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This reads a bit like the sort of things people say when breaking up so as not to upset the other person too much. You're a great person, but you're just more o

This reads a bit like the sort of things people say when breaking up so as not to upset the other person too much. You're a great person, but you're just more of an asset than a medium of exchange, and what I need in my life right now is a medium of exchange. What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? That is not a purely rhetorical question; cryptocurrencies change things a lot. But this news is worrying.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
chocolatebunny 9y ago
Bitcoin is definitely acting more like an asset than a medium of exchange, and yeah, I don't see why it would hold any value if it's treated like an asset. But as soon as people realize that then it should go back to being a medium of exchange and then it'll hold value again as an asset? Either way, just because Bitcoin isn't functioning correctly doesn't mean that all cryptocurrencies are not. But I guess at the moment it seems like everyone would rather hoard cryptocurrencies than actually use them for their intended purpose.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Bitcoin is functioning exactly as designed. Satoshi planned for this; it's in the whitepaper. Most people just don't like the idea of Satoshi's endgame vision. But it's working as intended.
  - tedunangst 9y ago
    Can you highlight the part of the white paper you're referring to? https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
    - sillysaurus3 9y ago
      "The incentive can also be funded with transaction fees. If the output value of a transaction is less than its input value, the difference is a transaction fee that is added to the incentive value of the block containing the transaction. Once a predetermined number of coins have entered circulation, the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees and be completely inflation free." It's the design, folks. Read the paper and think about what it's saying. Satoshi was acutely aware that 1MB blocks could only encode a couple thousand transactions. So what do you think "the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees" means in practice? Not a <$100 fee, that's for sure.
      - criddell 9y ago
        Of legacy electronics payment systems and their need to be mediator, Satoshi says this: > The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions If enabling small casual transactions was one of the goals, then they've failed terribly on that point.
        sillysaurus3 9y ago
        BS. Bitcoin had small casual transactions up until recently. It was one of its main selling points. Again, people don't like Satoshi's endgame vision. This is working as designed. Bitcoin was designed to evolve into this. It was not intended to stay static; it's in the whitepaper. Break out of the groupthink. It's worth realizing when everyone around you is being irrational.
        criddell 9y ago
        Satoshi expected Bitcoin to scale to Visa-levels of 100 million transactions per day. He expected the cost of a transaction to be less than Visa forever, not just while nobody was using it.
        sillysaurus3 9y ago
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - aaron-santos 9y ago
    > A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Is your argument that Stripe is acting as a financial institution or that their exit as a middle man is inches us closer to a peer-to-peer system?
- prostoalex 9y ago
  One side effect is that stores of value tend to have smaller and more expensive infrastructures than media of exchange. People are hoarding, so there are fewer transactions. Miners still need to pay the bills somehow, so transaction fees are likely to increase. With fewer transactions the price discovery mechanisms, i.e. exchanges, are now somewhat illusory due to thin trading volume (not like BTC exchanges were the paragon of transparency before). Unlike NYSE or Nasdaq, which support trading lithium or platinum ETFs but also make money from other sources (just in case precious metals themselves don't bring in much revenue today), Bitcoin exchanges are heavily concentrated on Bitcoin, and even the ones that support expansive lists of cryptocurrencies generally peg it to BTC, not USD. So now that exchanges are not such a swell business, this will lead to a wave of consolidation, reduced price discovery and higher fees/commissions to transact.
  - davmar 9y ago
    your assertions about fees is exactly backwards. if there are fewer transactions, the fees go down. each block has a finite number of transactions it can include, so to get yours included you attach a fee. therefore, increased demand increases the fees and visa-versa.
- clarkmoody 9y ago
  > Bitcoin isn't functioning correctly Please unpack this statement. Which part of the Bitcoin system is functioning incorrectly?
  - jnbiche 9y ago
    > Please unpack this statement. Which part of the Bitcoin system is functioning incorrectly? The payment system part. One of the main reasons why Satoshi created Bitcoin in the first place. As someone who got into Bitcoin in early 2011 (but left when things got crazy around 2014), it's utterly laughable to me that Bitcoin now can't even be used as a payment system. And that the fees per transaction are roughly the same as international wire transfer fees. The Bitcoin dev team well and good shot itself in the foot by refusing the raise the block size limit. The only good thing to come out of Bitcoin recently is the Bitcoin Cash fork, who showed that the sky doesn't fall when you raise the limit to a reasonable size, and that this does take care of the current scaling and fees issues (Bitcoin Cash transfers are both reasonably quick and affordable, like Bitcoin of old).
    - carlosthedwarf 9y ago
      But isn't increasing the block size limit still just a temporary fix? Wouldn't Bitcoin Cash also be rendered useless as a payment system if it was handling a similar volume of transactions as bitcoin?
      - jnbiche 9y ago
        Arguably not. Based on testing, they're able to handle up to 25 tx/sec without any problems now, compared to Bitcoin struggling with only 5 to 10 tx/sec. And they have only a 8MB block limit currently, but are only using a small fraction of that on most blocks. And they have plenty of room to expand, given that a 10 terabyte hard drive is only a few hundred dollars now. I'm still incredulous that Bitcoin has resisted changing to block size limit for so long, given that it was only a security measured Satoshi implemented a year into Bitcoin's life, not only kind of fundamental design feature. I rarely use Internet acronyms, but, smh....
viach 9y ago
> What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? The same as gold does?
- opportune 9y ago
  Or lead
  - viach 9y ago
    Gold is rare, lead isn't
  - bradleyjg 9y ago
    Lead is useful. Even gold is somewhat useful. Bitcoin is an asset that’s neither productive (stocks, bonds, land) nor useful (oil, wheat, lead). That’s quite unusual.
    - sowbug 9y ago
      Its utility is as a medium of exchange whose transactions are faster and cheaper than any other scarce asset.* *Rewrite in past tense or read circa 2015.
    - viach 9y ago
      You can buy Bitcoin worth 50k USD in one country, cross the border and sell it in another, with no documents required . This is useful for a subset of people .
      - bradleyjg 9y ago
        Not sure exactly what you mean by no documents required. You need to find some way to get money to the seller when you are in country A and the buyer needs to the same for you in country B. There is no reason that same pair of transactions could not have occurred with British bonds.
        9y ago
geofft 9y ago
My reading of this post is that Stripe has no particular love for Bitcoin, but wants to avoid the ire of the Bitcoin fans on the internet, and so it's coated in "Bitcoin is great, we were the first people to adopt it, we can't criticize it at all" etc. etc.
- pc 9y ago
  Stripe cofounder here. I think you're reading too much into it. We do think Bitcoin is cool. We're just trying to be as plainspoken and clear as possible about why we're doing what we're doing.
  - bartozone 9y ago
    Do you see yourself picking up another cryptocurrency in the future? One that isn't just an asset to be held but was accepted as a form of payment on a larger scale?
    - schoen 9y ago
      The original post mentions Lightning, OmiseGO, Ethereum, Stellar, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and "Bitcoin itself" as future possibilities that they might be interested in implementing support for.
    - batbomb 9y ago
      Why stop there? Why not allow people to pay with stocks and stock options?
      - jerguismi 9y ago
        How easy it is to accept stocks as a payment compared to cryptocurrencies? How easy it is to send stocks to some other person?
  - hitekker 9y ago
    I found the blogpost to be genuine, as far as corporate statements goes. In my opinion, the intimations of a "bad breakup" and of festering resentment, are grounded more in the cryptocurrency-community's insecurities than anything specific to Stripe.
umurkontaci 9y ago
Store value / Investment. You can buy gold, stocks, foreign currencies as means of investment. You can't pay your restaurant bill with them but that doesn't mean they don't have a future.
- mamon 9y ago
  Gold, unilike Bitcoin, cannot be forked overnight with minimal effort, which makes gold much better store of value.
  - Balero 9y ago
    I don't see how this is the case. Ok, so the Fork will have the same/similar technology behind it, and will be distributed to the same people at the beginning. But, it's not like it's being supplanted. Bitcoin will still be Bitcoin. I suppose the real world example would be to send an amount of copper to people with gold, it wouldn't change the value of the gold much. Bitcoin has many issues, but I don't see this as one.
  - sowbug 9y ago
    The network effects don't go along with the fork. Same if you copied and deployed Facebook's codebase on your own domain.
nulagrithom 9y ago
> What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? I look at it (maybe naively) like a solid gold bar. You're not going to walk in to a convenience store and pay with a bar of solid gold; you might flee the country with one though. Beyond that, I totally agree with your read on the post. Linking the pull request[0] was especially backhanded. It feels like there's some underlying frustration there that was expounded upon using good references and kind words. [0]: https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/bitcoin.org/pull/2010/files https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/bitcoin.org/pull/2010/fil...
- 0xcafecafe 9y ago
  Gold as a metal has an inherent value though. If not only for jewelry, it also has important uses in electronics. The value associated with bitcoin seems purely sentimental.
  - nxsynonym 9y ago
    This is why I hate the comparison of crypto to gold or any other "value asset'. Houses are lived in. Stocks act as a cashflow for companies. Even if the world economy collapses you can still use a solid gold bar as a blunt instrument to kill an animal and eat it. Cryptocurrencies have exactly 0 secondary uses.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - criddell 9y ago
      What's the secondary use of all the shares of AMZN one might have in their eTrade account? That's also just data, right?
      - throwaway2312 9y ago
        Those shares represent the stake in value of a corporation that exists in the real world with real services. Very very different than Bitcoin.
moduspol 9y ago
> What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? Lots of assets have value without people buying things with them. Gold, houses, stocks, etc. The more interesting question is how long Bitcoin will remain top dog merely as a store of value if other cryptocurrencies solve this on-chain / off-chain scaling problem better / faster. There's definitely some amount of value in the name alone, and some more in the security of the mining, but neither of those are unassailable.
- prostoalex 9y ago
  > Gold, houses, stocks, etc. With a caveat that houses and stocks can provide cashflow in terms of rent payments and dividends / option income.
  - pembrook 9y ago
    ...And gold is a physical commodity with both industrial and consumer product applications.
    - Goladus 9y ago
      ... and stocks are a legal claim to some percentage of the assets of a corporation. The only things that I can think of that are somewhat similar to cryptocurrency as a "store of value" are things like baseball cards.
      - notahacker 9y ago
        ...and even collectibles have some appreciable aesthetic qualities and enthusiast interest which exists independently of and generally strictly prior to speculators getting involved.
      - saalweachter 9y ago
        Baseball cards are propped up by nostalgia; you take away the nostalgia, and the value crumbles.
  - 9y ago
PMan74 9y ago
> What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? Not sure what you're getting at here? There are loads of assets that people don't buy stuff with e.g. gold, stocks, bonds, property, etc. Aside from cash I'd guess that the norm is for assets to be converted to cash before anything.
hamandcheese 9y ago
What other assets can you use for purchases?
oculusthrift 9y ago
do you buy stuff with gold??
digianarchist 9y ago
> This reads a bit like the sort of things people say when breaking up so as not to upset the other person too much. Probably wise considering Bitcoin's strange cultish following.
a13n 9y ago
I think they're being careful not to signal a negative sentiment towards crypto, because they're still bullish on crypto being the future of payment infra. Just bearish of BTC.
nikanj 9y ago
I never bought anything _with_ real estate, stocks or gold. I always traded them for fiat currency first.
- mathgeek 9y ago
  There are many people, especially on HN, that have traded stocks for many other assets without first exchanging them for fiat.
aaroninsf 9y ago
A thousand times this. "...we have both learned a lot and are richer for it, and can't wait to see how Bitcoin thrives in its new role..." Semantic judo at its finest.
Vadoff 9y ago
Just wait until LN is enabled.
clarkmoody 9y ago
> What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? Does gold have a future? Nobody buys anything with gold. Also, the Bitcoin blocks are full. Somebody is using it for something.
- rayvd 9y ago
  > Does gold have a future? Nobody buys anything with gold. As an asset or hedge against inflation. Not as a currency.
- UncleMeat 9y ago
  Why is everybody all suddenly so excited about gold? Maybe btc is modestly better gold. So? Who tells typical people to invest in gold other than foxnews and infowars? I own precisely zero dollars worth of gold. Why should I buy btc? Transactions are not always buying goods. If I transfer 1btc to somebody and then send me $10,000 there will be a transaction. But btc was not used as a currency to purchase a good here.
  - conanbatt 9y ago
    Because there are trillions of dollars in gold and only billions in bitcoin. If bitcoin just replaced gold as a store of value it would explode many-fold.
gist 9y ago
> What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? Real estate is an asset and you can't 'buy stuff' with it (other than a 1031 exchange in the US of course). It's an asset if there is a reasonable chance that someone else will buy it from you in the future for money which you can buy things with.
Lazare 9y ago
> What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? People don't buy stuff with gold, but it's been a viable store of value for a long time. That being said, the burden of proof to show that Bitcoin is going to be a viable store of value is simply enormous. Further, gold has a number of characteristics that make it fairly unique; nobody is running around saying "gold is great, but have you considered tantalum?". If you want to put a bunch of precious metal in a vault, gold is clearly a good default choice. Whereas Bitcoin is anything but unique now, and is not an obvious default choice.
nerdponx 9y ago
It's a death knell for the very first cryptocurrency, which its creator(s?) explicitly acknowledged was an experiment. Bitcoin is (hopefully soon-to-be) dead, long live cryptocurrency!
asdffdsa321 9y ago
"You know, you're more of an asset and I'm looking for a medium of exchange" That's a hell of a line to use when breaking up with someone
- dajohnson89 9y ago
  will use that and report back

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

chocolatebunny 9y ago

Bitcoin is definitely acting more like an asset than a medium of exchange, and yeah, I don't see why it would hold any value if it's treated like an asset. But as soon as people realize that then it should go back to being a medium of exchange and then it'll hold value again as an asset? Either way, just because Bitcoin isn't functioning correctly doesn't mean that all cryptocurrencies are not. But I guess at the moment it seems like everyone would rather hoard cryptocurrencies than actually use them for their intended purpose.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
Bitcoin is functioning exactly as designed. Satoshi planned for this; it's in the whitepaper. Most people just don't like the idea of Satoshi's endgame vision. But it's working as intended.
- tedunangst 9y ago
  Can you highlight the part of the white paper you're referring to? https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    "The incentive can also be funded with transaction fees. If the output value of a transaction is less than its input value, the difference is a transaction fee that is added to the incentive value of the block containing the transaction. Once a predetermined number of coins have entered circulation, the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees and be completely inflation free." It's the design, folks. Read the paper and think about what it's saying. Satoshi was acutely aware that 1MB blocks could only encode a couple thousand transactions. So what do you think "the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees" means in practice? Not a <$100 fee, that's for sure.
    - criddell 9y ago
      Of legacy electronics payment systems and their need to be mediator, Satoshi says this: > The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions If enabling small casual transactions was one of the goals, then they've failed terribly on that point.
      - sillysaurus3 9y ago
        BS. Bitcoin had small casual transactions up until recently. It was one of its main selling points. Again, people don't like Satoshi's endgame vision. This is working as designed. Bitcoin was designed to evolve into this. It was not intended to stay static; it's in the whitepaper. Break out of the groupthink. It's worth realizing when everyone around you is being irrational.
        criddell 9y ago
        Satoshi expected Bitcoin to scale to Visa-levels of 100 million transactions per day. He expected the cost of a transaction to be less than Visa forever, not just while nobody was using it.
        sillysaurus3 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- aaron-santos 9y ago
  > A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Is your argument that Stripe is acting as a financial institution or that their exit as a middle man is inches us closer to a peer-to-peer system?
prostoalex 9y ago
One side effect is that stores of value tend to have smaller and more expensive infrastructures than media of exchange. People are hoarding, so there are fewer transactions. Miners still need to pay the bills somehow, so transaction fees are likely to increase. With fewer transactions the price discovery mechanisms, i.e. exchanges, are now somewhat illusory due to thin trading volume (not like BTC exchanges were the paragon of transparency before). Unlike NYSE or Nasdaq, which support trading lithium or platinum ETFs but also make money from other sources (just in case precious metals themselves don't bring in much revenue today), Bitcoin exchanges are heavily concentrated on Bitcoin, and even the ones that support expansive lists of cryptocurrencies generally peg it to BTC, not USD. So now that exchanges are not such a swell business, this will lead to a wave of consolidation, reduced price discovery and higher fees/commissions to transact.
- davmar 9y ago
  your assertions about fees is exactly backwards. if there are fewer transactions, the fees go down. each block has a finite number of transactions it can include, so to get yours included you attach a fee. therefore, increased demand increases the fees and visa-versa.
clarkmoody 9y ago
> Bitcoin isn't functioning correctly Please unpack this statement. Which part of the Bitcoin system is functioning incorrectly?
- jnbiche 9y ago
  > Please unpack this statement. Which part of the Bitcoin system is functioning incorrectly? The payment system part. One of the main reasons why Satoshi created Bitcoin in the first place. As someone who got into Bitcoin in early 2011 (but left when things got crazy around 2014), it's utterly laughable to me that Bitcoin now can't even be used as a payment system. And that the fees per transaction are roughly the same as international wire transfer fees. The Bitcoin dev team well and good shot itself in the foot by refusing the raise the block size limit. The only good thing to come out of Bitcoin recently is the Bitcoin Cash fork, who showed that the sky doesn't fall when you raise the limit to a reasonable size, and that this does take care of the current scaling and fees issues (Bitcoin Cash transfers are both reasonably quick and affordable, like Bitcoin of old).
  - carlosthedwarf 9y ago
    But isn't increasing the block size limit still just a temporary fix? Wouldn't Bitcoin Cash also be rendered useless as a payment system if it was handling a similar volume of transactions as bitcoin?
    - jnbiche 9y ago
      Arguably not. Based on testing, they're able to handle up to 25 tx/sec without any problems now, compared to Bitcoin struggling with only 5 to 10 tx/sec. And they have only a 8MB block limit currently, but are only using a small fraction of that on most blocks. And they have plenty of room to expand, given that a 10 terabyte hard drive is only a few hundred dollars now. I'm still incredulous that Bitcoin has resisted changing to block size limit for so long, given that it was only a security measured Satoshi implemented a year into Bitcoin's life, not only kind of fundamental design feature. I rarely use Internet acronyms, but, smh....

viach 9y ago

> What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? The same as gold does?

opportune 9y ago
Or lead
- viach 9y ago
  Gold is rare, lead isn't
- bradleyjg 9y ago
  Lead is useful. Even gold is somewhat useful. Bitcoin is an asset that’s neither productive (stocks, bonds, land) nor useful (oil, wheat, lead). That’s quite unusual.
  - sowbug 9y ago
    Its utility is as a medium of exchange whose transactions are faster and cheaper than any other scarce asset.* *Rewrite in past tense or read circa 2015.
  - viach 9y ago
    You can buy Bitcoin worth 50k USD in one country, cross the border and sell it in another, with no documents required . This is useful for a subset of people .
    - bradleyjg 9y ago
      Not sure exactly what you mean by no documents required. You need to find some way to get money to the seller when you are in country A and the buyer needs to the same for you in country B. There is no reason that same pair of transactions could not have occurred with British bonds.
      - 9y ago

geofft 9y ago

My reading of this post is that Stripe has no particular love for Bitcoin, but wants to avoid the ire of the Bitcoin fans on the internet, and so it's coated in "Bitcoin is great, we were the first people to adopt it, we can't criticize it at all" etc. etc.

pc 9y ago
Stripe cofounder here. I think you're reading too much into it. We do think Bitcoin is cool. We're just trying to be as plainspoken and clear as possible about why we're doing what we're doing.
- bartozone 9y ago
  Do you see yourself picking up another cryptocurrency in the future? One that isn't just an asset to be held but was accepted as a form of payment on a larger scale?
  - schoen 9y ago
    The original post mentions Lightning, OmiseGO, Ethereum, Stellar, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, and "Bitcoin itself" as future possibilities that they might be interested in implementing support for.
  - batbomb 9y ago
    Why stop there? Why not allow people to pay with stocks and stock options?
    - jerguismi 9y ago
      How easy it is to accept stocks as a payment compared to cryptocurrencies? How easy it is to send stocks to some other person?
- hitekker 9y ago
  I found the blogpost to be genuine, as far as corporate statements goes. In my opinion, the intimations of a "bad breakup" and of festering resentment, are grounded more in the cryptocurrency-community's insecurities than anything specific to Stripe.

umurkontaci 9y ago

Store value / Investment. You can buy gold, stocks, foreign currencies as means of investment. You can't pay your restaurant bill with them but that doesn't mean they don't have a future.

mamon 9y ago
Gold, unilike Bitcoin, cannot be forked overnight with minimal effort, which makes gold much better store of value.
- Balero 9y ago
  I don't see how this is the case. Ok, so the Fork will have the same/similar technology behind it, and will be distributed to the same people at the beginning. But, it's not like it's being supplanted. Bitcoin will still be Bitcoin. I suppose the real world example would be to send an amount of copper to people with gold, it wouldn't change the value of the gold much. Bitcoin has many issues, but I don't see this as one.
- sowbug 9y ago
  The network effects don't go along with the fork. Same if you copied and deployed Facebook's codebase on your own domain.

nulagrithom 9y ago

> What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? I look at it (maybe naively) like a solid gold bar. You're not going to walk in to a convenience store and pay with a bar of solid gold; you might flee the country with one though. Beyond that, I totally agree with your read on the post. Linking the pull request[0] was especially backhanded. It feels like there's some underlying frustration there that was expounded upon using good references and kind words. [0]: https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/bitcoin.org/pull/2010/files https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/bitcoin.org/pull/2010/fil...

0xcafecafe 9y ago
Gold as a metal has an inherent value though. If not only for jewelry, it also has important uses in electronics. The value associated with bitcoin seems purely sentimental.
- nxsynonym 9y ago
  This is why I hate the comparison of crypto to gold or any other "value asset'. Houses are lived in. Stocks act as a cashflow for companies. Even if the world economy collapses you can still use a solid gold bar as a blunt instrument to kill an animal and eat it. Cryptocurrencies have exactly 0 secondary uses.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - criddell 9y ago
    What's the secondary use of all the shares of AMZN one might have in their eTrade account? That's also just data, right?
    - throwaway2312 9y ago
      Those shares represent the stake in value of a corporation that exists in the real world with real services. Very very different than Bitcoin.

moduspol 9y ago

> What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? Lots of assets have value without people buying things with them. Gold, houses, stocks, etc. The more interesting question is how long Bitcoin will remain top dog merely as a store of value if other cryptocurrencies solve this on-chain / off-chain scaling problem better / faster. There's definitely some amount of value in the name alone, and some more in the security of the mining, but neither of those are unassailable.

prostoalex 9y ago
> Gold, houses, stocks, etc. With a caveat that houses and stocks can provide cashflow in terms of rent payments and dividends / option income.
- pembrook 9y ago
  ...And gold is a physical commodity with both industrial and consumer product applications.
  - Goladus 9y ago
    ... and stocks are a legal claim to some percentage of the assets of a corporation. The only things that I can think of that are somewhat similar to cryptocurrency as a "store of value" are things like baseball cards.
    - notahacker 9y ago
      ...and even collectibles have some appreciable aesthetic qualities and enthusiast interest which exists independently of and generally strictly prior to speculators getting involved.
    - saalweachter 9y ago
      Baseball cards are propped up by nostalgia; you take away the nostalgia, and the value crumbles.
- 9y ago

PMan74 9y ago

> What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? Not sure what you're getting at here? There are loads of assets that people don't buy stuff with e.g. gold, stocks, bonds, property, etc. Aside from cash I'd guess that the norm is for assets to be converted to cash before anything.

hamandcheese 9y ago

What other assets can you use for purchases?

oculusthrift 9y ago

do you buy stuff with gold??

digianarchist 9y ago

> This reads a bit like the sort of things people say when breaking up so as not to upset the other person too much. Probably wise considering Bitcoin's strange cultish following.

a13n 9y ago

I think they're being careful not to signal a negative sentiment towards crypto, because they're still bullish on crypto being the future of payment infra. Just bearish of BTC.

nikanj 9y ago

I never bought anything _with_ real estate, stocks or gold. I always traded them for fiat currency first.

mathgeek 9y ago
There are many people, especially on HN, that have traded stocks for many other assets without first exchanging them for fiat.

aaroninsf 9y ago

A thousand times this. "...we have both learned a lot and are richer for it, and can't wait to see how Bitcoin thrives in its new role..." Semantic judo at its finest.

Vadoff 9y ago

Just wait until LN is enabled.

clarkmoody 9y ago

> What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? Does gold have a future? Nobody buys anything with gold. Also, the Bitcoin blocks are full. Somebody is using it for something.

rayvd 9y ago
> Does gold have a future? Nobody buys anything with gold. As an asset or hedge against inflation. Not as a currency.
UncleMeat 9y ago
Why is everybody all suddenly so excited about gold? Maybe btc is modestly better gold. So? Who tells typical people to invest in gold other than foxnews and infowars? I own precisely zero dollars worth of gold. Why should I buy btc? Transactions are not always buying goods. If I transfer 1btc to somebody and then send me $10,000 there will be a transaction. But btc was not used as a currency to purchase a good here.
- conanbatt 9y ago
  Because there are trillions of dollars in gold and only billions in bitcoin. If bitcoin just replaced gold as a store of value it would explode many-fold.

gist 9y ago

> What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? Real estate is an asset and you can't 'buy stuff' with it (other than a 1031 exchange in the US of course). It's an asset if there is a reasonable chance that someone else will buy it from you in the future for money which you can buy things with.

Lazare 9y ago

> What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? People don't buy stuff with gold, but it's been a viable store of value for a long time. That being said, the burden of proof to show that Bitcoin is going to be a viable store of value is simply enormous. Further, gold has a number of characteristics that make it fairly unique; nobody is running around saying "gold is great, but have you considered tantalum?". If you want to put a bunch of precious metal in a vault, gold is clearly a good default choice. Whereas Bitcoin is anything but unique now, and is not an obvious default choice.

nerdponx 9y ago

It's a death knell for the very first cryptocurrency, which its creator(s?) explicitly acknowledged was an experiment. Bitcoin is (hopefully soon-to-be) dead, long live cryptocurrency!

asdffdsa321 9y ago

"You know, you're more of an asset and I'm looking for a medium of exchange" That's a hell of a line to use when breaking up with someone

dajohnson89 9y ago
will use that and report back