Comment by GigabyteCoin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GigabyteCoin | Hacker News Reader

My hope for the Bitcoin blockchain died a few months ago when I realized that all of the Bitcoin proponents on reddit were laughing at the re-design of an old Bitcoin mining website. One I used to mine on before mining became unprofitable for everybody but a few large-scale miners. "Too little, too late!" they all chanted in unison. "Mining websites are dead!" they all laughed. And then it hit me...

The fact that the fair distribution of the coin is dead means that the entire blockchain will die imho. Bitcoin's price really exploded when the mining scene was lucrative for everybody interested in the coin. It tapered off rather quickly once mining became impossible for all but the few.

Why would anybody buy into Bitcoin now that one of it's original pomises of decentralized mining has been broken?

Why would anybdoy buy into Bitcoin when it means only fattening the pockets of a few (already rich) mining syndicates?

I certainly wouldn't, and I was a massive Bitcoin proponent for most of it's life.

Many ideas that Bitcoin brought with it will live on, but the Bitcoin blockchain in it's current implementation will "die" sooner rather than later imho.

The fact that one can transfer value from point A to point B for next to nothing and without government oversight is amazing. The fact that the majority of Bitcoins that will ever exist are held by a few individuals (and always will be while mining for the layman is dead) is not.

You view bitcoin as as "investment" not a "tool" there in lies your problem.

"Why would anybdoy buy into Bitcoin when it means only fattening the pockets of a few (already rich) mining syndicates?"

Replace Bitcoin with USD in above sentence and "mining syndicates" with "banks"

Nobody has to buy into the USD, it's already there, established. Bitcoin has to be better than the established norm in order to succeed. It is in some ways, don't get me wrong, that's true. But it still isn't perfect, and I personally think a better implementation will succeed in the future.

Namely, one where the majority of "little people" can mine the coin. Or one with a fair and equal distribution to at least hundreds of millions of people (preferably billions) before the coin is launched.

Those were some of the founders original ideas, that anybody with a CPU could mine the coin. And technology slowly took over...

I think the parent commenter's point was that Bitcoin was billed as a solution to the problem of the few holding most of the money, yet has appeared to fail in that regard, and continues to fail as mining is increasingly inaccessible to all but those who are sufficiently wealthy to afford warehouses full of state-of-the-art ASICs.

This isn't to say that Bitcoin hasn't succeeded in a lot of fronts. Just that one of the key fronts - one of equal ownership of the money supply - hasn't been quite as successful as others.

Most miners sell their bitcoins to buy more hardware and pay their electricity bills...

Why go through the trouble of running a mining rig instead of just buying the coins sold by miners in the market?

It is true that the majority of Bitcoins are held by a few early adopters (NB: not today's miners!). They will diversify out as time goes on. Wealth can come from skill, hard work, luck, politicking, etc... Rejecting Bitcoin because it enriches a few people in a manner that you find objectionable is... myopic.

Look around you, almost everything you do enriches one capitalist or another. Many intelligent people have tried finding a way around that, with limited to no success. Good luck.

>Rejecting Bitcoin because it enriches a few people in a manner that you find objectionable is... myopic.

That's not why I think Bitcoin is dead.

It's primarily the fact that nobody can mine it anymore, thus nobody will be interested in it. All of my friends who I introduced to Bitcoin (and were fanatics while they were mining) don't even talk about it anymore. They're all just steadily hoarding their coins, not using them for anything, in the hopes of cashing out millions of dollars once all of the later "suckers" come along and buy into the blockchain.

It was the "free money" aspect that really sold the idea to most people. Nobody cares about the "exchange money for Bitcoin just because Bitcoin is so much more fluid" aspect.

I proposed an altcoin that would would increase reward logarithmically as a result of increasing hash power.

Because otherwise there is excessive deflation and instability.

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