rawtxapp

I mean people buy USD through forex markets all the time, the same way that people buy Bitcoin through crypto exchanges. Also, it won't become reserve currency overnight, it's a gradual process and until it happens it acts as a store of value with a huge upside.

That's one way of looking at it, but most stocks don't pay dividends, so that "equity" is also not that tangible either, unless you're like a majority shareholder that you can change company direction. When you buy a stock, that money doesn't go to the company, it goes to previous investor, unless the company issues more stock (usually the opposite happens).

Also, Bitcoin's success doesn't mean those companies will succeed because it's decentralized and there's thousands of companies across the world and competition is very stiff. But those companies can't succeed without Bitcoin.

If this was 2013, I would agree with you, because the risk of it being worth nothing was much larger, but today the Bitcoin blockchain moves thousands of bitcoin per day (worth billions of dollars in value) and it's network effects are stronger than ever before and you can see usage go high through on-chain metrics (like # wallets, transfers) and increase in lightning network usage (1ml.com).

So I would say, investing in Bitcoin in 2013 probably has the same risk as investing in pets.com, but today, it would be like investing in Amazon a couple years after the dot com bubble when the trajectory is clearer. Just my 2 cents.

> most of them revolve around money laundering, drug trades, and ransomware.

You need a citation for that, because according to experts “In 2020, the illicit share of all cryptocurrency activity fell to just 0.34%,” reported Chainalysis [1].

For many, it's a hedge against inflation, for others it's the next potential global reserve currency, for some it's just a savings mechanism. There are more rational reasons than just crime that you're ignoring.

1: https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/investigation-fra...

Are you implying that no rational person should ever buy Bitcoin? That seems a bit far-fetched, no?

At this point, considering that it's stronger than ever and it's pretty clear it's not going away, I would expect a rational person to allocate even a small percentage to it for diversification, in case they happen to be wrong on their conclusions or understanding of Bitcoin.

If you have assets and debt (and a job that will actually pay well, keep up with inflation), money printing is awesome for you!

If you're in the majority of people who don't have those things, life just gets harder and wealth gap keeps getting larger and larger.

Exactly the same as dot-com bubble where bs companies with just a domain name were the hot thing, if you just looked at that and wrote off tech, you would have made the wrong decision. Being on HN probably means you're technical enough to sort through the noise and find the actual value for yourself until the market does it for you.

What gives a chain value is the network effects which are notoriously hard to establish. So yes, you can fork it, but can you get people to actually use it? Really doubt it.

Except that investing in Bitcoin has shown the exact opposite of high probability of failure, yet people still claim speculation.

Then I can say that I've done my research and I think it's reasonable that USD won't remain global reserve currency forever and that it's replacement won't be a governmental currency, but a decentralized one and Bitcoin would be the only reasonable candidate.

Does this mean that I'm not speculating all of a sudden because I've done research and came up with a reasonable forecast?

Once you accept that the future is unknown, you'll see that every asset is a speculative asset, no?

For the longest time, real estate was assumed to be 100% safe until 2008, etc.

Propaganda? Does it matter where they learned it as long as it's true and factual?

You fail to see people who lost trust in their governments and organizations? You don't see how people are unhappy with getting their savings diluted by unlimited money printing?

Then you would expect people in the EU to not be interested in crypto, yet it's the opposite. You can pull up search volume for "Bitcoin" across the world (using Google Trends), many European nations are at the top.

As a matter of fact, their search volume is higher than US.

It also seems to support hardware wallets.

One of the most important thing people overlook is network effects. By being around longer those chains have built those networks, so even if you have something better, it'll have a huge uphill battle for adoption.

For same reasons that many startups tried to compete with craigslist for years and failed because they didn't account for network effects.

> That's because bitcoin is so centralized these days

Citation badly needed.

For taproot to rollout, you need wallet providers, exchanges, nodes and miners to agree. There are hundreds/thousands of different participants in each one of these categories across the world. Specifically, 90% of nodes need to signal for it.

One of the most interesting things in this experiment was the speedy trial imo. We now have an agreed way to change/improve consensus rules. It's very difficult to get a handful of people to agree on something, let alone all the different participants in this global/borderless system.

It's truly amazing, almost felt magical the first few autocomplete results I got.

There's the benefits that a lot of people mentioned, but to me the biggest benefit is I can avoid procrastination. Usually when I'm blocked on something I'll run a search in the browser, but very quickly I end up going off the trail and just browsing the web and losing a lot of time. Now when I'm blocked I simply type the comment of what I'm trying to do and the autocomplete suggestion is pretty damn good and unblocks me very quickly. More surprising of all, it somehow understands my code style by looking at the context.

Pets.com started in 1998 and was gone by 2000, it's more like the ICOs of 2017. Bitcoin has been alive for almost 12 years now and is stronger than ever before. I'm not sure that's a fair comparison.

> There is no missing out though.

If you were aware of Bitcoin when it was worth a couple hundreds of dollars and you wrote it off as a fad or whatever and turns out you were completely wrong about it, you would definitely feel like you missed out, no? Sure, better late than never, but you still can't change that feeling.

The same things that normal financial systems enable you, but without a central authority. It's trustless, permissionless, completely transparent, uncensorable, borderless open financial system. If you think that all of that is just pure speculation, I don't know what to say.

Just go through github, whitepapers and technical discussions to see the serious side of the industry, rather than being stuck to the surface level of fraudsters/speculators promising 100x money returns on social media.

> I fail to see how the public-permissionless paradigm will ever work

But it is working! Bitcoin has hundreds of thousands of transactions per day on the main chain alone where it settles 2B+$ in value, eth has tons of really useful defi projects that people actually use (maker, compound, aave, uniswap, etc).

According to chainanalysis, about 0.34% of crypto transfers in 2020 were for crime if that's what you mean by illegitimate [1].

1: https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-crypto-crime-repor...

> in a liquidation

That would be like a worst case scenario though, right? Which would in turn make those shares worth a lot less to begin with.

Especially when you consider that a large percentage of stocks don't pay dividends, so you're only holding it because you think the company will do better which may or may not translate into increased share value.

You can do a quick search to have the answers to all these simple questions, it has about ~200k transactions per day which settles about ~2B$ worth of Bitcoin a day (which is up very significantly since last year and down quite a bit from few months ago).

Maker is pretty useful for getting collateralized loans, compound is pretty useful for generating yield by lending to others, uniswap is freaking amazing as a dex and you can trade anything by creating liquidity pools without permission, aave is very useful for arbitraging market inefficiencies away risk-free, so on and on. Gas fees are going to become minimal with layer 2.

If you dig enough, you'll see a lot of very useful and important projects being built by some very capable engineers.

This kind of comment reminds me of when people were predicting that internet was going to be a useless thing[1].

1: https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...

DYOR (Do Your Own Research), don't fomo into coins just because they are pumping in price. Read through their code (or how many contributors, how much contributions it gets, etc) which is something that you can't do with current financial system and if any of those projects don't open source their code, stay as far away as possible. Inspect the on-chain data to see how much is it actually used, etc. Look at Google Trends, look at their community sizes, etc.

There's a lot of datapoints that you can use or you can find reliable people and rely on their judgments. Also, if you're simply looking for investment, you can't go wrong with BTC/ETH portfolio, they have been proven to work over many years now and most of the remaining altcoins are correlated with them in price anyways.

Yes, the loud mouths on twitter and other social networks are definitely a turn-off and pretty annoying.

For anyone who's looking into more serious/technical discussions, I think looking through github contributions, whitepapers, technical parts of bitcointalk and in depth interviews of legitimate contributors to the ecosystem (like Vitalik) is much more informative and has better signal to noise ratios.