News Reader

I thought the sentence was clear. For example, if you strip away the mobile, network-connected, and technological aspects of a mobile phone away, you are left with nothing: there's no centuries-old parallel for such a communications device. With bitcoin, apparently there is.

View on HN

Messages by carrier pigeon? Sounds pretty "mobile" to me.

I think the point is Bitcoin is revolutionary in many ways than just being a digital currency. It's also P2P, and these type of technologies seem very hard to shut down by governments, after reaching critical mass. There are probably a lot of things governments could do to slow it down, but I'm not sure they could kill it.

But the problem is that, among all the things Bitcoin is trying to be, one of them is a currency. A pseudonymous decentralized p2p payment system is a reasonable idea, but since every transaction takes place in a currency with bad fundamentals as a currency, it's not a particularly good implementation of that idea.

I see the term critical mass being used a lot within the Bitcoin community. What's your opinion on what would constitute critical mass?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com