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You'll notice the entire Bitcoin community has changed tone. It used to be "this is the currency of the future, down with cash/Visa!" but now you hear "Bitcoin

• phnofive 9y ago
  The goal posts will stop moving in time with the music.
• Kinnard 9y ago
  Actually there's been a vigorous enough debate happening in the community about how to fix some of these problems and how to move forward toward what Bitcoin will ultimately be that the community and blockchain split.
  • stingraycharles 9y ago
    Yes but these debates have been going on for years with very little progress being made. Bitcoin is growing faster than it can keep up with, it seems.
    • etr-strike 9y ago
      I mean, segwit was activated. That doubles the capacity of blocks. People just need to upgrade. Lightning Network is moving quickly. It is live on mainnet, tho still considered unstable. Schnorr signatures are in development. This will further compress transactions. Seems like progress is happening to me...
• jondubois 9y ago
  I don't see it as a store of value. It's just a very reliable network for sending very big transactions. If you send 1 million dollars in Bitcoin, a $20 fee is negligible - The reliability of the Bitcoin network makes it worth it. For smaller transactions you should just use a different coin.
  • lolc 9y ago
    The volatility affects all sizes of transactions in the same way. So sure, transactions with Bitcoin may be reliable. But converting them is not.
  • canoebuilder 9y ago
    If you're in good standing with the various governmental authorities, what are the scenarios that make it worthwhile to convert to some cryptocoin, "send a transaction," then convert back on the other end? There are traditional channels for sending money to various places, what do these extra steps get me? You may feel a $20 fee is negligible, how about a 1% price move? 10%? It's funny how often one sees these sort of high-dollar scenarios described for this "decentralized"! "currency of the people"! Like, sending million dollar wires is a fairly niche market, and to my knowledge people regularly engaging in such things seem to be getting along just fine, there not crying out desperately for a better solution. And how exactly is bitcoin better for doing this if your million dollar transactions don't consist of the spoils from an exchange hack, exit scam or the like? It's just a very reliable network for sending very big transactions. Do you think the traditional channels for sending million dollar wires are unreliable? This seems like an area where the market is likely to converge on the very most reliable options and any service provider in this area with even a hint of unreliability would rapidly fade away.
  • vkou 9y ago
    If you send 1 million dollars in bitcoin, the crazy volatility may mean that you only sent $950,000 by the time your transaction was confirmed. The bitcoin blockchain is a great way to transfer a fixed amount of bitcoin. It is an awful, awful way to transfer a fixed amount of wealth.
  • CaptainZapp 9y ago
    Unless your million $ is dirty you would be stupid to not use proper channels for the transfer. Beginning with a knock on the door and two gentlemen with badges asking why you transfer so much money over - well - unconventional channels.
  • QML 9y ago
    If it costs $20 to move a million dollars, then why not use a $30 wire transfer? The way I see it is that Bitcoin's advantage should be to move any amount of value across the internet for a low flat fee; anything less then the hassle of using the Bitcoin network outweighs the benefit.
• cohnnton 9y ago
  why would it be a (good) store of value? there are countless crytocurrencies. The only reason people think bitcoin is rare is a (blind) leap of faith
  • erikpukinskis 9y ago
    It’s the first and one of the simplest with the biggest brand. Those things matter somewhat.
• thevardanian 9y ago
  Thanks. But no thanks. Even as a store of value it's crappy because of the public ledger. I would rather have some semblance of privacy in terms of my wealth.
  • perseusprime11 9y ago
    It has become a store of value, and there is nothing wrong to see it as a new asset class because of the attention it has been getting. IMO, bitcoin will rise till it finds an equivalent place like gold. Because of the limit, the value of bitcoin can technically reach anywhere between 400K to a million dollars. If they really wanted to see this as a currency, you would never design this to have an upper bound. You cannot realistically support or even augment the world exonomy with just 21 million bitcoins.
    • coderdude 9y ago
      100,000,000 * 21,000,000 If bitcoin became the "world's currency" or whatever, you'd be using it at the satoshi level. Of course, at some point people would need a unit smaller than a satoshi.
    • thevardanian 9y ago
      Cool. What I'm saying is that it lacks privacy, and therefore is a poor store of value. As for it being a store of value akin to gold? I don't think so. For various reason, even disregarding the historicity, and the physical nature of gold, the primarily reason I think it won't be comparable to gold will be because of the nature of technology. That being the lack of long term, and I'm talking centuries, hell even a few decades out, type of stability, and I just don't see Bitcoin being stable for such a long period of time. Technologies improve, and fundamentally demand constant change,and so superior competitors will emerge. Hell if anything even a state sanctioned E-Coin system would obliterate Bitcoin. Fundamentally at this point Bitcoin is reliant on the network effect. As of even today the technology behind it is in constant flux, experimentation, and competition, what keeps bitcoin afloat is that it's a first mover, and a lot of people use it. The network effect is really a short term moat for most technologies, including Bitcoin, and as such it will not last long enough to be a Long Term store of value. So any sort of comparable "Long term store" of value in any comparable to gold is out of the question.
• LrnByTeach 9y ago
  >Bitcoin community has changed tone. > It used to be "this is the currency of the future, down with cash/Visa!" > but now you hear "Bitcoin is not a currency, it's a store of value".
• randomsearch 9y ago
  How does the volatility not make it a bad store of value?! Surely by definition that is exactly why it is a bad store of value!
  • jcranmer 9y ago
    But that would mean it's good for nothing except warming the planet!
    • mproud 9y ago
      It’s really sad that so much power will be wasted on mining Bitcoin.
  • dubin 9y ago
    “How can Bitcoin be a good store of value if its price is so volatile?” http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/12/can-bitcoin-good-store-value-price-volatile.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/12/can...
    • guitarbill 9y ago
      Quoting some articles does not an argument make. The summary argument: > Volatility is a feature of Bitcoin, not a bug, and that is in part for reasons that have nothing to do with speculation or bubbliness, but rather follow from the contours of the utility function. It’s that latter point that hardly anyone understands. I'd argue this is might be correct, but also irrelevant, as many people involved in bitcoin either wanted to use it as a payment method, or are only in it for speculation, or money laundering/covert transferring of wealth. How useful is a value store where it's very difficult to actually get the value out remains to be seen, or what effect such a realisation will have on the price.
  • xelxebar 9y ago
    I'm not intimately familiar with BTC prices, but they seem to have lots of high frequency volatility while the low frequency price changes are close to monotonic. If that's the case then it makes sense as a long term store of value.
• dragonwriter 9y ago
  > But as a store of value, none of those arguments apply. It only has to compete with gold bars, which are crappy in their own ways. There are lots of stores of value besides gold bars and Bitcoin; real estate, business equity, business and government debt instruments,...
• vkou 9y ago
  Gold bars don't require the electricity output of a small country to keep running. Although I suppose digging them up also has serious environmental consequences.
  • jameskegel 9y ago
    One might research the effects of cyanide byproducts from gold mining, and the lives lost harvesting it.
  • LASR 9y ago
    Mining gold is extremely expensive. And more environmental issues than just the waste of power. Gold processing uses cyanides and refining companies have in the past just dumped them anywhere. Also, the effort and energy goes into building and maintaining vaults for gold.
  • majewsky 9y ago
    This made me briefly consider the real-world environmental impact of the automated mining operation on my Minecraft server. :)
• headgasket 9y ago
  I think it's an organic reaction that makes a lot of sense. A distributed deflationary currency not run by any central authority is a dangerous concept. Another volatile store of value that might not be very liquid is a lot less dangerous. (Imagine cashing a 10th of the float, say) The forces of the status quo(or is it the invisible hand?) has responded to the threat, for now, by blowing this up to the stratosphere and making it impractical as a currency; it's even a better move than making it illegal. There will be more chapters to this, especially smart contracts. Interesting developments.
• simonsarris 9y ago
  Gold bars are only a store of value if they're in your possession. A gold bar in the hand is worth two in the bush as they say. To be a good store of value its not enough that it exists and people value it, you have to be able to call upon it when you need it. That's where its back to approximating currency, and where Bitcoin's weakest link seems to be. This is probably just the beginning of the bad news. King George used to lay claim to every pine in North America, to be called upon when he needed them for ship masts. For some reason or another he couldn't do that anymore. Historical examples abound, if you look for them, and they're not tulips: https://hackernoon.com/the-guns-of-bitcoin-1f779309a718 https://hackernoon.com/the-guns-of-bitcoin-1f779309a718 (disclaimer: I wrote that, which dances around a few historical reasons why bitcoin's value might not be so peachy)
• omarforgotpwd 9y ago
  Even a $1 bitcoin transaction costs $25 in TX fees to send. At least I can pick up a gold bar myself for free. And price volatility makes it a terrible store of value. Let’s face it: in its current state bitcoin is pretty much useless except if you hold it and the price goes up. I own some Bitcoin and plan on holding it but there’s no denying the software in its state is not usable for anything. If the devs could figure out how to make it work like Venmo, that would be absolutely huge. Perhaps another implementation will get it right first, or already has.