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To that point, from the article: >“During the information technology bubble, we saw a rally in dot-com company shares. But at least at that time, there were pe

by rtpg 9y ago

To that point, from the article: >“During the information technology bubble, we saw a rally in dot-com company shares. But at least at that time, there were people using Yahoo or (Japanese internet firm) Rakuten -- people were using their services,” he said. >“But this time, I see quite a lot of people doing crypto-currency businesses in my circle of friends. But I hardly know anyone in person who is trading crypto-currencies and I haven’t seen anyone using them in real life,” he said. Google is a real thing. The impression from a lot of people isn't that Bitcoin is "actually" worthless, but that it's not currently being used in society in a way that validates the high numbers we're seeing. Shorter thesis: Bitcoin right now is fueling Bitcoin startups, but not much else. Google was search.

panarky 9y ago
In 2004, analysts and pundits acknowledged that Google had some utility, but they had great certainty that Google's potential was far too small to justify the valuation. Today, almost everyone accepts that the blockchain is a disruptive and valuable innovation and that cryptocurrencies have some utility -- just far too little to justify the valuation. They could be right. It's just not obvious to me that the potential isn't there, and I question how they can be so certain.
- rtpg 9y ago
  This might be more pedantic RE the comparison to Google, but there's a good subset of people who think that Bitcoin provides no value. I think there's a lot of interesting innovations in the space, but I can think of a lot of counterarguments to Bitcoin's "value". These are points I've heard... - distributed ledger: In practice, things that require ledgers also have a degree of trust between parties. They also usually are bound by contracts and laws. Enforcement power is necessary for ledgers to be useful - store of value: Many different securities exist with less volatility. Also I either store my value in exchanges I can't trust to stay solvent, or I am now hiding my BTC under my figurative couch and can't use it super easily. - Transaction mechanism: For small transactions, the mining fees are prohibitive and the speed's not great. For large transactions, banks work fine. Each transaction uses absurd amounts of energy I think the blockchain is interesting (smart contracts as a thin layer under "real" contracts), and can come up with theoretical use cases. But large-scale "real" usage needs to happen for a lot of these counter-arguments to become less compelling.

by rtpg 9y ago

panarky 9y ago

In 2004, analysts and pundits acknowledged that Google had some utility, but they had great certainty that Google's potential was far too small to justify the valuation. Today, almost everyone accepts that the blockchain is a disruptive and valuable innovation and that cryptocurrencies have some utility -- just far too little to justify the valuation. They could be right. It's just not obvious to me that the potential isn't there, and I question how they can be so certain.

rtpg 9y ago
This might be more pedantic RE the comparison to Google, but there's a good subset of people who think that Bitcoin provides no value. I think there's a lot of interesting innovations in the space, but I can think of a lot of counterarguments to Bitcoin's "value". These are points I've heard... - distributed ledger: In practice, things that require ledgers also have a degree of trust between parties. They also usually are bound by contracts and laws. Enforcement power is necessary for ledgers to be useful - store of value: Many different securities exist with less volatility. Also I either store my value in exchanges I can't trust to stay solvent, or I am now hiding my BTC under my figurative couch and can't use it super easily. - Transaction mechanism: For small transactions, the mining fees are prohibitive and the speed's not great. For large transactions, banks work fine. Each transaction uses absurd amounts of energy I think the blockchain is interesting (smart contracts as a thin layer under "real" contracts), and can come up with theoretical use cases. But large-scale "real" usage needs to happen for a lot of these counter-arguments to become less compelling.