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It's solving a much much bigger problem than electronic payments (which was never really a problem in the first place unless you're overly concerned about priva

It's solving a much much bigger problem than electronic payments (which was never really a problem in the first place unless you're overly concerned about privacy). We have a major problem with inflation in this world, you can't just put your money somewhere and have it retain its value anymore and it hasn't been like that for years, we're forced to play the stock market game which just consolidates power to big corporations and leaves a lot of people all over the world left behind - bitcoin actually solves that problem, and just to drive that point home, if you'd invested in bitcoin and held during just about any given 365 day period throughout its ten year lifespan you'd have likely beaten the stock market in gains by a lot, that helps a ton of people, especially young people who are saddled by debt. We have countries that have no reliable form of currency at all, again bitcoin solves that problem. I agree with some of the sentiment of the article, bitcoin's energy consumption is something to keep an eye on and if we can seamlessly move to an algorithm that's greener then so be it but you have to realize the tremendous amount of good that bitcoin is doing for the world and will likely continue to do as it becomes scarcer and scarcer, don't knock a technology that can single handedly lift a continent like Africa out of poverty. *edit: Nothing like defending bitcoin on Hacker News and getting downvoted to oblivion, hey rather than downvote why don't you point out exactly what you disagree with so we can have a discussion

puranjay 7y ago
> We have countries that have no reliable form of currency at all, again bitcoin solves that problem Countries that don't have reliable forms of currency also don't have reliable power or internet access.
- sodafountan 7y ago
  and yet all you need is a simple phone and access to these satellites: https://blockstream.com/satellite/ https://blockstream.com/satellite/ I agree the infrastructure isn't there yet but problems with national currency is a government issue, infrastructure issues can usually be solved but governmental issues tend to be a lot harder and all countries that rely on fiat currency are subject to inflation
  - puranjay 7y ago
    Countries that don't have reliable currencies are countries like South Sudan and Somalia. Do you really expect illiterate people (3 in 4 women in Somalia are illiterate, 1 in 2 men) to use Blockstream? You can tell that Bitcoin, and its advocates, are from developed countries. No one who has lived in a developing country and seen crushing poverty would make such arguments.
    - RidingPegasus 7y ago
      Given the choice would you suggest a person from somewhere such as Venezuela keep their personal savings in Bitcoin or Venezuelan bolívars?
      - atq2119 7y ago
        This is a false dichotomy, since USD are very widely spread on South America.
      - paulmd 7y ago
        I'd suggest keeping it in USD or other hard currency. Bitcoin provides no advantages in obtaining/transacting hard currency relative to other currencies, nor any stability while holding it. Either way you are going to a black market, and you are paying real, unaffordable conversion rates compared to transacting in (worthless) hyperinflationary currency. The bitcoin guy is not going to accept 1 Zimbabwe dollar to 1 USD any more than your black market dealer who has USD. The real currency conversion rate is the problem, not the act of obtaining actual hard currency.
        zadler 7y ago
        USD bills can’t be easily transferred over the Internet.
        paulmd 7y ago
        look at this scrub who's never heard of venmo yes, there are a lot of fungible ways to transfer hard currency over the internet... once you acquire it. again: acquiring it is the hard part, because nobody wants to trade a zimbabwe dollar for a USD. Bitcoin does nothing to help your zimbabwe dollars be less worthless than they are in USD, therefore they don't help the currency conversion process at all.
- zygimantasdev 7y ago
  I would argue all currencies are unreliable ,because they go down in value due increase of supply. Throwing 2-4% every year sounds awful
  - atq2119 7y ago
    This gets repeated over and over again, but the causality of this has never been proven, as incredible as that may sound. Yes, the causality of "create too much money -> inflation" is plausible (but note the emphasis on "too much"). However, we live in a world of endogenous money, where money is largely created by commercial banks in the form of loans to private entities. When prices increase, those loans get bigger. So there is also the causality "inflation -> create more money". At the same time, there are other factors that can drive inflation, such as workers and companies exercising price setting power (which Econ 101 likes to pretend doesn't exist, but plays an important role in the real world). So yeah, the causality that you're casually throwing out there hasn't actually been proven as the driving factor here. At the same time, the widespread belief in it and similar misunderstandings causes us as a society to make extremely damaging macroeconomic policy decisions, in particular the decision to attempt to fight recessions using monetary policy instead of fiscal policy.
    - londons_explore 7y ago
      Bitcoins rate of coin creation is also ~7% per year at the moment...
      - tromp 7y ago
        No; it's approximately 3%. We had 4 years with 4x the reward, 4 years with 2x the reward, and about 3 years with the current reward, which makes for 1/(4x4+4x2+3) = 1/27 inflation.
    - paulmd 7y ago
      bingo, money is enormously more complicated than microecon suggests. Micro-econ thinks Keynesian economics are full of shit, yet they stimulated us right out of a micro-economic hole during the 30s.
- biolurker1 7y ago
  this will change with satellite internet coming for the masses and will make Bitcoin really useful in war regimes
arcticbull 7y ago
> We have a major problem with inflation in this world, you can't just put your money somewhere and have it retain its value anymore and it hasn't been like that for years, we're forced to play the stock market game which just consolidates power to big corporations and leaves a lot of people all over the world left behind... The Bank of Canada found that a Bitcoin based economy would have the same amount of drag as a 48% rate of inflation [1]. A 2% rate of inflation is trivial in the near term, and in the long term encourages productive allocation of capital. Inflation literally only matters to people sitting on cash -- and that's the point! If you invest it in anything inflation stops mattering and the constant-dollar return starts to matter. [1] https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/swp2019-40.pdf https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/swp20...
- gl00pp 7y ago
  So you're essentially saying: "If you have cash, you should gamble it by investing it in stocks or business." but that's risking the money I earned. I don't want to risk it, I earned it, I just want to save it and not have it evaporate over the years.
fierarul 7y ago
> we're forced to play the stock market game which just consolidates power to big corporations and leaves a lot of people all over the world left behind We at least know the names of big corporations. Otherwise "we're forced to play the BitCoin game which just consolidates power to big anonymous holders and leaves a lot of people all over the world left behind". 85% of the BitCoins have already been mined. It's beyond the reach of people to participate in mining. What's left is pure speculation, based on the available supply. There's also a "culture" of HODL which means the actual exchange rate is determined by very few (big) sellers.
- gl00pp 7y ago
  Even if the 'BitCoin' <sic> is distributed exactly the same as money is now the 80/20 Where 20% of the population control 80% of the money. Wouldn't it be better if your money (that was BitCoin <sic>) increased 2% a year instead of decreased 2% a year?

puranjay 7y ago

> We have countries that have no reliable form of currency at all, again bitcoin solves that problem Countries that don't have reliable forms of currency also don't have reliable power or internet access.

sodafountan 7y ago
and yet all you need is a simple phone and access to these satellites: https://blockstream.com/satellite/ https://blockstream.com/satellite/ I agree the infrastructure isn't there yet but problems with national currency is a government issue, infrastructure issues can usually be solved but governmental issues tend to be a lot harder and all countries that rely on fiat currency are subject to inflation
- puranjay 7y ago
  Countries that don't have reliable currencies are countries like South Sudan and Somalia. Do you really expect illiterate people (3 in 4 women in Somalia are illiterate, 1 in 2 men) to use Blockstream? You can tell that Bitcoin, and its advocates, are from developed countries. No one who has lived in a developing country and seen crushing poverty would make such arguments.
  - RidingPegasus 7y ago
    Given the choice would you suggest a person from somewhere such as Venezuela keep their personal savings in Bitcoin or Venezuelan bolívars?
    - atq2119 7y ago
      This is a false dichotomy, since USD are very widely spread on South America.
    - paulmd 7y ago
      I'd suggest keeping it in USD or other hard currency. Bitcoin provides no advantages in obtaining/transacting hard currency relative to other currencies, nor any stability while holding it. Either way you are going to a black market, and you are paying real, unaffordable conversion rates compared to transacting in (worthless) hyperinflationary currency. The bitcoin guy is not going to accept 1 Zimbabwe dollar to 1 USD any more than your black market dealer who has USD. The real currency conversion rate is the problem, not the act of obtaining actual hard currency.
      - zadler 7y ago
        USD bills can’t be easily transferred over the Internet.
        paulmd 7y ago
        look at this scrub who's never heard of venmo yes, there are a lot of fungible ways to transfer hard currency over the internet... once you acquire it. again: acquiring it is the hard part, because nobody wants to trade a zimbabwe dollar for a USD. Bitcoin does nothing to help your zimbabwe dollars be less worthless than they are in USD, therefore they don't help the currency conversion process at all.
zygimantasdev 7y ago
I would argue all currencies are unreliable ,because they go down in value due increase of supply. Throwing 2-4% every year sounds awful
- atq2119 7y ago
  This gets repeated over and over again, but the causality of this has never been proven, as incredible as that may sound. Yes, the causality of "create too much money -> inflation" is plausible (but note the emphasis on "too much"). However, we live in a world of endogenous money, where money is largely created by commercial banks in the form of loans to private entities. When prices increase, those loans get bigger. So there is also the causality "inflation -> create more money". At the same time, there are other factors that can drive inflation, such as workers and companies exercising price setting power (which Econ 101 likes to pretend doesn't exist, but plays an important role in the real world). So yeah, the causality that you're casually throwing out there hasn't actually been proven as the driving factor here. At the same time, the widespread belief in it and similar misunderstandings causes us as a society to make extremely damaging macroeconomic policy decisions, in particular the decision to attempt to fight recessions using monetary policy instead of fiscal policy.
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    Bitcoins rate of coin creation is also ~7% per year at the moment...
    - tromp 7y ago
      No; it's approximately 3%. We had 4 years with 4x the reward, 4 years with 2x the reward, and about 3 years with the current reward, which makes for 1/(4x4+4x2+3) = 1/27 inflation.
  - paulmd 7y ago
    bingo, money is enormously more complicated than microecon suggests. Micro-econ thinks Keynesian economics are full of shit, yet they stimulated us right out of a micro-economic hole during the 30s.
biolurker1 7y ago
this will change with satellite internet coming for the masses and will make Bitcoin really useful in war regimes

arcticbull 7y ago

> We have a major problem with inflation in this world, you can't just put your money somewhere and have it retain its value anymore and it hasn't been like that for years, we're forced to play the stock market game which just consolidates power to big corporations and leaves a lot of people all over the world left behind... The Bank of Canada found that a Bitcoin based economy would have the same amount of drag as a 48% rate of inflation [1]. A 2% rate of inflation is trivial in the near term, and in the long term encourages productive allocation of capital. Inflation literally only matters to people sitting on cash -- and that's the point! If you invest it in anything inflation stops mattering and the constant-dollar return starts to matter. [1] https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/swp2019-40.pdf https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/swp20...

gl00pp 7y ago
So you're essentially saying: "If you have cash, you should gamble it by investing it in stocks or business." but that's risking the money I earned. I don't want to risk it, I earned it, I just want to save it and not have it evaporate over the years.

fierarul 7y ago

> we're forced to play the stock market game which just consolidates power to big corporations and leaves a lot of people all over the world left behind We at least know the names of big corporations. Otherwise "we're forced to play the BitCoin game which just consolidates power to big anonymous holders and leaves a lot of people all over the world left behind". 85% of the BitCoins have already been mined. It's beyond the reach of people to participate in mining. What's left is pure speculation, based on the available supply. There's also a "culture" of HODL which means the actual exchange rate is determined by very few (big) sellers.

gl00pp 7y ago
Even if the 'BitCoin' <sic> is distributed exactly the same as money is now the 80/20 Where 20% of the population control 80% of the money. Wouldn't it be better if your money (that was BitCoin <sic>) increased 2% a year instead of decreased 2% a year?