10 ms·

Bitcoin falls below $5,000

112 points by wil_I_am_27 8y ago

adamnemecek 8y ago
Crypto is going to come back with vengeance. Maybe not bitcoin and maybe not in the next 6 months, but people have seen the future and they want more. In order to maximize "exchange of value", there needs to be a way to exchange tiny amounts of money easily. Right now there isn't such a way and crypto might solve it.
- lbotos 8y ago
  > Crypto is going to come back with vengeance. Bold statement. > Right now there isn't such a way and crypto might solve it. weak support. Why do people need to exchange tiny amounts of money? EDIT for clarity: Why do people need Crypto to exchange tiny amounts of money?
  - mattdeboard 8y ago
    People already exchange tiny amounts of money. It's done through this cutting edge service called "banking." I think the implication of the GP's comment is that he considers blockchain/cryptocurrency tech a replacement for banking.
    - dlubarov 8y ago
      What banking service are you referring to? Credit networks, debit networks, ACH, something else? AFAIK none of them are practical for micropayments, in the US at least. It's possible that the banking industry could invent a network on which micropayments are practical, but it hasn't happened yet.
  - sdenton4 8y ago
    Completely disagree with the op re bit coin, but I do agree that people need easy ways to handle small transactions seamlessly. Mpesa and venmo provide plenty of reasonable use cases...
  - imglorp 8y ago
    Micropayments is the perfect use case. My vision is you would stock a wallet with, say $50, and then authorize a few of your regular sites in your client. Every time you loaded a new story, it might deduct $.01 for example. Perhaps not with this tech, but one similar with fast transactions and tiny fees. See Iota for example. Shifting from an ad driven to paid publisher/subscriber model has many advantages. Ideally you'd have a tech to support it which was a) not centralized, b) anonymous customer but visible vendor, and c) low transaction fees. This rules out credit cards and bitcoin but there are others.
    - akhilcacharya 8y ago
      I really don't understand these examples for micropayments, they're always for things I wouldn't pay for anyway.
      - imglorp 8y ago
        Oh? Do you fund anyone on Patreon? Is there no content you think is worthwhile, quality reading, that you'd pay a little to contribute your share, instead of ads and malware?
        akhilcacharya 8y ago
        I don’t and nobody I know does either.
    - creeble 8y ago
      I think all these visions for micro payments have been swamped by advertising as a source for revenue. I dislike that fact, but I don't think most people care. So micro payments are just a way to make less money than advertising-based models.
      - adamnemecek 8y ago
        Lol are you aware of the backlash against advertising?
  - creeble 8y ago
    I'm not sure people need a lot of ways to exchange tiny amounts of money either, but the existing ones like Venmo work really well. Without a blockchain. And fast, too!
- hendzen 8y ago
  "people have seen the future and they want more" Citation needed. The impression I get is that other than a get rich quick/MLM scheme, there isn't really anything there of interest to the general population. And I say that as someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about Bitcoin and crypto in general.
  - jjtheblunt 8y ago
    Agreed totally.
  - mattdeboard 8y ago
    You can tell everyone wants it by the way demand has crashed through the floor
    - adamnemecek 8y ago
      It crashed as currently the technology isn't quite there, however it will be eventually.
    - pc86 8y ago
      Disclaimer: I made about 13x total ROI speculating on Bitcoin during its volatility between the $1200-8k range. I wouldn't touch it with a 10' pole now. Demand has crashed because speculation is much more difficult now, and it's much easier to get into a position where your only choices are (a) sell at a huge loss; or, (b) hold and hope it goes up and you can get out even. A few years ago when it was much more volatile unless you were very unlucky with your timing you didn't have to wait more than a month or two to be able to sell with substantial gains, and wait for another drop to buy back in (or buy in pieces on the way down).
  - pixelperfect 8y ago
    It seems to have widespread utility in countries with severe currency problems like Venezuela. But I agree, for countries with healthy economies, I don't see why crypto would attain mainstream adoption for much more than black market transactions.
  - 8y ago
- fredley 8y ago
  Are you joking? Bitcoin is a terrible medium for exchange of small quantities of money. A few places around where I live set up bitcoin payment machines a few years ago. They all gave up. Transaction processing times reached over 30 minutes at the slowest times. Cash is already the perfect medium for exchanging small amounts of money.
  - metachris 8y ago
    > Cash is already the perfect medium for exchanging small amounts of money. Yes in person, but not over the internet. Crypto currencies definitely have potential for exchanging small amount of money there!
  - dlubarov 8y ago
    The parent wasn't talking about Bitcoin in particular though. Newer systems like Tendermint finalize transactions after a few seconds by running a consensus algorithm after each block. We're working on a system with a different consensus algorithm which should have subsecond latency. There are also layer 2 systems which can provide almost instant latency, albeit with some caveats.
  - dqpb 8y ago
    Oh yeah? Try exchanging a small amount of cash from the US with someone in Africa. Cash doesn't solve this problem. In fact there is no good current solution to this problem.
    - Applethief 8y ago
      What are your thoughts on Ripple / XRP?
  - sunshiney 8y ago
    Perhaps but cash is disgusting. Have you read how 90 percent of cash is covered with cocaine? Not to mention all the creepy crawlies on it... ewww...
- mamon 8y ago
  The problem is that current cryptocurrencies are not good for such use case. You cannot use Bitcoin for "tiny amounts of money" and for sure you cannot use it "easily". So cryptocurrencies might win in the long run, just not the currently existing ones.
- mattdeboard 8y ago
  So just out of curiosity re: exchanging tiny amounts of money, are you suggesting that cryptocurrency and blockchain tech replace banks? Because there are loads of ways to exchange tiny amounts of money...
  - buboard 8y ago
    Like? For example how to do micropayments on the web?
    - adamnemecek 8y ago
      And with an easy setup.
    - tomjakubowski 8y ago
      Venmo, Square Cash, Patreon. There's this espresso bar in LA that only takes cash or Venmo.
      - buboard 8y ago
        venmo & sq cash are not available here, and patreon are you serious? None of them beats the simplicity of an app wallet and semi-anonymous payments, kind of like a cash replacement.
        sunshiney 8y ago
        agree with you but we have so much education to do of normal, every day people. It's too techy for too many.. so they don't see what you and I are seeing.
- nambit 8y ago
  lmao. People have seen the future and it is decentralized fax machines
- lsiunsuex 8y ago
  (not an investor nor a banker) "At its peak, in November 2017, it briefly hit $19,783 - which means the price has fallen by about 75%." If this were a real stock market and those were real $$$s, isn't that the kind of crash that causes great depressions or investors jumping out of windows (movie trope, but not really) How can something so volatile possibly be worth pursuing or investing in, other then get rich quick schemes.
  - adamnemecek 8y ago
    It's the first one. The fact that it was able to gain that much value and mind share is astounding.
  - aboodman 8y ago
    I think you have your answer: the stock market has had massive declines, and yet people still pursue and invest in stocks.
  - dqpb 8y ago
    Surely the speculative value of bitcoin is independent of the inherent value of cryptocurrency technology. You wouldn't argue that cash isn't viable because some countries economies have crashed.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > You wouldn't argue that cash isn't viable because some countries economies have crashed. That's actually exactly the argument I've seen from many Bitcoin proponents, ironically enough.
    - fisherjeff 8y ago
      > You wouldn't argue that cash isn't viable because some countries economies have crashed On the other hand, I would say a country's economy weren't viable if their cash had crashed.
  - superfrank 8y ago
    I agree that I think crypto is pretty much dead in the water, but comparing it's volatility to the stock market as a whole is kind of silly. Sure, if the S&P/Dow/Nasdaq fell 75% people would be jumping out the window, but it's also never risen 300% in a few months like crypto did. Crypto needs to be evaluated against other speculative investments and not against a long term vehicle like a major index.
- mygo 8y ago
  > people have seen the future and they want more. Normally when there's a demonstrated demand for something, its price doesn't go down by 75% year over year. Well, outside of government price controlling You could be right, but it doesn't appear that the thing will be bitcoin, at least not unless it's a different thing sharing the same name. The promise of bitcoin was a currency. But so far, it's not being used as a currency, people are treating it more like gold than cash. Until people are actually using it in day to day transactions, it's just a collectible. Now I have been payed in Etherium by a client a couple times, but it's such a hassle. That money's just sitting around because I don't even want to deal with the exchanges.
  - adamnemecek 8y ago
    I said crypto not bitcoin. And the current generation of cryptos isn't quite there yet.
    - mygo 8y ago
      Ah, gotcha. Sometimes people don't discern between the two. What's your definition of there? Being able to do micro-transactions? quick transactions? Would transaction fees matter?
- vbezhenar 8y ago
  As a customer, I'm OK with banks and similar centralized institutions to handle small payments. I can take risk of losing $100 if I'm banned. As a seller, on the other hand, I don't like any notion of centralized institution, because my account will have much more money and block will be painful. But, I guess, I won't have much choice. Now Bitcoin has much more value for me, as a tool to store money and transfer big payments. There's no easy way to transfer few thousand bucks between countries without dealing with state agencies, there's huge risk of frozen account, there's huge risk of being robbed, etc. Storing money is the same: your house could be robbed, your bank could default. Bitcoin solving those problems perfectly, aside from its fluctuating price, of course, but that couldn't be solved with algorithms anyway.
0xTJ 8y ago
Oh no, my $10 is now worth $5
- alexandernst 8y ago
  HODL!!! I'm told you'll soon be so rich you could buy a yacht! Or two!
rustcharm 8y ago
Shouldn't all the True Believers be mortgaging and leveraging everything and going all in?
- pamflemington 8y ago
  Well the funny thing about the True Believers is that their numbers are strangely correlated to the price of bitcoin.
johnwheeler 8y ago
I wanted to get some bitcoin to buy some things off a website where bitcoin was the only thing accepted. I was immediately turned off when a different, exchange website asked me to upload a photo of myself holding my driver's license in one hand and a paper with the name of the website and date in the other. Just my experience. To me, it seemed like a joke.
- cenal 8y ago
  KYC is an awful thing for user experience. Expect it moving forward.
  - skybrian 8y ago
    For this sort of thing, a notary could do the job, and if you search on "notary near me" there are plenty of businesses doing it. It seems like there's an opportunity here to make this easier?
  - mancerayder 8y ago
    Banks do it pretty well already. Coinbase and the like failed to do it initially, and had to play catch-up during the peak of the activity towards the end of last year / early this year. I guess it was a sort of tech debt with regards to their customer support and experience dealing with KYC problems?
  - waynecochran 8y ago
    FMI, KYC is a TLA for "Know Your Customer" based authentication.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - yellowapple 8y ago
      FYI, TLA is a TLA for "Three Letter Acronym"
jgladch 8y ago
There will be a whole spectrum of cryptos with different advantages over one another... like there already is.
booleandilemma 8y ago
I never saw this coming.
mrtksn 8y ago
My feeling: HN is generally negative against blockchain and it's applications, rooting to be proven useless because the Silicon Valley actually missed the window and it's not on the cutting edge of the wave. My feelings towards bitcoin(cryptocurrencies in general): A tool to misbehave in a society that is completely regulated and monitored. Its price is going to match the market for misbehaviour. The size of the market for misbehaviour is going to be based on how much the society deviates from moderate: that is, in total anarchy bitcoin can replace the total global money supply and reach millions of dollars equivalent per bitcoin and in totalitarian governments in multipole world order it can be the currency to trade between camps and illegals when the governments tells you not to. Edit: Hey, it would be nice if you also write why you disagree.
- jhwang5 8y ago
  Feel exact opposite. HN had a ton of pro-crypto articles trending earlier this year, as well as brigading from pro-crypto subreddits bombing the comments section.
- tyingq 8y ago
  "HN is generally negative against blockchain" I agree with this part. However, many of us are just negative because of the tendency to try and make blockchain a solution when it's not needed. Especially when it's used somewhere where you already have to trust a 3rd party. In those cases, a traditional ledger is fine.
  - mrtksn 8y ago
    Definitely, there's lot's of scam and technically unfeasible stuff going on. Just like the World Wide Web.
    - tyingq 8y ago
      I wasn't really talking about scams or technically unfeasible stuff. Just things where people use a blockchain when it's not adding any value.
- 8y ago
dopamean 8y ago
$5000 still seems like an insane number for something that I have no idea how to judge the value of.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  I felt the same about Facebook, and it's now worth $380B.
  - api 8y ago
    I felt the same about Juicero and it's now worth $0. That logic doesn't work.
  - danhak 8y ago
    Companies can be valued based on expectations of future cashflows. Bitcoin can be valued based on... ???
    - nscalf 8y ago
      Based off your comment, expectations of future utility?
  - rootusrootus 8y ago
    The value proposition of FB seems much easier to explain than cryptocurrency, though. We at least know what FB gets used for and where it earns money. That's 100% more than I can say about Bitcoin.
    - xenihn 8y ago
      Money laundering.
    - nostrademons 8y ago
      We didn't in 2007 when FB was worth $15B, though. At the time, it was primarily used for throwing sheep at people, getting laid, and boasting about how many friends you have. They had just barely opened up the site to adults, the news feed was a year in the future, the Like button was 2 years in the future, and they didn't have advertisement or any revenue at all until 5 years in the future. All we knew was that a lot of people were very excited about it for pretty irrational reasons. That's a lot like how a lot of people are very excited about cryptocurrency for pretty irrational reasons.
yifanl 8y ago
"On Thursday, 15 November, Bitcoin Cash - an offshoot of Bitcoin - split into two different crypto-currencies, which are now in competition with each other" Could someone explain why did Bitcoin Cash split again, were there technical reasons that couldn't be resolved by creating a new cryptocurrency? edit: clarification
- the_clarence 8y ago
  It’s honestly probably not that interesting. Cryptocoins split all the time. Bitcoin has A dozen of forks, same for Ethereum, same for ...
  - asdff 8y ago
    How are you supposed to add users and grow a network if its is constantly broken apart for ideological reasons?
    - qqn 8y ago
      Well I mean Christianity's been doing it pretty well for a long time now.
- dawhizkid 8y ago
  By design the Bitcoin Cash network upgrades every 6 months. There were some proposed network upgrades that a certain influential mining group led by someone claiming to be the creator of Bitcoin disagreed with, and decided to band together with some other large miners to hard fork with their own protocol changes. The changes were mostly around blocksize (the camp that disagreed wanted larger block sizes), how transactions are ordered in a block, and adding/removing certain functions.
  - berberous 8y ago
    I haven't followed the split very closely at all, but "someone claiming to be the creator of Bitcoin" really understates things. That someone is Craig Wright. Craig is _obviously_ not Satoshi (the creator of Bitcoin) -- he is a transparent fraudster, lacks technical understanding, and is unhinged (see his tweets and crazy threatening emails). I think a lot of this is just stemming from Craig's ongoing desire to fraudulently control Bitcoin by claiming to be it's creator (the fork is called "Satoshi's Vision"). I'd stay far away from anything he touches.
gfkyrslfgh 8y ago
Oh look, the so future HN crowd is laughing at Bitcoin. hN laughed at Bitcoin when it was worthless, when it bubbled at 32, bubbled at 1100, bubbled at 20,000 Big shock to see all the insightful highly technical views now. Echo chamber galore.
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  Not sure I'd brag too much about the bubbles.
api 8y ago
I'm really shocked by the whole cryptocurrency experiment. We are now ten years in and it seems like literally nothing of value has come of it at all. Billions have been spent and we have absolutely nothing to show for it. I've thought it was overvalued for a while but I still kept expecting the whole ecosystem to create something I or someone else might find useful in the real world. I've waited and waited and waited but no. Teams of brilliant people, tons of money, and nothing! It started as a sort of crypto-libertarian critique of financial capitalism, but then it seems to have evolved rapidly into a "reductio ad absurdium" parody of financial capitalism. Among other things I think this experiment proves that the excesses and absurdities of financial capitalism are not a technical problem. They are a social and political problem. The instant cryptocurrency got legs it became yet another speculative casino just like the rest of the financial system. Edit: so prove me wrong. Does anyone actually use a cryptocurrency based system for anything other than cryptocurrency itself, speculation, or gambling?
- joefourier 8y ago
  There are a number of real-world applications to which cryptocurrency has been proven to be useful outside of gambling and financial speculation, such as darknet markets, ransomware, donations to blacklisted organisations, paying international contractors sotto banco, transporting money illegally across borders... While you may notice a common pattern in their legality or lack thereof, they certainly have real needs that are fulfilled by cryptocurrency.
  - api 8y ago
    I'm aware of that niche, but I was speaking mostly of the ICOs that promised new technologies and of broader adoption of cryptocurrency across the economy. The thing that's shocked me the most is the amount of money raised by ICO-type projects during the boom and the fact that not one of them appears to have delivered anything. I'd expect some to be scams, but every single one of them? Not a single reputable functional team raised money with an ICO and shipped something? I'm excluding ICOs that shipped things of use only to other ICOs, cryptocurrency, gambling, and speculation. That's self-referential: crypto to make crypto for more crypto. I'm talking about things of use in the real world. That's why I called it a parody of financial capitalism. The point of money is to facilitate useful things, not to just chase itself around in circles. The latter is the essence of financial capitalism vs. real productive capitalism.
0x8BADF00D 8y ago
I don’t think mining will be profitable anymore at a certain point. As soon as mining becomes unprofitable, there will be a death spiral for the price of Bitcoin.
- newnewpdro 8y ago
  When miners leave the network the difficulty drops automatically keeping it profitable for those who remain.
  - mario0b1 8y ago
    But this then brings the question back (atleast for me): What happens when all coins are mined? I just looked it up and it's already >80% mined. So if miners would leave the pool and then suddenly (suddenly might even be a long period of time here, I don't know to much about bitcoin) all coins are gone. What happens? Edit: What just got to my mind is that we will never gain more bitcoins then those 21 million, but we surely will lose them (people lose they keys, die, whatever). Will the price go up to "infinity" or will it suddenly drop to 0?
    - sauwan 8y ago
      Theoretically, transaction costs (will) pay the miners.
    - berbec 8y ago
      According to [1], in 2140 each block will give 0.00000042 BTC (big guess based on mining trends). The reward per block goes down as the number of remaining coins reduces. This introduces a very unstable system. If the price of bitcoin doesn't (double + increase with inflation), as the block reward shrinks, the rewards will become useless. 1: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10486/when-will-the-last-bitcoin-be-mined https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10486/when-will-...
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - 8y ago
the_snooze 8y ago
I'm surprised it's that high, given that its biggest uses are just speculation, drugs, and ransomware.
isuckatcoding 8y ago
Please let this mean cheaper GPUs
raverbashing 8y ago
London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down, London Bridge is falling down, my dear lady (ambiguity intended)
the_clarence 8y ago
I honestly don’t know what to make of it. I’m surrounded by a lot of bankers, none of them believe in cryptocurrencies but all of them are focused on the price and have zero understanding of the technology. I’m also surrounded by a lot of blockchain people who are insanely hyped by the future of cryptocurrencies and who have little idea about their current prices. Being in the middle I see 99% of bullshit blockchain stuff, but I’m really hyped by some cryptocurrencies and some of their tech. It is a really interesting field if you ignore the market, but there is also a lot to win/lose if you can predict where the tech will go. Bankers and blockchain people are both the worst people to ask for an opinion. So I might be in the right position to make a guess. There is value. This market might become as strong as the stock market is nowadays. As long as there is hype, there will continue to be a market. If it’s a scam/pyramid sheme/mlm, then it’s an international one and it’s probably not going to stop.
- buboard 8y ago
  I 'm confused about the position of bankers. Our bank terminated our business account because they found out we ran a cryptocoin price aggregator (oh the horror!). I had to terminate the site (because it was making peanuts and i didn't have the time) to have the account reinstated but i didn't understand the hostility. And this came from a bank that in 2013 crashed and literally stole money from their customer's accounts. This weird situation actually made me a lot more optimistic about the future of crypto, because , you know, banks are thieves too.
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > i didn't understand the hostility Cryptocurrencies are an AML nightmare. Ironically, this is a social–not technological–problem. Even on HN, you'll regularly see "I don't have to pay taxes on cryptocurrencies because the authorities can't catch me" comments. This creates regulatory risks. Regulatory risks are regulatory costs. Add to that the credit card fraud (buy cryptocurrencies with a card, charge back; profit) and theft risks, and a cryptocurrency-affiliated customer is more likely to cost a bank rather than make them money. Layer on top of that the time it takes to develop expertise and a blanket ban on everything around cryptocurrencies becomes understandable (versus training employees to comb through them). I don't like this outcome. But I see why a big bank would decide this. Community banks, on the other hand, might be willing to invest the time into understanding why you don't pose a fraud or my-assets-got-stolen-now-I'm-broke risk.
mxschumacher 8y ago
something that I think is commonly misunderstood about Bitcoin is that something can bring a lot of value, without being valuable in a market capitalisation sense. Think Wikipedia and Linux.
Kaveren 8y ago
Amusing that the Bitcoin / Bitcoin Cash split is now even deeper with a split in Bitcoin Cash. Just keep on forking until everyone has their own cryptocurrency, I guess. Aside from that, a point nobody seems to bring up is just how unproven most cryptocurrency technology is from a monetary safety standpoint. It's not just about a 51% blockchain attack. In multiple cases of some of the most popular cryptocurrencies, we've seen danger [0] (these are not the only examples). Nobody talks about this though, so while you're worried about centralized banking, consider for a moment the threat of bad actors to the core of your system. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/09/cryptocurrency-insecurity-iota-bcash-and-too-many-more/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/09/cryptocurrency-insecurity-... Of course many fanatics (some of the same people who still treat John McAfee seriously) will blindly "hodl" by the logic that it's gone up after the post-2013 crash, it must surely skyrocket again. Some people can justify their belief, but many are just playing follow the leader.
- xiphias2 8y ago
  Please don't confuse Bitcoin with any other cryptocurrency. Bitcoin Core is where developers who treat it responsibly as a multi-billion dollar system are concentrated. It's very hard to submit code to it for a reason (unlike ALL other crypto currencies so far). Just as an example Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency where you can see a page with all security vulnerabilities so far.
  - Kaveren 8y ago
    I am aware that Bitcoin is not the same as the myriad of altcoins. Faith in the cryptocurrency market as a whole can affect all prices, and that's half the point. Besides, it's only been what, not quite 10 years since the first Bitcoin implementation, and there's still plenty of ongoing work. I'm sure the developers take their job very seriously, but even so, there's no promise of impenetrability this early. Maybe in another 10 years. Volatility induced by technical failures in the cryptocurrency market should be just as concerning, particularly when people expect / expected the price to stabilize following the surge in price in 2017.
nikk1 8y ago
The price of bitcoin is actually a pretty good metric to observe the Gartner hype cycle in action: from the rise, peak of inflated expectations, and slide into the through of disillusionment. I predict that in 2019 or 2020 the price of bitcoin will slowly begin to come back up once we hit the slope of enlightenment.
- scj 8y ago
  That assumes Bitcoin is the ideal expression of the near-term cryptocoin. Perhaps Bitcoin will be surpassed for technical reasons to become "The Yahoo! of crypto-currencies" one day. From a speculator's perspective, it'd probably be a riskier but more rewarding bet to make in the cryptocurrency space.
dajohnson89 8y ago
What's the momentum for adoption in places like venezuela?
- asdff 8y ago
  Nowhere to be found. I kid you not, the government tried to start a nationalized crypto. Many are just using other currencies like the Colombian peso.
  - lrns_ 8y ago
    O really? https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins/VES https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins/VES seems to tell a different story. Ofcourse no one wants to buy a 'nationalized (read: centralized) crypto'.
mikenew 8y ago
When it comes to the general public adopting crypto as usable, cash replacement currency, I think there's two issues with adoption. One is of course the network effect. I can't pay with (whatever)coin unless other people use it too. So unless I'm just really excited about crypto and want to pay with it, it's not very useful to me until more people start using it. And considering most of the crypt-hype has worn off, there's less and less people that are just dying to use it. And the other is that people (and businesses) are not going to try things over and over until someone gets it right. Bitcoin is terrible as a currency. I tried paying a friend of mine for a sandwich once, just for fun, and it cost me $10 to send him $10, plus it took almost an hour. Of course it's less bad now, but it's still not great. Valve started accepting bitcion and later stopped. Lots of retailers did too. No one is going to jump on Bitcoin Cash or Monero or whatever, even if they're better, because they were burned pretty hard with Bitcoin. Someone is going to have to genuinely nail it with a currency that is instant, costs almost nothing per transaction, is very easy to use, and they're going to have to make sure everyone knows it. And even then I think it's going to be uphill.
- buboard 8y ago
  > No one is going to jump on Bitcoin Cash or Monero or whatever, even if they're better I think they will, if it is better. > going to have to genuinely nail it with a currency that is instant, costs almost nothing per transaction, is very easy to use, There are such cryptos. stellar, nano and i m sure also others. And i think monero's anonymity promise is a big selling point too
  - waynecochran 8y ago
    Who will use bitcoin without it having a stable value?
    - buboard 8y ago
      The fees are a much bigger problem. Bitcoin is unusable, it s a speculative vehicle for rich people. Zero-fee , or very-low-fee cryptos (i remember stellar, iota, raiblocks, even xrp) would be very usable if they had a large userbase and a very easy way to buy them. One of those has to focus on real world growth, i.e. get many websites to support them by providing a dead-simple payment solution. I think there are ways to make them less volatile. For one, don't list them in any crypto-to-crypto exchanges, instead allow only dollar cash-ins/outs, or limit the amount that can be exchanged to some fixed value like $100 / hour. Speculation and greed is limiting the prospects of most coins.
johnwheeler 8y ago
So, it looks like this post got ripped off the front page. Question: was the Bitcoin breaks $20000 post ripped off the front page last year?
newnewpdro 8y ago
There's a lot of posts here questioning the utility of cryptocurrency when we already have cash. I sometimes ask myself the same question, as none of my day-to-day transactions would benefit from cryptocurrency (or even offer it as an option). But I'm a cantankerous old man who just goes to the grocery store and gas station, not some malleable young whipper-snapper shaping the future, for better or worse, with what I participate in. However, I recently listened to a Reply-All episode [1] where a young girl casually received $100 in bitcoin from an anonymous individual mid-episode, a sort of restitution for having her account stolen, while corresponding with the thief on discord. It took practically no time, and gave me some pause to consider how this might be a glimpse of the future. The exchange could have been done through PayPal or something else with less anonymity, but it wasn't, they used bitcoin. Perhaps it was staged, perhaps she was primed to have a coinbase account already by the show hosts knowing this would happen, I don't know. If it was an authentically candid situation, it would be somewhat remarkable that she was already prepared to accept the payment with zero friction other than asking "It's super long, right?" when asked for her bitcoin address. So clearly there's already utility/convenience for some people today, and the fact that this group includes youngsters could mean it's just be a matter of their becoming mature adults continuing to use cryptocurrency before it takes over in a big way. Here's the excerpt from the transcript for the curious and lazy: ----8<----8<----8<----8<----- ALEX: And then (clears throat) he was like, “Look, do you have a bitcoin account?” And she was like, “Yeah.” KEVIN: I sold the Snapchat for 100 so I’ll just send that directly back to you. So um, you can do whatever you want with that since it is rightfully yours. ALEX: Lizzie, do you have your Bitcoin account number handy? LIZZIE: Yeah. ALEX: Do you want to drop it into– KEVIN: Yeah, let me– LIZZIE: It’s super long, right? KEVIN: Yeah, yeah, yeah no. Post it. Yeah, yeah. It starts, uh, it’s usually with a three. You have coinbase, right? LIZZIE: Yeah. KEVIN: Yeah, let me boot up my ledger. Okay. [typing] Alright I sent it. LIZZIE: Yup. KEVIN: Got it? LIZZIE: Yeah, thank you. KEVIN: Cool. Yeah, of course. Yeah you can do whatever you want with that. If you wanted to donate it, go for it. And if you want to keep it and buy groceries go for it. LIZZIE: Awesome. ----8<----8<----8<----8<----- [1] https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/130-lizard https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/130-lizard [1.mp3] https://traffic.megaphone.fm/GLT8967905844.mp3?updated=1541657837 https://traffic.megaphone.fm/GLT8967905844.mp3?updated=15416...
buboard 8y ago
This is good news, very good. I hope it psychologically affects people and that it lasts long enough that people will stop focusing on speculation and pumps, and instead focus on adoption and expansion.
- forthefuture 8y ago
  I’d go even further: I hope it keeps falling until a better crypto currency is worth more. Bitcoin even existing proves the market is more speculative than functional.
  - buboard 8y ago
    there does seem to be some disentanglement from bitcoin: https://coinmarketcap.com/ https://coinmarketcap.com/

112 points by wil_I_am_27 8y ago

Crypto is going to come back with vengeance. Maybe not bitcoin and maybe not in the next 6 months, but people have seen the future and they want more. In order to maximize "exchange of value", there needs to be a way to exchange tiny amounts of money easily. Right now there isn't such a way and crypto might solve it.

lbotos 8y ago
> Crypto is going to come back with vengeance. Bold statement. > Right now there isn't such a way and crypto might solve it. weak support. Why do people need to exchange tiny amounts of money? EDIT for clarity: Why do people need Crypto to exchange tiny amounts of money?
- mattdeboard 8y ago
  People already exchange tiny amounts of money. It's done through this cutting edge service called "banking." I think the implication of the GP's comment is that he considers blockchain/cryptocurrency tech a replacement for banking.
  - dlubarov 8y ago
    What banking service are you referring to? Credit networks, debit networks, ACH, something else? AFAIK none of them are practical for micropayments, in the US at least. It's possible that the banking industry could invent a network on which micropayments are practical, but it hasn't happened yet.
- sdenton4 8y ago
  Completely disagree with the op re bit coin, but I do agree that people need easy ways to handle small transactions seamlessly. Mpesa and venmo provide plenty of reasonable use cases...
- imglorp 8y ago
  Micropayments is the perfect use case. My vision is you would stock a wallet with, say $50, and then authorize a few of your regular sites in your client. Every time you loaded a new story, it might deduct $.01 for example. Perhaps not with this tech, but one similar with fast transactions and tiny fees. See Iota for example. Shifting from an ad driven to paid publisher/subscriber model has many advantages. Ideally you'd have a tech to support it which was a) not centralized, b) anonymous customer but visible vendor, and c) low transaction fees. This rules out credit cards and bitcoin but there are others.
  - akhilcacharya 8y ago
    I really don't understand these examples for micropayments, they're always for things I wouldn't pay for anyway.
    - imglorp 8y ago
      Oh? Do you fund anyone on Patreon? Is there no content you think is worthwhile, quality reading, that you'd pay a little to contribute your share, instead of ads and malware?
      - akhilcacharya 8y ago
        I don’t and nobody I know does either.
  - creeble 8y ago
    I think all these visions for micro payments have been swamped by advertising as a source for revenue. I dislike that fact, but I don't think most people care. So micro payments are just a way to make less money than advertising-based models.
    - adamnemecek 8y ago
      Lol are you aware of the backlash against advertising?
- creeble 8y ago
  I'm not sure people need a lot of ways to exchange tiny amounts of money either, but the existing ones like Venmo work really well. Without a blockchain. And fast, too!
hendzen 8y ago
"people have seen the future and they want more" Citation needed. The impression I get is that other than a get rich quick/MLM scheme, there isn't really anything there of interest to the general population. And I say that as someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about Bitcoin and crypto in general.
- jjtheblunt 8y ago
  Agreed totally.
- mattdeboard 8y ago
  You can tell everyone wants it by the way demand has crashed through the floor
  - adamnemecek 8y ago
    It crashed as currently the technology isn't quite there, however it will be eventually.
  - pc86 8y ago
    Disclaimer: I made about 13x total ROI speculating on Bitcoin during its volatility between the $1200-8k range. I wouldn't touch it with a 10' pole now. Demand has crashed because speculation is much more difficult now, and it's much easier to get into a position where your only choices are (a) sell at a huge loss; or, (b) hold and hope it goes up and you can get out even. A few years ago when it was much more volatile unless you were very unlucky with your timing you didn't have to wait more than a month or two to be able to sell with substantial gains, and wait for another drop to buy back in (or buy in pieces on the way down).
- pixelperfect 8y ago
  It seems to have widespread utility in countries with severe currency problems like Venezuela. But I agree, for countries with healthy economies, I don't see why crypto would attain mainstream adoption for much more than black market transactions.
- 8y ago
fredley 8y ago
Are you joking? Bitcoin is a terrible medium for exchange of small quantities of money. A few places around where I live set up bitcoin payment machines a few years ago. They all gave up. Transaction processing times reached over 30 minutes at the slowest times. Cash is already the perfect medium for exchanging small amounts of money.
- metachris 8y ago
  > Cash is already the perfect medium for exchanging small amounts of money. Yes in person, but not over the internet. Crypto currencies definitely have potential for exchanging small amount of money there!
- dlubarov 8y ago
  The parent wasn't talking about Bitcoin in particular though. Newer systems like Tendermint finalize transactions after a few seconds by running a consensus algorithm after each block. We're working on a system with a different consensus algorithm which should have subsecond latency. There are also layer 2 systems which can provide almost instant latency, albeit with some caveats.
- dqpb 8y ago
  Oh yeah? Try exchanging a small amount of cash from the US with someone in Africa. Cash doesn't solve this problem. In fact there is no good current solution to this problem.
  - Applethief 8y ago
    What are your thoughts on Ripple / XRP?
- sunshiney 8y ago
  Perhaps but cash is disgusting. Have you read how 90 percent of cash is covered with cocaine? Not to mention all the creepy crawlies on it... ewww...
mamon 8y ago
The problem is that current cryptocurrencies are not good for such use case. You cannot use Bitcoin for "tiny amounts of money" and for sure you cannot use it "easily". So cryptocurrencies might win in the long run, just not the currently existing ones.
mattdeboard 8y ago
So just out of curiosity re: exchanging tiny amounts of money, are you suggesting that cryptocurrency and blockchain tech replace banks? Because there are loads of ways to exchange tiny amounts of money...
- buboard 8y ago
  Like? For example how to do micropayments on the web?
  - adamnemecek 8y ago
    And with an easy setup.
  - tomjakubowski 8y ago
    Venmo, Square Cash, Patreon. There's this espresso bar in LA that only takes cash or Venmo.
    - buboard 8y ago
      venmo & sq cash are not available here, and patreon are you serious? None of them beats the simplicity of an app wallet and semi-anonymous payments, kind of like a cash replacement.
      - sunshiney 8y ago
        agree with you but we have so much education to do of normal, every day people. It's too techy for too many.. so they don't see what you and I are seeing.
nambit 8y ago
lmao. People have seen the future and it is decentralized fax machines
lsiunsuex 8y ago
(not an investor nor a banker) "At its peak, in November 2017, it briefly hit $19,783 - which means the price has fallen by about 75%." If this were a real stock market and those were real $$$s, isn't that the kind of crash that causes great depressions or investors jumping out of windows (movie trope, but not really) How can something so volatile possibly be worth pursuing or investing in, other then get rich quick schemes.
- adamnemecek 8y ago
  It's the first one. The fact that it was able to gain that much value and mind share is astounding.
- aboodman 8y ago
  I think you have your answer: the stock market has had massive declines, and yet people still pursue and invest in stocks.
- dqpb 8y ago
  Surely the speculative value of bitcoin is independent of the inherent value of cryptocurrency technology. You wouldn't argue that cash isn't viable because some countries economies have crashed.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > You wouldn't argue that cash isn't viable because some countries economies have crashed. That's actually exactly the argument I've seen from many Bitcoin proponents, ironically enough.
  - fisherjeff 8y ago
    > You wouldn't argue that cash isn't viable because some countries economies have crashed On the other hand, I would say a country's economy weren't viable if their cash had crashed.
- superfrank 8y ago
  I agree that I think crypto is pretty much dead in the water, but comparing it's volatility to the stock market as a whole is kind of silly. Sure, if the S&P/Dow/Nasdaq fell 75% people would be jumping out the window, but it's also never risen 300% in a few months like crypto did. Crypto needs to be evaluated against other speculative investments and not against a long term vehicle like a major index.
mygo 8y ago
> people have seen the future and they want more. Normally when there's a demonstrated demand for something, its price doesn't go down by 75% year over year. Well, outside of government price controlling You could be right, but it doesn't appear that the thing will be bitcoin, at least not unless it's a different thing sharing the same name. The promise of bitcoin was a currency. But so far, it's not being used as a currency, people are treating it more like gold than cash. Until people are actually using it in day to day transactions, it's just a collectible. Now I have been payed in Etherium by a client a couple times, but it's such a hassle. That money's just sitting around because I don't even want to deal with the exchanges.
- adamnemecek 8y ago
  I said crypto not bitcoin. And the current generation of cryptos isn't quite there yet.
  - mygo 8y ago
    Ah, gotcha. Sometimes people don't discern between the two. What's your definition of there? Being able to do micro-transactions? quick transactions? Would transaction fees matter?
vbezhenar 8y ago
As a customer, I'm OK with banks and similar centralized institutions to handle small payments. I can take risk of losing $100 if I'm banned. As a seller, on the other hand, I don't like any notion of centralized institution, because my account will have much more money and block will be painful. But, I guess, I won't have much choice. Now Bitcoin has much more value for me, as a tool to store money and transfer big payments. There's no easy way to transfer few thousand bucks between countries without dealing with state agencies, there's huge risk of frozen account, there's huge risk of being robbed, etc. Storing money is the same: your house could be robbed, your bank could default. Bitcoin solving those problems perfectly, aside from its fluctuating price, of course, but that couldn't be solved with algorithms anyway.

0xTJ 8y ago

Oh no, my $10 is now worth $5

alexandernst 8y ago
HODL!!! I'm told you'll soon be so rich you could buy a yacht! Or two!

rustcharm 8y ago

Shouldn't all the True Believers be mortgaging and leveraging everything and going all in?

pamflemington 8y ago
Well the funny thing about the True Believers is that their numbers are strangely correlated to the price of bitcoin.

johnwheeler 8y ago

I wanted to get some bitcoin to buy some things off a website where bitcoin was the only thing accepted. I was immediately turned off when a different, exchange website asked me to upload a photo of myself holding my driver's license in one hand and a paper with the name of the website and date in the other. Just my experience. To me, it seemed like a joke.

cenal 8y ago
KYC is an awful thing for user experience. Expect it moving forward.
- skybrian 8y ago
  For this sort of thing, a notary could do the job, and if you search on "notary near me" there are plenty of businesses doing it. It seems like there's an opportunity here to make this easier?
- mancerayder 8y ago
  Banks do it pretty well already. Coinbase and the like failed to do it initially, and had to play catch-up during the peak of the activity towards the end of last year / early this year. I guess it was a sort of tech debt with regards to their customer support and experience dealing with KYC problems?
- waynecochran 8y ago
  FMI, KYC is a TLA for "Know Your Customer" based authentication.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - yellowapple 8y ago
    FYI, TLA is a TLA for "Three Letter Acronym"

jgladch 8y ago

There will be a whole spectrum of cryptos with different advantages over one another... like there already is.

booleandilemma 8y ago

I never saw this coming.

mrtksn 8y ago

My feeling: HN is generally negative against blockchain and it's applications, rooting to be proven useless because the Silicon Valley actually missed the window and it's not on the cutting edge of the wave. My feelings towards bitcoin(cryptocurrencies in general): A tool to misbehave in a society that is completely regulated and monitored. Its price is going to match the market for misbehaviour. The size of the market for misbehaviour is going to be based on how much the society deviates from moderate: that is, in total anarchy bitcoin can replace the total global money supply and reach millions of dollars equivalent per bitcoin and in totalitarian governments in multipole world order it can be the currency to trade between camps and illegals when the governments tells you not to. Edit: Hey, it would be nice if you also write why you disagree.

jhwang5 8y ago
Feel exact opposite. HN had a ton of pro-crypto articles trending earlier this year, as well as brigading from pro-crypto subreddits bombing the comments section.
tyingq 8y ago
"HN is generally negative against blockchain" I agree with this part. However, many of us are just negative because of the tendency to try and make blockchain a solution when it's not needed. Especially when it's used somewhere where you already have to trust a 3rd party. In those cases, a traditional ledger is fine.
- mrtksn 8y ago
  Definitely, there's lot's of scam and technically unfeasible stuff going on. Just like the World Wide Web.
  - tyingq 8y ago
    I wasn't really talking about scams or technically unfeasible stuff. Just things where people use a blockchain when it's not adding any value.
8y ago

dopamean 8y ago

$5000 still seems like an insane number for something that I have no idea how to judge the value of.

nostrademons 8y ago
I felt the same about Facebook, and it's now worth $380B.
- api 8y ago
  I felt the same about Juicero and it's now worth $0. That logic doesn't work.
- danhak 8y ago
  Companies can be valued based on expectations of future cashflows. Bitcoin can be valued based on... ???
  - nscalf 8y ago
    Based off your comment, expectations of future utility?
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  The value proposition of FB seems much easier to explain than cryptocurrency, though. We at least know what FB gets used for and where it earns money. That's 100% more than I can say about Bitcoin.
  - xenihn 8y ago
    Money laundering.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    We didn't in 2007 when FB was worth $15B, though. At the time, it was primarily used for throwing sheep at people, getting laid, and boasting about how many friends you have. They had just barely opened up the site to adults, the news feed was a year in the future, the Like button was 2 years in the future, and they didn't have advertisement or any revenue at all until 5 years in the future. All we knew was that a lot of people were very excited about it for pretty irrational reasons. That's a lot like how a lot of people are very excited about cryptocurrency for pretty irrational reasons.

yifanl 8y ago

"On Thursday, 15 November, Bitcoin Cash - an offshoot of Bitcoin - split into two different crypto-currencies, which are now in competition with each other" Could someone explain why did Bitcoin Cash split again, were there technical reasons that couldn't be resolved by creating a new cryptocurrency? edit: clarification

the_clarence 8y ago
It’s honestly probably not that interesting. Cryptocoins split all the time. Bitcoin has A dozen of forks, same for Ethereum, same for ...
- asdff 8y ago
  How are you supposed to add users and grow a network if its is constantly broken apart for ideological reasons?
  - qqn 8y ago
    Well I mean Christianity's been doing it pretty well for a long time now.
dawhizkid 8y ago
By design the Bitcoin Cash network upgrades every 6 months. There were some proposed network upgrades that a certain influential mining group led by someone claiming to be the creator of Bitcoin disagreed with, and decided to band together with some other large miners to hard fork with their own protocol changes. The changes were mostly around blocksize (the camp that disagreed wanted larger block sizes), how transactions are ordered in a block, and adding/removing certain functions.
- berberous 8y ago
  I haven't followed the split very closely at all, but "someone claiming to be the creator of Bitcoin" really understates things. That someone is Craig Wright. Craig is _obviously_ not Satoshi (the creator of Bitcoin) -- he is a transparent fraudster, lacks technical understanding, and is unhinged (see his tweets and crazy threatening emails). I think a lot of this is just stemming from Craig's ongoing desire to fraudulently control Bitcoin by claiming to be it's creator (the fork is called "Satoshi's Vision"). I'd stay far away from anything he touches.

gfkyrslfgh 8y ago

Oh look, the so future HN crowd is laughing at Bitcoin. hN laughed at Bitcoin when it was worthless, when it bubbled at 32, bubbled at 1100, bubbled at 20,000 Big shock to see all the insightful highly technical views now. Echo chamber galore.

rootusrootus 8y ago
Not sure I'd brag too much about the bubbles.

api 8y ago

I'm really shocked by the whole cryptocurrency experiment. We are now ten years in and it seems like literally nothing of value has come of it at all. Billions have been spent and we have absolutely nothing to show for it. I've thought it was overvalued for a while but I still kept expecting the whole ecosystem to create something I or someone else might find useful in the real world. I've waited and waited and waited but no. Teams of brilliant people, tons of money, and nothing! It started as a sort of crypto-libertarian critique of financial capitalism, but then it seems to have evolved rapidly into a "reductio ad absurdium" parody of financial capitalism. Among other things I think this experiment proves that the excesses and absurdities of financial capitalism are not a technical problem. They are a social and political problem. The instant cryptocurrency got legs it became yet another speculative casino just like the rest of the financial system. Edit: so prove me wrong. Does anyone actually use a cryptocurrency based system for anything other than cryptocurrency itself, speculation, or gambling?

joefourier 8y ago
There are a number of real-world applications to which cryptocurrency has been proven to be useful outside of gambling and financial speculation, such as darknet markets, ransomware, donations to blacklisted organisations, paying international contractors sotto banco, transporting money illegally across borders... While you may notice a common pattern in their legality or lack thereof, they certainly have real needs that are fulfilled by cryptocurrency.
- api 8y ago
  I'm aware of that niche, but I was speaking mostly of the ICOs that promised new technologies and of broader adoption of cryptocurrency across the economy. The thing that's shocked me the most is the amount of money raised by ICO-type projects during the boom and the fact that not one of them appears to have delivered anything. I'd expect some to be scams, but every single one of them? Not a single reputable functional team raised money with an ICO and shipped something? I'm excluding ICOs that shipped things of use only to other ICOs, cryptocurrency, gambling, and speculation. That's self-referential: crypto to make crypto for more crypto. I'm talking about things of use in the real world. That's why I called it a parody of financial capitalism. The point of money is to facilitate useful things, not to just chase itself around in circles. The latter is the essence of financial capitalism vs. real productive capitalism.

0x8BADF00D 8y ago

I don’t think mining will be profitable anymore at a certain point. As soon as mining becomes unprofitable, there will be a death spiral for the price of Bitcoin.

newnewpdro 8y ago
When miners leave the network the difficulty drops automatically keeping it profitable for those who remain.
- mario0b1 8y ago
  But this then brings the question back (atleast for me): What happens when all coins are mined? I just looked it up and it's already >80% mined. So if miners would leave the pool and then suddenly (suddenly might even be a long period of time here, I don't know to much about bitcoin) all coins are gone. What happens? Edit: What just got to my mind is that we will never gain more bitcoins then those 21 million, but we surely will lose them (people lose they keys, die, whatever). Will the price go up to "infinity" or will it suddenly drop to 0?
  - sauwan 8y ago
    Theoretically, transaction costs (will) pay the miners.
  - berbec 8y ago
    According to [1], in 2140 each block will give 0.00000042 BTC (big guess based on mining trends). The reward per block goes down as the number of remaining coins reduces. This introduces a very unstable system. If the price of bitcoin doesn't (double + increase with inflation), as the block reward shrinks, the rewards will become useless. 1: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10486/when-will-the-last-bitcoin-be-mined https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10486/when-will-...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- 8y ago

the_snooze 8y ago

I'm surprised it's that high, given that its biggest uses are just speculation, drugs, and ransomware.

isuckatcoding 8y ago

Please let this mean cheaper GPUs

raverbashing 8y ago

London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down, London Bridge is falling down, my dear lady (ambiguity intended)

the_clarence 8y ago

I honestly don’t know what to make of it. I’m surrounded by a lot of bankers, none of them believe in cryptocurrencies but all of them are focused on the price and have zero understanding of the technology. I’m also surrounded by a lot of blockchain people who are insanely hyped by the future of cryptocurrencies and who have little idea about their current prices. Being in the middle I see 99% of bullshit blockchain stuff, but I’m really hyped by some cryptocurrencies and some of their tech. It is a really interesting field if you ignore the market, but there is also a lot to win/lose if you can predict where the tech will go. Bankers and blockchain people are both the worst people to ask for an opinion. So I might be in the right position to make a guess. There is value. This market might become as strong as the stock market is nowadays. As long as there is hype, there will continue to be a market. If it’s a scam/pyramid sheme/mlm, then it’s an international one and it’s probably not going to stop.

buboard 8y ago
I 'm confused about the position of bankers. Our bank terminated our business account because they found out we ran a cryptocoin price aggregator (oh the horror!). I had to terminate the site (because it was making peanuts and i didn't have the time) to have the account reinstated but i didn't understand the hostility. And this came from a bank that in 2013 crashed and literally stole money from their customer's accounts. This weird situation actually made me a lot more optimistic about the future of crypto, because , you know, banks are thieves too.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > i didn't understand the hostility Cryptocurrencies are an AML nightmare. Ironically, this is a social–not technological–problem. Even on HN, you'll regularly see "I don't have to pay taxes on cryptocurrencies because the authorities can't catch me" comments. This creates regulatory risks. Regulatory risks are regulatory costs. Add to that the credit card fraud (buy cryptocurrencies with a card, charge back; profit) and theft risks, and a cryptocurrency-affiliated customer is more likely to cost a bank rather than make them money. Layer on top of that the time it takes to develop expertise and a blanket ban on everything around cryptocurrencies becomes understandable (versus training employees to comb through them). I don't like this outcome. But I see why a big bank would decide this. Community banks, on the other hand, might be willing to invest the time into understanding why you don't pose a fraud or my-assets-got-stolen-now-I'm-broke risk.

mxschumacher 8y ago

something that I think is commonly misunderstood about Bitcoin is that something can bring a lot of value, without being valuable in a market capitalisation sense. Think Wikipedia and Linux.

Kaveren 8y ago

Amusing that the Bitcoin / Bitcoin Cash split is now even deeper with a split in Bitcoin Cash. Just keep on forking until everyone has their own cryptocurrency, I guess. Aside from that, a point nobody seems to bring up is just how unproven most cryptocurrency technology is from a monetary safety standpoint. It's not just about a 51% blockchain attack. In multiple cases of some of the most popular cryptocurrencies, we've seen danger [0] (these are not the only examples). Nobody talks about this though, so while you're worried about centralized banking, consider for a moment the threat of bad actors to the core of your system. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/09/cryptocurrency-insecurity-iota-bcash-and-too-many-more/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/09/cryptocurrency-insecurity-... Of course many fanatics (some of the same people who still treat John McAfee seriously) will blindly "hodl" by the logic that it's gone up after the post-2013 crash, it must surely skyrocket again. Some people can justify their belief, but many are just playing follow the leader.

xiphias2 8y ago
Please don't confuse Bitcoin with any other cryptocurrency. Bitcoin Core is where developers who treat it responsibly as a multi-billion dollar system are concentrated. It's very hard to submit code to it for a reason (unlike ALL other crypto currencies so far). Just as an example Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency where you can see a page with all security vulnerabilities so far.
- Kaveren 8y ago
  I am aware that Bitcoin is not the same as the myriad of altcoins. Faith in the cryptocurrency market as a whole can affect all prices, and that's half the point. Besides, it's only been what, not quite 10 years since the first Bitcoin implementation, and there's still plenty of ongoing work. I'm sure the developers take their job very seriously, but even so, there's no promise of impenetrability this early. Maybe in another 10 years. Volatility induced by technical failures in the cryptocurrency market should be just as concerning, particularly when people expect / expected the price to stabilize following the surge in price in 2017.

nikk1 8y ago

The price of bitcoin is actually a pretty good metric to observe the Gartner hype cycle in action: from the rise, peak of inflated expectations, and slide into the through of disillusionment. I predict that in 2019 or 2020 the price of bitcoin will slowly begin to come back up once we hit the slope of enlightenment.

scj 8y ago
That assumes Bitcoin is the ideal expression of the near-term cryptocoin. Perhaps Bitcoin will be surpassed for technical reasons to become "The Yahoo! of crypto-currencies" one day. From a speculator's perspective, it'd probably be a riskier but more rewarding bet to make in the cryptocurrency space.

dajohnson89 8y ago

What's the momentum for adoption in places like venezuela?

asdff 8y ago
Nowhere to be found. I kid you not, the government tried to start a nationalized crypto. Many are just using other currencies like the Colombian peso.
- lrns_ 8y ago
  O really? https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins/VES https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins/VES seems to tell a different story. Ofcourse no one wants to buy a 'nationalized (read: centralized) crypto'.

mikenew 8y ago

When it comes to the general public adopting crypto as usable, cash replacement currency, I think there's two issues with adoption. One is of course the network effect. I can't pay with (whatever)coin unless other people use it too. So unless I'm just really excited about crypto and want to pay with it, it's not very useful to me until more people start using it. And considering most of the crypt-hype has worn off, there's less and less people that are just dying to use it. And the other is that people (and businesses) are not going to try things over and over until someone gets it right. Bitcoin is terrible as a currency. I tried paying a friend of mine for a sandwich once, just for fun, and it cost me $10 to send him $10, plus it took almost an hour. Of course it's less bad now, but it's still not great. Valve started accepting bitcion and later stopped. Lots of retailers did too. No one is going to jump on Bitcoin Cash or Monero or whatever, even if they're better, because they were burned pretty hard with Bitcoin. Someone is going to have to genuinely nail it with a currency that is instant, costs almost nothing per transaction, is very easy to use, and they're going to have to make sure everyone knows it. And even then I think it's going to be uphill.

buboard 8y ago
> No one is going to jump on Bitcoin Cash or Monero or whatever, even if they're better I think they will, if it is better. > going to have to genuinely nail it with a currency that is instant, costs almost nothing per transaction, is very easy to use, There are such cryptos. stellar, nano and i m sure also others. And i think monero's anonymity promise is a big selling point too
- waynecochran 8y ago
  Who will use bitcoin without it having a stable value?
  - buboard 8y ago
    The fees are a much bigger problem. Bitcoin is unusable, it s a speculative vehicle for rich people. Zero-fee , or very-low-fee cryptos (i remember stellar, iota, raiblocks, even xrp) would be very usable if they had a large userbase and a very easy way to buy them. One of those has to focus on real world growth, i.e. get many websites to support them by providing a dead-simple payment solution. I think there are ways to make them less volatile. For one, don't list them in any crypto-to-crypto exchanges, instead allow only dollar cash-ins/outs, or limit the amount that can be exchanged to some fixed value like $100 / hour. Speculation and greed is limiting the prospects of most coins.

johnwheeler 8y ago

So, it looks like this post got ripped off the front page. Question: was the Bitcoin breaks $20000 post ripped off the front page last year?

newnewpdro 8y ago

There's a lot of posts here questioning the utility of cryptocurrency when we already have cash. I sometimes ask myself the same question, as none of my day-to-day transactions would benefit from cryptocurrency (or even offer it as an option). But I'm a cantankerous old man who just goes to the grocery store and gas station, not some malleable young whipper-snapper shaping the future, for better or worse, with what I participate in. However, I recently listened to a Reply-All episode [1] where a young girl casually received $100 in bitcoin from an anonymous individual mid-episode, a sort of restitution for having her account stolen, while corresponding with the thief on discord. It took practically no time, and gave me some pause to consider how this might be a glimpse of the future. The exchange could have been done through PayPal or something else with less anonymity, but it wasn't, they used bitcoin. Perhaps it was staged, perhaps she was primed to have a coinbase account already by the show hosts knowing this would happen, I don't know. If it was an authentically candid situation, it would be somewhat remarkable that she was already prepared to accept the payment with zero friction other than asking "It's super long, right?" when asked for her bitcoin address. So clearly there's already utility/convenience for some people today, and the fact that this group includes youngsters could mean it's just be a matter of their becoming mature adults continuing to use cryptocurrency before it takes over in a big way. Here's the excerpt from the transcript for the curious and lazy: ----8<----8<----8<----8<----- ALEX: And then (clears throat) he was like, “Look, do you have a bitcoin account?” And she was like, “Yeah.” KEVIN: I sold the Snapchat for 100 so I’ll just send that directly back to you. So um, you can do whatever you want with that since it is rightfully yours. ALEX: Lizzie, do you have your Bitcoin account number handy? LIZZIE: Yeah. ALEX: Do you want to drop it into– KEVIN: Yeah, let me– LIZZIE: It’s super long, right? KEVIN: Yeah, yeah, yeah no. Post it. Yeah, yeah. It starts, uh, it’s usually with a three. You have coinbase, right? LIZZIE: Yeah. KEVIN: Yeah, let me boot up my ledger. Okay. [typing] Alright I sent it. LIZZIE: Yup. KEVIN: Got it? LIZZIE: Yeah, thank you. KEVIN: Cool. Yeah, of course. Yeah you can do whatever you want with that. If you wanted to donate it, go for it. And if you want to keep it and buy groceries go for it. LIZZIE: Awesome. ----8<----8<----8<----8<----- [1] https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/130-lizard https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/130-lizard [1.mp3] https://traffic.megaphone.fm/GLT8967905844.mp3?updated=1541657837 https://traffic.megaphone.fm/GLT8967905844.mp3?updated=15416...

buboard 8y ago

This is good news, very good. I hope it psychologically affects people and that it lasts long enough that people will stop focusing on speculation and pumps, and instead focus on adoption and expansion.

forthefuture 8y ago
I’d go even further: I hope it keeps falling until a better crypto currency is worth more. Bitcoin even existing proves the market is more speculative than functional.
- buboard 8y ago
  there does seem to be some disentanglement from bitcoin: https://coinmarketcap.com/ https://coinmarketcap.com/