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Notice how almost all news of Bitcoin now are about its price. Bitcoin used to be exciting in both technical and economical aspects, but has now become just a s

Notice how almost all news of Bitcoin now are about its price. Bitcoin used to be exciting in both technical and economical aspects, but has now become just a store of value entirely driven by speculation. Other technically superior cryptocurrencies (e.g. Monero, Ethereum) have replaced most of its usecases, boasting much faster and cheaper transactions and real anonymity in the case of Monero. Bitcoin takes more than an hour even at absurd transaction fees of multiple dollars, and is actually pseudonymous, meaning if you can associate an address with a real person, it becomes relatively easy to trace all their transactions unless they were careful to cover their tracks. It may or may not continue to increase in value long-term, but it has little uses outside of being worth a lot of money.

deleted 9y ago
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dcdanko 9y ago
It's shopworn but good tech doesn't always win. Bitcoin has a big(ish) network of users and a proven codebase. The decentralized nature of blockchains means that they're hard for individual corporations to control and profit from. That hampers adoption of new closed cryptocurrencies (not Monero or Ethereum though) but can serve as a powerful public utility.
- wallace_f 9y ago
  This is an interesting line of thought: bitcoin has no intrinsic value--its price represents a supply and demand equillibrium for a (1) money, that is (2) pseudonymous, and (3) not a government currency. If other CCs can offer 2, 3 equally well, the price premium must be due to something different about 1--how well it performs the functions of money. Is it a better Store of Value? How much better of a Medium of Exchange is it, and is it worth the premium? As far as I can tell from my napkin analysis, I would guess that bitcoin appears to be in a pretty speculative bubble. This is assuming Ethereum, and other CCs, are equally capable of fulfilling the functions of bitcoin.
  - dcdanko 9y ago
    Personally I think that the value of (1) Money is extremely dependent on proven track record and the network size. Since the value of (2) and (3) are dependent on (1) I think this has outsize importance. Though as programmers I think we tend to underestimate this value. Not to say Bitcoin isn't in a speculative bubble, who knows? Aside: I don't know if it's fair to call bitcoin pseudonymous. Tumblers mean that one can effectively obscure their transactions if that's their goal, pseudo-pseudonymous if you will.
  - LyndsySimon 9y ago
    > This is an interesting line of thought: bitcoin has no intrinsic value--its price represents a supply and demand equillibrium for a (1) money, that is (2) pseudonymous, and (3) not a government currency. I agree with this completely, but think there are a few other factors that will matter in the future but have not yet become widely used. The relative importance of all of these factors has changed over time and will continue to change in the future. > As far as I can tell from my napkin analysis, I would guess that bitcoin appears to be in a pretty speculative bubble. Again, I agree. Every time the price of Bitcoin has gone up a great deal in a short time, it's been a bubble caused by speculation or by a new wave of people joining for the first time. Every time that's happened, the bubble has burst. Every time the bubble has burst, it's bottomed out at a level significantly higher than the previous baseline, and every time it's bottomed out it the price has stabilized and ultimately recovered. If you want to day trade, now is probably a great time to get in - assuming we're still on the way up. If you're wanting to hold long-term, then the safest time to buy will be as soon as the price stabilizes after the next pop. As for me... I buy on a regular basis without regard to the price. I'm something of a "true believer" though, and don't expect to ever sell my entire holdings again.
tom_mellior 9y ago
> (e.g. Monero, Ethereum) have replaced most of its usecases I use Bitcoin from time to time to order food and buy other stuff online (sometimes through gift cards bought with Bitcoin). It's tough enough to find sites that accept Bitcoin, but I don't think I've ever seen one that accepted Monero or Ethereum. Maybe Litecoin a few years back. I admit that I haven't searched, but I would have expected a correlation with Bitcoin-accepting sites. So if it's not buying stuff, what use cases do you have in mind?
- Casseres 9y ago
  Ideally Monero would replace Bitcoin when buying things. Monero is more like cash than Bitcoin is. Unlike Bitcoin, paying with Monero doesn't immediately give away your balance and transaction history. Monero would also be better suited because it has lower fees that will get even lower as the dynamic block size increases. And because of the dynamic blocksize, you won't have to wait forever to confirm that you sent payment for a cup of coffee or whatever. If you're interested in adopting Monero, but still need to be able to pay in Bitcoin occasionally, you can use a service like www.XMR.to
  - nadam 9y ago
    Monero has potential, but I have found DASH to be the currency that has the biggest potential to replace Bitcoin when buying things. It has high throughput, privateSend, instaSend, decentralized governance, treasury system, they are focusing on UX, and I find some of the 'leaders' very talented (like Ryan Taylor).
    - nosuchthing 9y ago
      DASH, aka Darkcoin, should be avoided - in the first two days the developer printed "1.9 million coins" or 10% of the supply.
  - Geee 9y ago
    Monero's scalability is even harder to solve than Bitcoin's I think. Perfect coin should be private and scalable. There isn't one yet, expect maybe Byteball's blackbytes.
rb808 9y ago
> has little uses outside of being worth a lot of money. Right on the button. Make a lot of money, keep buying, everyone is happy.
ogig 9y ago
> (..), but [bitcoin] it has little uses outside of being worth a lot of money. I keep reading this and sounds false to me. Why do you ignore the illegal drugs market? Lots of people uses bitcoin daily to buy and sell substances. You might have a moral opinion about that fact, but it remains true. You might think it's a small, or temporary market, but I disagree based on the history of humans and drugs use. While I don't fully disagree that speculation might be the main drive of the price, let's not forget that the are some real, big, uses of bitcoin.
nikcub 9y ago
> boasting much faster and cheaper transactions and real anonymity Cost me over $4 to send Monero transactions last month. Cost me about $3 to send a Bitcoin transaction this morning. The average and median transaction fees between the two networks have been pretty close for a while I like Monero but it has some way to go - it needs a light client, multisig completed, and hasn't really had to confront any scaling issues yet (already at 30GB+ blockchain with 4-5k transactions per day). At the same time the other cryptos are progressing rapidly on the one huge advantage Monero has - Ethereum has added zk-SNARKs and there are all sorts of proposals and developments on Bitcoin now that malleability has been addressed and the new opcodes added edit: also re: Bitcoin News - most of what I read is about the ongoing Segwit2x saga, but it's a bit difficult to avoid the price when it is on such a tear
- john_alan 9y ago
  A) XMR Tx set to low priority will usually ship in next block (within 2 mins) with 5 ring size at fee of 30cent. Not sure what you were doing. B) ZKSnarks will never deprecate XMR, they bring the caveats of trusted being required, inability to audit coin supply and inherently DO NOT provide fungibility. It’s no wonder xmr price is in the doldrums. Even the smart guys on HN are misinformed about it.
  - DennisP 9y ago
    Fwiw, ring signatures are also getting implemented on Ethereum. (But I do think Monero makes a good case for their "mandatory privacy" stance.)
    - john_alan 9y ago
      Yup. Eth is good, ring on eth will not provide transactional privacy though.
- nikolay 9y ago
  I see hundreds of my friends sending money free with Venmo each month. I know nobody having any slightest interest in Bitcoin or the likes. Once in a while, somebody would ask me if it makes sense for them to invest some cash into Bitcoin as they've heard about some crazy growth, but when I explain to them some, they all decide it's too risky, and those who are the anarchist type stick to gold.
randallsquared 9y ago
As someone who has no stake in any of these, it seems to me that Ethereum has a big PR problem no matter how technically superior it is: it's inextricably tied to the story about the DAO, where those who played the game by the rules had their Ethereum redistributed by the developers because said developers didn't like the outcome. (I know that this isn't a neutral phrasing, but it's the perception I'm talking about...). Once it's shown that some group is willing and able to change the rules to avoid losing, trusting that they won't do it again seems naive.
- tfha 9y ago
  People who believe that ethereum is technically superior have not studied cryptocurrencies in depth. Ethereum made a lot of reckless design decisions, trading long term stability and security for advantages that only exist over bitcoin in the short term. Their short block time is a sloppy choice. Their focus on gpu mining is a boneheaded mistake. Their scripting system is embarrassing. Proof of stake is nonviable. Multiple clients invites large scale network forks like the spurious dragon update disaster. Their code is garbage and won't scale.
  - bpicolo 9y ago
    > Their focus on gpu mining is a boneheaded mistake Better to leave random warehouses in China to control the entire pool? How does supporting asics matter in the least other than making it less accessible?
    - russelldc 9y ago
      If any government wanted to take down a CPU or GPU based cryptocurrency, they could accomplish a 51% attack in no time. Gathering or manufacturing ASICs would be a longer, harder, more obvious process.
      - ryanmarsh 9y ago
        Gathering or manufacturing ASICs would be a longer, harder, more obvious process. In the short term, true. The same could have been said of integrated circuits at one point. ASIC manufacturing will become cheaper and easier.
xvilka 9y ago
I think from relatively new currencies NEO [1] looks one of the most interesting, fixed many problems of Bitcoin and Ethereum [1] https://neo.org/ https://neo.org/
- splintercell 9y ago
  Please mention the 'many problems' in some technical capacity, otherwise you're just spamming.
VMG 9y ago
> Other technically superior cryptocurrencies > Ethereum LOL
drzaiusapelord 9y ago
>but has now become just a store of value entirely driven by speculation. and that's why its going to survive. Its a bit like the fine art market. Why are the wealthy buying $20m dollar paintings? Because in 5 years it goes to auction for $25m. Now whether "survive" means anything more than being the preferred currency of illegal dealings and ransomware is the big question. I suspect bitcoin has found its market niche and will stay here as-is. Fiat currency will be as strong as ever and the social and political aspects of cryptocurrency have pretty much failed outside of these tiny use cases. I see it a bit like the Commodore 64 from the 80s. It wasn't the best home computer, but it was cheap and passable and lasted far longer than anyone should have rightfully assumed. "Good" tech doesn't always win, say the way the Amiga never took off like the C64 did. Sometimes we get stuck with "bad" tech for a while.
tudorconstantin 9y ago
Bitcoin's value is given by the trust people put in it. Just like with the fiat currencies as a matter of fact, because I don't know of any of them to be backed by anything else than trust. Of course, the US dollar has the whole US economy and the biggest army in the world as its plus, but it also has its minuses: the US treasury can and does print as many as it wants, in the detriment of ALL USD holders. Bitcoin's pluses when comparing it to other crypto currencies are: - the first to market advantage - almost 9 years of virtually 0 hacks of the protocol or concept - no sudden moves - the whole ecosystem that formed around it - etc. Let's not forget - ETH is less than 3 years old, Ripple is centralized, Litecoin, zCash, Monero and most of the others are bitcoin forks.
- LyndsySimon 9y ago
  > Litecoin, zCash, Monero and most of the others are bitcoin forks. Nope. All of these are derivatives of Bitcoin, but none of them are forks. A fork, by definition, shares a genesis block with the parent currency. This is in contrast to a "client fork", where the Bitcoin codebase was modified to create a new blockchain with or without changes in protocol. Most forks of Bitcoin have been intentional, and the "lesser" chain has died on purpose. Off the top of my head, existing forks are: BitcoinXT: created in late 2014, it allowed 8MB blocks instead of the 1MB limit for Bitcoin. As of mid-2016, it died due to lack of miner support. Bitcoin Classic: created in early 2016, it allowed 2MB blocks. It was effectively dead as of early 2017. Bitcoin Cash (a/k/a BCash, BCH): created in August 2017. It eschewed SegWit, and increased block size to 8MB. It's not dead yet and seems to have a base level of support both in terms of miners and in terms of price. I expect that it will die eventually... but who knows. It is by far the best-supported Bitcoin fork, and there are many who believe that it's the "real Bitcoin" in the sense that it conforms more closely to the original whitepaper. There are a couple of other forks planned in the near future as well.
  - eigenvalue 9y ago
    I believe the parent poster meant fork in the sense of forking the codebase, not a currency fork. And in the case of Litecoin at least, that is true.
ryanmarsh 9y ago
Other technically superior cryptocurrencies... VHS vs. Betamax
swalsh 9y ago
I keep thinking about investing again, but I have a rule about investments. If I can't come up with a reasonable story to explain why supply and demand are the way they are. I don't invest. I can explain the supply side part... but the demand here baffles me. The best explanation I can come up with is "this thing is rising in price like a rocket, maybe I'll make some money" That's not a good reason to invest in my opinion. Good gamble though.
- dleslie 9y ago
  At this point, the demand for bitcoin is driven primarily by its value; anyone acquiring it with the intent to use it in transactions is being foolish. Almost certainly they would be better off holding the BTC and processing the transaction with another currency.
  - Vadoff 9y ago
    Why would that matter? If you buy something with $100 instead of buying it with bitcoin, that's $100 less you could've put into bitcoin. Or thinking about it another way, if you spend bitcoin and feel like you have less than you'd like to hold, you can simply buy more.
  - gburt 9y ago
    Without making any judgement on whether it is a useful transactional "currency," I hear this sort of thing a lot, but I don't understand it. Surely either BTC is a good transaction mechanism or it isn't and the rampant increase in value is largely irrelevant. You could convert USD to BTC and buy something while maintaining exactly the same held balance, no?
    - dleslie 9y ago
      You're holding two currencies, one loses about 2.5% of its value a year, the other gains about 1500% (some huge factor) of its value in that same period. Which one do you purchase the coffee with? The one that's losing value as you hold it, or the one that's going gangbusters?
sna1l 9y ago
There are DApp currencies which have better scaling solutions in place already vs Ethereum. I think you are heavily discounting the first mover advantage. I think a lot of the price movement is speculation, but a lot of it is new institutional investors investing in bitcoin. Ask most people who are new investors in BTC if they've heard of ETH, I bet it isn't as large of a proportion as you'd think. People are betting on the future of BTC being greater than it is currently, not about its current value.
- CryptoPunk 9y ago
  >>There are DApp currencies which have better scaling solutions in place already vs Ethereum. Like what? The only competitors to Ethereum are totally unviable as decentralized systems and sustained solely on hype and misinformation. They are also either not released or have less than 1% of the tx volume of Ethereum. Ethereum also has a very aggressive and well developed scaling roadmap.
nikolay 9y ago
Yeah, imagine using Netscape in 2017 and not Chrome - that's pretty much how I look at Bitcoin. The anarchists say how important Bitcoin is, yet, all they care is its fiat exchange ratio as all they care about - cash out their stash in fiat just right before it starts dropping in a get-rich-quick pipe dream.
- mbrock 9y ago
  Are you talking about any specific "anarchists"?
  - nikolay 9y ago
    Well, those who express a pathological fear of governments, control, and so on.
    - CryptoPunk 9y ago
      It's not only anarchists that fear government control over private life (mass surveillance, the erosion of privacy and contract rights, economic centralization through regulatory barriers to entry and gatekeeping, etc are valid concerns that many have).
turkeytotal 9y ago
> Notice how almost all news of Bitcoin now are about its price. Bitcoin used to be exciting in both technical and economical aspects, but has now become just a store of value entirely driven by speculation. Citation needed. >Other technically superior cryptocurrencies (e.g. Monero, Ethereum) have replaced most of its usecases, boasting much faster and cheaper transactions and real anonymity in the case of Monero. Citation needed. > it has little uses outside of being worth a lot of money. Citation needed.
deletia 9y ago
> It may or may not continue to increase in value long-term, but it has little uses outside of being worth a lot of money. So at worst: bitcoin > gold?
googletazer 9y ago
>but it has little uses outside of being worth a lot of money. Absolutely, yet being a store of wealth is a use case in itself. Technically bitcoin is eclipsed by Ethereum (capability wise) and Monero (privacy wise)
fermienrico 9y ago
Bitcoin is a currency. Why shouldn't a currency not have more articles about its price? I don't understand where you're going with this argument. There is plenty of technical information about bitcoin. Bitcoin has spawned an overwhelming amount of technical discussion with regards to blockchain. > It may or may not continue to increase in value long-term, but it has little uses outside of being worth a lot of money. It is a form of currency. What uses are you thinking? Bitcoin popularized blockchain technology. I really don't understand your criticism of Bitcoin.
deevolution 9y ago
It's definitely due to network effects. Bitcoin Is the most popular cryptocurrency. Ask the average person about cryptocurrency and they will immediately think bitcoin. The technical subtleties between different cryptocurrencies aren't well known to the average non-technical crypto investor.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

dcdanko 9y ago

It's shopworn but good tech doesn't always win. Bitcoin has a big(ish) network of users and a proven codebase. The decentralized nature of blockchains means that they're hard for individual corporations to control and profit from. That hampers adoption of new closed cryptocurrencies (not Monero or Ethereum though) but can serve as a powerful public utility.

wallace_f 9y ago
This is an interesting line of thought: bitcoin has no intrinsic value--its price represents a supply and demand equillibrium for a (1) money, that is (2) pseudonymous, and (3) not a government currency. If other CCs can offer 2, 3 equally well, the price premium must be due to something different about 1--how well it performs the functions of money. Is it a better Store of Value? How much better of a Medium of Exchange is it, and is it worth the premium? As far as I can tell from my napkin analysis, I would guess that bitcoin appears to be in a pretty speculative bubble. This is assuming Ethereum, and other CCs, are equally capable of fulfilling the functions of bitcoin.
- dcdanko 9y ago
  Personally I think that the value of (1) Money is extremely dependent on proven track record and the network size. Since the value of (2) and (3) are dependent on (1) I think this has outsize importance. Though as programmers I think we tend to underestimate this value. Not to say Bitcoin isn't in a speculative bubble, who knows? Aside: I don't know if it's fair to call bitcoin pseudonymous. Tumblers mean that one can effectively obscure their transactions if that's their goal, pseudo-pseudonymous if you will.
- LyndsySimon 9y ago
  > This is an interesting line of thought: bitcoin has no intrinsic value--its price represents a supply and demand equillibrium for a (1) money, that is (2) pseudonymous, and (3) not a government currency. I agree with this completely, but think there are a few other factors that will matter in the future but have not yet become widely used. The relative importance of all of these factors has changed over time and will continue to change in the future. > As far as I can tell from my napkin analysis, I would guess that bitcoin appears to be in a pretty speculative bubble. Again, I agree. Every time the price of Bitcoin has gone up a great deal in a short time, it's been a bubble caused by speculation or by a new wave of people joining for the first time. Every time that's happened, the bubble has burst. Every time the bubble has burst, it's bottomed out at a level significantly higher than the previous baseline, and every time it's bottomed out it the price has stabilized and ultimately recovered. If you want to day trade, now is probably a great time to get in - assuming we're still on the way up. If you're wanting to hold long-term, then the safest time to buy will be as soon as the price stabilizes after the next pop. As for me... I buy on a regular basis without regard to the price. I'm something of a "true believer" though, and don't expect to ever sell my entire holdings again.

tom_mellior 9y ago

> (e.g. Monero, Ethereum) have replaced most of its usecases I use Bitcoin from time to time to order food and buy other stuff online (sometimes through gift cards bought with Bitcoin). It's tough enough to find sites that accept Bitcoin, but I don't think I've ever seen one that accepted Monero or Ethereum. Maybe Litecoin a few years back. I admit that I haven't searched, but I would have expected a correlation with Bitcoin-accepting sites. So if it's not buying stuff, what use cases do you have in mind?

Casseres 9y ago
Ideally Monero would replace Bitcoin when buying things. Monero is more like cash than Bitcoin is. Unlike Bitcoin, paying with Monero doesn't immediately give away your balance and transaction history. Monero would also be better suited because it has lower fees that will get even lower as the dynamic block size increases. And because of the dynamic blocksize, you won't have to wait forever to confirm that you sent payment for a cup of coffee or whatever. If you're interested in adopting Monero, but still need to be able to pay in Bitcoin occasionally, you can use a service like www.XMR.to
- nadam 9y ago
  Monero has potential, but I have found DASH to be the currency that has the biggest potential to replace Bitcoin when buying things. It has high throughput, privateSend, instaSend, decentralized governance, treasury system, they are focusing on UX, and I find some of the 'leaders' very talented (like Ryan Taylor).
  - nosuchthing 9y ago
    DASH, aka Darkcoin, should be avoided - in the first two days the developer printed "1.9 million coins" or 10% of the supply.
- Geee 9y ago
  Monero's scalability is even harder to solve than Bitcoin's I think. Perfect coin should be private and scalable. There isn't one yet, expect maybe Byteball's blackbytes.

rb808 9y ago

> has little uses outside of being worth a lot of money. Right on the button. Make a lot of money, keep buying, everyone is happy.

ogig 9y ago

> (..), but [bitcoin] it has little uses outside of being worth a lot of money. I keep reading this and sounds false to me. Why do you ignore the illegal drugs market? Lots of people uses bitcoin daily to buy and sell substances. You might have a moral opinion about that fact, but it remains true. You might think it's a small, or temporary market, but I disagree based on the history of humans and drugs use. While I don't fully disagree that speculation might be the main drive of the price, let's not forget that the are some real, big, uses of bitcoin.

nikcub 9y ago

> boasting much faster and cheaper transactions and real anonymity Cost me over $4 to send Monero transactions last month. Cost me about $3 to send a Bitcoin transaction this morning. The average and median transaction fees between the two networks have been pretty close for a while I like Monero but it has some way to go - it needs a light client, multisig completed, and hasn't really had to confront any scaling issues yet (already at 30GB+ blockchain with 4-5k transactions per day). At the same time the other cryptos are progressing rapidly on the one huge advantage Monero has - Ethereum has added zk-SNARKs and there are all sorts of proposals and developments on Bitcoin now that malleability has been addressed and the new opcodes added edit: also re: Bitcoin News - most of what I read is about the ongoing Segwit2x saga, but it's a bit difficult to avoid the price when it is on such a tear

john_alan 9y ago
A) XMR Tx set to low priority will usually ship in next block (within 2 mins) with 5 ring size at fee of 30cent. Not sure what you were doing. B) ZKSnarks will never deprecate XMR, they bring the caveats of trusted being required, inability to audit coin supply and inherently DO NOT provide fungibility. It’s no wonder xmr price is in the doldrums. Even the smart guys on HN are misinformed about it.
- DennisP 9y ago
  Fwiw, ring signatures are also getting implemented on Ethereum. (But I do think Monero makes a good case for their "mandatory privacy" stance.)
  - john_alan 9y ago
    Yup. Eth is good, ring on eth will not provide transactional privacy though.
nikolay 9y ago
I see hundreds of my friends sending money free with Venmo each month. I know nobody having any slightest interest in Bitcoin or the likes. Once in a while, somebody would ask me if it makes sense for them to invest some cash into Bitcoin as they've heard about some crazy growth, but when I explain to them some, they all decide it's too risky, and those who are the anarchist type stick to gold.

randallsquared 9y ago

As someone who has no stake in any of these, it seems to me that Ethereum has a big PR problem no matter how technically superior it is: it's inextricably tied to the story about the DAO, where those who played the game by the rules had their Ethereum redistributed by the developers because said developers didn't like the outcome. (I know that this isn't a neutral phrasing, but it's the perception I'm talking about...). Once it's shown that some group is willing and able to change the rules to avoid losing, trusting that they won't do it again seems naive.

tfha 9y ago
People who believe that ethereum is technically superior have not studied cryptocurrencies in depth. Ethereum made a lot of reckless design decisions, trading long term stability and security for advantages that only exist over bitcoin in the short term. Their short block time is a sloppy choice. Their focus on gpu mining is a boneheaded mistake. Their scripting system is embarrassing. Proof of stake is nonviable. Multiple clients invites large scale network forks like the spurious dragon update disaster. Their code is garbage and won't scale.
- bpicolo 9y ago
  > Their focus on gpu mining is a boneheaded mistake Better to leave random warehouses in China to control the entire pool? How does supporting asics matter in the least other than making it less accessible?
  - russelldc 9y ago
    If any government wanted to take down a CPU or GPU based cryptocurrency, they could accomplish a 51% attack in no time. Gathering or manufacturing ASICs would be a longer, harder, more obvious process.
    - ryanmarsh 9y ago
      Gathering or manufacturing ASICs would be a longer, harder, more obvious process. In the short term, true. The same could have been said of integrated circuits at one point. ASIC manufacturing will become cheaper and easier.

xvilka 9y ago

I think from relatively new currencies NEO [1] looks one of the most interesting, fixed many problems of Bitcoin and Ethereum [1] https://neo.org/ https://neo.org/

splintercell 9y ago
Please mention the 'many problems' in some technical capacity, otherwise you're just spamming.

VMG 9y ago

> Other technically superior cryptocurrencies > Ethereum LOL

drzaiusapelord 9y ago

>but has now become just a store of value entirely driven by speculation. and that's why its going to survive. Its a bit like the fine art market. Why are the wealthy buying $20m dollar paintings? Because in 5 years it goes to auction for $25m. Now whether "survive" means anything more than being the preferred currency of illegal dealings and ransomware is the big question. I suspect bitcoin has found its market niche and will stay here as-is. Fiat currency will be as strong as ever and the social and political aspects of cryptocurrency have pretty much failed outside of these tiny use cases. I see it a bit like the Commodore 64 from the 80s. It wasn't the best home computer, but it was cheap and passable and lasted far longer than anyone should have rightfully assumed. "Good" tech doesn't always win, say the way the Amiga never took off like the C64 did. Sometimes we get stuck with "bad" tech for a while.

tudorconstantin 9y ago

Bitcoin's value is given by the trust people put in it. Just like with the fiat currencies as a matter of fact, because I don't know of any of them to be backed by anything else than trust. Of course, the US dollar has the whole US economy and the biggest army in the world as its plus, but it also has its minuses: the US treasury can and does print as many as it wants, in the detriment of ALL USD holders. Bitcoin's pluses when comparing it to other crypto currencies are: - the first to market advantage - almost 9 years of virtually 0 hacks of the protocol or concept - no sudden moves - the whole ecosystem that formed around it - etc. Let's not forget - ETH is less than 3 years old, Ripple is centralized, Litecoin, zCash, Monero and most of the others are bitcoin forks.

LyndsySimon 9y ago
> Litecoin, zCash, Monero and most of the others are bitcoin forks. Nope. All of these are derivatives of Bitcoin, but none of them are forks. A fork, by definition, shares a genesis block with the parent currency. This is in contrast to a "client fork", where the Bitcoin codebase was modified to create a new blockchain with or without changes in protocol. Most forks of Bitcoin have been intentional, and the "lesser" chain has died on purpose. Off the top of my head, existing forks are: BitcoinXT: created in late 2014, it allowed 8MB blocks instead of the 1MB limit for Bitcoin. As of mid-2016, it died due to lack of miner support. Bitcoin Classic: created in early 2016, it allowed 2MB blocks. It was effectively dead as of early 2017. Bitcoin Cash (a/k/a BCash, BCH): created in August 2017. It eschewed SegWit, and increased block size to 8MB. It's not dead yet and seems to have a base level of support both in terms of miners and in terms of price. I expect that it will die eventually... but who knows. It is by far the best-supported Bitcoin fork, and there are many who believe that it's the "real Bitcoin" in the sense that it conforms more closely to the original whitepaper. There are a couple of other forks planned in the near future as well.
- eigenvalue 9y ago
  I believe the parent poster meant fork in the sense of forking the codebase, not a currency fork. And in the case of Litecoin at least, that is true.

ryanmarsh 9y ago

Other technically superior cryptocurrencies... VHS vs. Betamax

swalsh 9y ago

I keep thinking about investing again, but I have a rule about investments. If I can't come up with a reasonable story to explain why supply and demand are the way they are. I don't invest. I can explain the supply side part... but the demand here baffles me. The best explanation I can come up with is "this thing is rising in price like a rocket, maybe I'll make some money" That's not a good reason to invest in my opinion. Good gamble though.

dleslie 9y ago
At this point, the demand for bitcoin is driven primarily by its value; anyone acquiring it with the intent to use it in transactions is being foolish. Almost certainly they would be better off holding the BTC and processing the transaction with another currency.
- Vadoff 9y ago
  Why would that matter? If you buy something with $100 instead of buying it with bitcoin, that's $100 less you could've put into bitcoin. Or thinking about it another way, if you spend bitcoin and feel like you have less than you'd like to hold, you can simply buy more.
- gburt 9y ago
  Without making any judgement on whether it is a useful transactional "currency," I hear this sort of thing a lot, but I don't understand it. Surely either BTC is a good transaction mechanism or it isn't and the rampant increase in value is largely irrelevant. You could convert USD to BTC and buy something while maintaining exactly the same held balance, no?
  - dleslie 9y ago
    You're holding two currencies, one loses about 2.5% of its value a year, the other gains about 1500% (some huge factor) of its value in that same period. Which one do you purchase the coffee with? The one that's losing value as you hold it, or the one that's going gangbusters?

sna1l 9y ago

There are DApp currencies which have better scaling solutions in place already vs Ethereum. I think you are heavily discounting the first mover advantage. I think a lot of the price movement is speculation, but a lot of it is new institutional investors investing in bitcoin. Ask most people who are new investors in BTC if they've heard of ETH, I bet it isn't as large of a proportion as you'd think. People are betting on the future of BTC being greater than it is currently, not about its current value.

CryptoPunk 9y ago
>>There are DApp currencies which have better scaling solutions in place already vs Ethereum. Like what? The only competitors to Ethereum are totally unviable as decentralized systems and sustained solely on hype and misinformation. They are also either not released or have less than 1% of the tx volume of Ethereum. Ethereum also has a very aggressive and well developed scaling roadmap.

nikolay 9y ago

Yeah, imagine using Netscape in 2017 and not Chrome - that's pretty much how I look at Bitcoin. The anarchists say how important Bitcoin is, yet, all they care is its fiat exchange ratio as all they care about - cash out their stash in fiat just right before it starts dropping in a get-rich-quick pipe dream.

mbrock 9y ago
Are you talking about any specific "anarchists"?
- nikolay 9y ago
  Well, those who express a pathological fear of governments, control, and so on.
  - CryptoPunk 9y ago
    It's not only anarchists that fear government control over private life (mass surveillance, the erosion of privacy and contract rights, economic centralization through regulatory barriers to entry and gatekeeping, etc are valid concerns that many have).

turkeytotal 9y ago

> Notice how almost all news of Bitcoin now are about its price. Bitcoin used to be exciting in both technical and economical aspects, but has now become just a store of value entirely driven by speculation. Citation needed. >Other technically superior cryptocurrencies (e.g. Monero, Ethereum) have replaced most of its usecases, boasting much faster and cheaper transactions and real anonymity in the case of Monero. Citation needed. > it has little uses outside of being worth a lot of money. Citation needed.

deletia 9y ago

> It may or may not continue to increase in value long-term, but it has little uses outside of being worth a lot of money. So at worst: bitcoin > gold?

googletazer 9y ago

>but it has little uses outside of being worth a lot of money. Absolutely, yet being a store of wealth is a use case in itself. Technically bitcoin is eclipsed by Ethereum (capability wise) and Monero (privacy wise)

fermienrico 9y ago

Bitcoin is a currency. Why shouldn't a currency not have more articles about its price? I don't understand where you're going with this argument. There is plenty of technical information about bitcoin. Bitcoin has spawned an overwhelming amount of technical discussion with regards to blockchain. > It may or may not continue to increase in value long-term, but it has little uses outside of being worth a lot of money. It is a form of currency. What uses are you thinking? Bitcoin popularized blockchain technology. I really don't understand your criticism of Bitcoin.

deevolution 9y ago

It's definitely due to network effects. Bitcoin Is the most popular cryptocurrency. Ask the average person about cryptocurrency and they will immediately think bitcoin. The technical subtleties between different cryptocurrencies aren't well known to the average non-technical crypto investor.