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Bitcoin isn't the internet of money, it is an internet for money. With this distinction in mind, it would be foolish to think that the first cryptocurrency woul

by strgrd 9y ago

Bitcoin isn't the internet of money, it is an internet for money. With this distinction in mind, it would be foolish to think that the first cryptocurrency would be the last. It took many implementations and iterations of wide area networks to arrive at the Internet Protocol we have today. While Bitcoin doesn't share the same set of problems as fiat currency, it has its own burdens, and has proven completely ineffective as a functional money system outside of speculation and fraud. The novelty of Bitcoin is supposedly its 'immutable ledger', a phrase used so frequently in defending Bitcoin, that it has become divorced from its meaning, and divorced from the reality that solutions to distributed logging existed long before Bitcoin, and many more solutions to this problem will be developed with no regard to the blockchain. Bitcoin itself will never replace anything -- cryptocurrencies will remain monolithic in purpose and function for a very long time. The underlying ideas to the Bitcoin protocol will be iterated on, and we'll see these ideas implemented in distributed software, but to incessantly hype Bitcoin as the singular platform for cryptocurrency is to live in a bubble. pls buy litecoin

mattbeckman 9y ago
"pls buy litecoin" ... there's always a vested interest!
- jackstraw14 9y ago
  Maybe at some point people will do some thinking about how their own conflicts of interest affect the hype and FUD they spread in crypto communities. pls buy iota
  - strgrd 9y ago
    I have been trying to keep track of some of the cryptocurrency idiocy on HN, but no one seems to care/get it: reddit.com/r/BoHN/
bernadus_edwin 9y ago
Wow. There is a twist at the end
- wmf 9y ago
  Yeah, Litecoin is no better than Bitcoin in any fundamental way. It doesn't solve volatility, scalability, reversibility, etc.
jondubois 9y ago
Yes, it seems that human attention has become the ultimate luxury commodity. I think that a cryptocurrency derives a significant portion of its value from the mere fact that that a lot of people know about its existence. A lot of celebrities these days make huge sums of money in spite of being untalented. Being famous is valuable in itself. People (especially rich people) want to be loved and/or respected. The "why" doesn't actually matter. If you own a lot of something which a lot of people know about, then you will be respected. The blockchain is public. Everybody can see it. It's the ultimate instrument of vanity. In the future you'll be able to show off your wealth without the stigma associated with actually showing it off. People will be able to look you up on a popular blockchain and know that you are an influential individual. It solves a big problem that rich people have. They want to appear humble but at the same time they want other people to know that they are rich.
- nosuchthing 9y ago
  Yes, and we can see the Oligarchical squatters who acquired large stakes in Bitcoin. In economics, the Gini coefficient is the standard measure of how inequitable a society is. This is tricky to determine for Bitcoin, as it's not quiet a "society" in the Gini sense, one person may have multiple addresses and many addresses have been used only once or a few times. (The commonly-cited figure of 0.88 is based on one small exchange in 2011.) However, a Citigroup analysis from early 2014 notes: "47 individuals hold about 30 percent, another 900 a further 20 percent, the next 10,000 about 25% and another million about 20%"; and distribution "looks much like the distribution of wealth in North Korea and makes China's and even the US' wealth distribution look like that of a workers' paradise Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir found in a 2012 study that only 22% of then-existing Bitcoins were in circulation at all, there were a total of 75 active users or businesses with any kind of volume, one (unidentified) user owned a quarter of all Bitcoins in existence, and one large owner was trying to hide their pile by moving it around in thousands of smaller transactions. (Shamir is one of the most renowned cryptographers in the world and the "S" in "RSA encryption")" [1] via https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgerard https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgerard
ThomPete 9y ago
If only humans always chose the best solutions to a problem. That's not how things work though. Many sup-par solutions have been chosen because they gained adoption more than because they were the best solution.
XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago
Bitcoin will never be the most interesting w.r.t technology, but it has the potential for having the highest market cap. It has a huge network effect, and currently stands as the major conduit for fiat to any other cryptocurrency.

by strgrd 9y ago

mattbeckman 9y ago

"pls buy litecoin" ... there's always a vested interest!

jackstraw14 9y ago
Maybe at some point people will do some thinking about how their own conflicts of interest affect the hype and FUD they spread in crypto communities. pls buy iota
- strgrd 9y ago
  I have been trying to keep track of some of the cryptocurrency idiocy on HN, but no one seems to care/get it: reddit.com/r/BoHN/

bernadus_edwin 9y ago

Wow. There is a twist at the end

wmf 9y ago
Yeah, Litecoin is no better than Bitcoin in any fundamental way. It doesn't solve volatility, scalability, reversibility, etc.

jondubois 9y ago

Yes, it seems that human attention has become the ultimate luxury commodity. I think that a cryptocurrency derives a significant portion of its value from the mere fact that that a lot of people know about its existence. A lot of celebrities these days make huge sums of money in spite of being untalented. Being famous is valuable in itself. People (especially rich people) want to be loved and/or respected. The "why" doesn't actually matter. If you own a lot of something which a lot of people know about, then you will be respected. The blockchain is public. Everybody can see it. It's the ultimate instrument of vanity. In the future you'll be able to show off your wealth without the stigma associated with actually showing it off. People will be able to look you up on a popular blockchain and know that you are an influential individual. It solves a big problem that rich people have. They want to appear humble but at the same time they want other people to know that they are rich.

nosuchthing 9y ago
Yes, and we can see the Oligarchical squatters who acquired large stakes in Bitcoin. In economics, the Gini coefficient is the standard measure of how inequitable a society is. This is tricky to determine for Bitcoin, as it's not quiet a "society" in the Gini sense, one person may have multiple addresses and many addresses have been used only once or a few times. (The commonly-cited figure of 0.88 is based on one small exchange in 2011.) However, a Citigroup analysis from early 2014 notes: "47 individuals hold about 30 percent, another 900 a further 20 percent, the next 10,000 about 25% and another million about 20%"; and distribution "looks much like the distribution of wealth in North Korea and makes China's and even the US' wealth distribution look like that of a workers' paradise Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir found in a 2012 study that only 22% of then-existing Bitcoins were in circulation at all, there were a total of 75 active users or businesses with any kind of volume, one (unidentified) user owned a quarter of all Bitcoins in existence, and one large owner was trying to hide their pile by moving it around in thousands of smaller transactions. (Shamir is one of the most renowned cryptographers in the world and the "S" in "RSA encryption")" [1] via https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgerard https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidgerard

ThomPete 9y ago

If only humans always chose the best solutions to a problem. That's not how things work though. Many sup-par solutions have been chosen because they gained adoption more than because they were the best solution.

XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y ago

Bitcoin will never be the most interesting w.r.t technology, but it has the potential for having the highest market cap. It has a huge network effect, and currently stands as the major conduit for fiat to any other cryptocurrency.