7 ms·

What Is Bitcoin: Internet’s Native Money or Asset for Speculation?

29 points by likhuta 7y ago

Doches 7y ago
By Betteridge's law of headlines: _No_.
- Darmody 7y ago
  I think that does work only with questions that require an affirmative or negative answer only.
- omani 7y ago
  no. only if one question is asked which you can only answer with either yes or no.
jandrese 7y ago
I can't even load the site due to some issue with their Cert, but based on the headline it's the latter. Bitcoin as a currency is hugely problematic, while as an asset its inherent deflationary nature makes it surprisingly safe as an investment, assuming you have plenty of time to wait out the enormous volatility of the system. Sure it's basically a giant pyramid scheme, but since everyone is incentivized so strongly to keep holding and not selling it has remained remarkably stable as far as pyramid schemes go.
- sunshinerag 7y ago
  I don't think it is inherently better than any other pyramid schemes like the dollars. The only difference between the two in terms of long term holding is in the latter you are forced to.
- the_gastropod 7y ago
  > while as an asset its inherent deflationary nature makes it surprisingly safe as an investment My toenail clippings have an inherently deflationary nature. Yet, nobody's knocking down my door to collect them. What gives?
  - gruez 7y ago
    >My toenail clippings have an inherently deflationary nature. how can they be deflationary (unless you're dead, or don't have toes) when they're growing 24/7?
    - the_gastropod 7y ago
      Yea, exactly—you kind of answered your own question: I'm mortal. So like Bitcoin, there is a finite amount they will increase. That makes it a great investment opportunity, right?
      - oarsinsync 7y ago
        And there are lots of alt-nails out there too. The problem is that it's not trivial to distinguish between your bitnails and all the other altnails, so you have a massive counterfeiting problem the moment any real value gets attached to your bitnails. (So, no, I won't be investing.)
  - drcode 7y ago
    It's hard to securely transfer your toenail clippings over the internet, meaning they have no advantages over fiat currency. If you could somehow create a new technology that would allow your specific toenail clippings to be easily transferred over the internet (or could give your toenail clippings some other substantive advantage as a currency over traditional fiat currency) they would likely become very valuable very quickly.
Darmody 7y ago
I liked the idea of bitcoin for a while but I think it's pure garbage now. Not only because the blockchain technology has evolved a lot and you can make better networks with it, but because it's being used only to make very few people very rich. There are others DLT (Distributed Ledger Technologies) far more advanced, with real life use cases and without that monstruosity called Proof of Work.
- Darmody 7y ago
  I forgot to add that using it as an asset is not the best idea. It has some nice features that makes it look good as a long term investment but it's heavily manipulated by big whales, mostly with Tether. Sad but true.
exabrial 7y ago
No. Please use Stellar/Lumens for that.
- companyhen 7y ago
  You mean use DAI for that.
HashThis 7y ago
I had a big insight on bitcoin: * "Sound money" groups have one set of wishes of what will happen to the US Dollar * Some parts of the population want money printing to pay for services. * WallStreet likes money printing US Dollars to bail them out. * Everyone has an agenda for US Dollars. Here is what happens to bitcoin: * Bitcoin (and Ethereum) were given a historic strategic value by the US Gov because they get grand fathered in that they are not required to have KYC & AML. Future crypto tokens will, and they will be held back. * Bitcoin is where citizens can turn to, when money printing doesn't match their agenda. What is amazing, is that they don't need to get approval from the full citizen base. This is great for citizens that are hurt by money printing. Right now, it is for speculation for investors. But the investors are investing towards more usage as a currency in the future.
- api 7y ago
  Why would you spend or invest a currency that magically goes up whenever there is demand for it? The hard money aspect of Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies guarantees that they will be speculation devices that will behave like iterative Ponzi-like games of chance (even if they were not explicitly intended as such). Any increase in their use as currencies will drive their value up which will paradoxically discourage their use as a currency, leading to boom-bust cycles. These will be quite extreme as Bitcoin and its ilk are much more deflationary than precious metals or other traditional commodity monies. They are not only absolutely finite but are subject to breakage (permanent loss) due to lost secret keys. This is why the entire world rejected hard asset money and fiat money pegged to hard assets. It's bad for the actual economy where actual economy is defined as actually doing things in the real world. Money is a means to an end not an end in itself.
  - whb07 7y ago
    Because what you're saying is some dreamland example everyone always repeats like a scratched disc. Why would you buy a CPU today when you know next year it will be at least 1/2 price or twice more performant? Why buy a new phone today when tomorrow it will be cheaper? Why marry a woman/guy today when you know tomorrow there will be a younger and better looking person out there? Thats what you're saying. It doesn't hold true. I want something TODAY, not tomorrow, or next week. So if i had some gold or bitcoin, i would exchange some of it for the thing i want. Lastly, some of the bitcoin-USD payment processors saw the largest volumes DURING the bubble of Dec 2017. What that means is as people got richer they started buying goods with their highly appreciated bitcoin.
einpoklum 7y ago
It's a pyramid scheme. Blockchain as a technology isn't, although distributed ledgering isn't just blockchain. But Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme.
- _eht 7y ago
  Bitcoin aside, for your own personal financial safety I recommend researching what a pyramid scheme is.
- qertoip 7y ago
  It's not because it does not promise any returns. In fact, you won't even find "invest" word on the website. There is zero promise, nor even implied, about future value.
mundo 7y ago
Equivocating over the technical definition of "money" won't obscure the plain fact that it's been out for a decade and you can't buy stuff with it. More generally, the whole point of BTC was supposed to be that it would be free of external control. Now, everyone seems resigned to the fact that the only way to scale it is off-chain ledgers run by financial corporations. Doesn't seem to be much more to say about it.
- _eht 7y ago
  I don’t know about the rest of what you’re saying, but I buy stuff with it. Have for the last decade or so... Take that for what it’s worth, but yeah, you’re wrong.
  - the_gastropod 7y ago
    People buy stuff with Chuck E. Cheese tokens too (and I suspect more goods are bought with _them_ than Bitcoin). It's still a pretty rare phenomenon.
  - mundo 7y ago
    "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
    - _eht 7y ago
      Not criticizing, just letting you know that the fact you stated is false.
    - LMYahooTFY 7y ago
      If you're going to reference the rules, you might put more effort into articulating the nuances rather than stating it as an absolute, as what you stated is clearly false.
      - mundo 7y ago
        Alice: "You can't buy stuff with it." Bob: "That's technically false! The truth is you mostly can't buy stuff with it." Whatever; the point stands. Separate from that, you might put some thought in to why the HN guidelines say "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation" instead of "Please try to phrase your comments so carefully that there is only one possible interpretation."
adaisadais 7y ago
I would highly recommend Felix Martin’s “Money: The Unauthorized Biography” to anyone who is interested in the underlying subject of money. Martin’s basic argument is that money is simply a social technology. I don’t believe that bitcoin is the internet’s native “money” but I do believe it is the internet’s native “gold.” I believe future currencies (as some currently do) will peg their value to Bitcoin. However, once the first major corporation begins accepting bitcoin then it just might as well be what we classically view as “money”. https://www.amazon.com/Money-Unauthorized-Biography-Coinage-Cryptocurrencies/dp/0345803558 https://www.amazon.com/Money-Unauthorized-Biography-Coinage-...
GuB-42 7y ago
For now, you can't do much with Bitcoin besides buying drugs and paying ransoms. But people expect it to become more important in the future, and that's the main reason why they buy Bitcoin. So, it is like 99% speculation and 1% "internet money", a big part of that 1% is for illegal activity.
- bsurmanski 7y ago
  The main reason its only for illegal activities right now is because (for almost every case) it provides no advantage over using a credit card. The biggest problem is the user now owns liability. With a credit card, if someone steals your card you can call up the provider and get the charges reversed. Without a centralized authority, if something goes wrong with your bitcoin account your out of luck. Other than that, its somewhat inconvenient to get your hands on it. BTC exchanges feel a little shady. And it's not as private as you'd think. All of your transactions are public. On the plus side, you don't need a credit card provider to bless your business, so sketchy or illegal businesses are free to transact online now. And lastly, it's decoupled from any one government. But that's not a benefit unless you live in a volatile region.
- tfang17 7y ago
  Cash is used for illegal activity at a scale that dwarfs Bitcoin.
  - rkoten 7y ago
    True, and cash is used for any activity at a scale that dwarfs Bitcoin. It makes sense to compare their ratio of illegal to all transactions in this case.
- qertoip 7y ago
  Bitcoin is massively used as a remittance infrastructure tool by Venezuelans. See this report be Venezuelan citizen: https://stephanlivera.com/episode/143/ https://stephanlivera.com/episode/143/
Aaronstotle 7y ago
Bitcoin is terrible for transacting (slow, expensive, traceable), but I think its use case will be to provide a store of value, hence the "digital gold" description. Monero is closer to Internet's native money imo, and that doesn't seem to have nearly the drastic swings that BTC has had in the last few months. That being said, use case for store of value is difficult since whales can manipulate the price so easily.
- jmeyer2k 7y ago
  It doesn't have to be terrible for transacting though. There are tons of ways to make Bitcoin better, but nobody wants to try them.
  - brink 7y ago
    Why make bitcoin better when you can just reimplement it from the ground up? Look at Stellar. Transactions take <5 seconds and the chain is kind to the environment with trust based transactions rather than POW.
    - companyhen 7y ago
      Look at how centralized Stellar is and then you have your answer for <5s tx
      - jmeyer2k 7y ago
        There is the question of, is trustlessness even needed or is federation enough?
  - wtsnz 7y ago
    the Bitcoin SV project is trying them out https://bitcoinsv.io/ https://bitcoinsv.io/
    - qertoip 7y ago
      Bitcoin SV is a scam created by well known fraudster Craig Wright.
brighton36 7y ago
You know, if there's a ticker symbol at the top left of the article ... that's probably a vote for speculation.
speedgoose 7y ago
I may be wrong but I think it's too risky to put so much value into crypto currencies before we have a proof that P≠NP. I also hope that P=NP.
- tromp 7y ago
  Given how extremely useful public key technology is, I certainly hope that P ≠ NP (as well as the stronger BPP ≠ NP).
schmichael 7y ago
None of the items in "Bitcoin’s Advantages Over Traditional Money" are without significant caveats: > Bitcoin’s supply is limited to 21 million coins... Until it's not. There are already discussions at the highest levels of the Bitcoin community to raise the cap[0]. Also what are forks and new coins if not new currency in circulation? The supply of "bitcoin" doubled when BCH forked. The supply doubled again when BSV forked. > Low and predictable inflation rate. See caveats above. Also the inflation rate has appeared to have 0 impact on the price of BTC so far, so it doesn't appear to be a meaningful metric. Payments for goods and services using BTC are almost always denominated in fiat with BTC being used as the medium of exchange (eg a seller wants $50 for some pills but accepts payment in $50 worth of BTC). BTC's inflation rate is meaningless in this scenario. > Lack of a central authority. This makes Bitcoin resistant to censorship and voluntary manipulation of its parameters. This is arguably somewhat true. However, there are very few meaningfully sized Bitcoin miners, and it's not unreasonable to assume a single miner may have or be able to have >51% of the hashrate if they desired. The core development team is also fairly small with a relatively small number of people and organizations controlling what ships. As for censorship: exchanges censor bitcoin addresses and manipulate (eg lose, socialize losses) balances all the time. As long as bitcoin is beholden to fiat for its value, it's far from censorship proof. > Low transaction costs and acceptable processing speed. "acceptable processing speed" is laughable from a retail transaction perspective. "Low transaction cost" is arguably somewhat true, but there's also times of fee volatility as well as a times of high risk if you don't pay enough fees to get processed quickly. Resubmitting transactions with higher fees is possible but complex and imperfect. > Security and irreversibility of transactions "Security of transactions" is arguably true in the technical sense that the PKI protecting a transaction is so far unbreakable. However that's just one attack vector: it's untrue and meaningless for the vast majority of financial attack vectors. Sure double spends are exceptionally hard, but theft is rampant, loss due to technical error/bugs is common, and then irreversibility is a liability not an advantage. [0] https://twitter.com/mhluongo/status/1092559017178734594 https://twitter.com/mhluongo/status/1092559017178734594
k_vi 7y ago
Bitcoin value is in it's potential to become a savings technology(store of value, digital gold, hard money) on the internet. Decentralisation is a spectrum, expensive and slow is intentional in it's design to provide the highest level of security and trustlesness. If you want fast and cheap transactions then blockchain is not the answer. If Bitcoin goes mainstream, layer 0 will be used for large value transactions. Rest will be moved off chain to custodial wallets and on probably a much smaller scale lightning, liquid and ethereum. Compared to fiat, transparency and opting out of centralized systems are easier. The real question is not whether Bitcoin is a good SoV but if Austrian economics and sound money are a better alternative to our present economic system[1]. Either way, I believe Bitcoin might become the safe-haven asset that people could fall back on in times of inflation[2]. I think the following arguments against Bitcoin are not useful. - X blockchain is faster than bitcoin. - PoW is wasteful. - Bitcoin is used for drugs so cannot be money. - Whales can manipulate the price. [1] http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/whyaust.htm http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/whyaust.htm [2] https://news.bitcoin.com/countries-suffering-from-rapid-inflation-show-significant-demand-for-cryptos/ https://news.bitcoin.com/countries-suffering-from-rapid-infl...

29 points by likhuta 7y ago

Doches 7y ago

By Betteridge's law of headlines: _No_.

Darmody 7y ago
I think that does work only with questions that require an affirmative or negative answer only.
omani 7y ago
no. only if one question is asked which you can only answer with either yes or no.

jandrese 7y ago

I can't even load the site due to some issue with their Cert, but based on the headline it's the latter. Bitcoin as a currency is hugely problematic, while as an asset its inherent deflationary nature makes it surprisingly safe as an investment, assuming you have plenty of time to wait out the enormous volatility of the system. Sure it's basically a giant pyramid scheme, but since everyone is incentivized so strongly to keep holding and not selling it has remained remarkably stable as far as pyramid schemes go.

sunshinerag 7y ago
I don't think it is inherently better than any other pyramid schemes like the dollars. The only difference between the two in terms of long term holding is in the latter you are forced to.
the_gastropod 7y ago
> while as an asset its inherent deflationary nature makes it surprisingly safe as an investment My toenail clippings have an inherently deflationary nature. Yet, nobody's knocking down my door to collect them. What gives?
- gruez 7y ago
  >My toenail clippings have an inherently deflationary nature. how can they be deflationary (unless you're dead, or don't have toes) when they're growing 24/7?
  - the_gastropod 7y ago
    Yea, exactly—you kind of answered your own question: I'm mortal. So like Bitcoin, there is a finite amount they will increase. That makes it a great investment opportunity, right?
    - oarsinsync 7y ago
      And there are lots of alt-nails out there too. The problem is that it's not trivial to distinguish between your bitnails and all the other altnails, so you have a massive counterfeiting problem the moment any real value gets attached to your bitnails. (So, no, I won't be investing.)
- drcode 7y ago
  It's hard to securely transfer your toenail clippings over the internet, meaning they have no advantages over fiat currency. If you could somehow create a new technology that would allow your specific toenail clippings to be easily transferred over the internet (or could give your toenail clippings some other substantive advantage as a currency over traditional fiat currency) they would likely become very valuable very quickly.

Darmody 7y ago

I liked the idea of bitcoin for a while but I think it's pure garbage now. Not only because the blockchain technology has evolved a lot and you can make better networks with it, but because it's being used only to make very few people very rich. There are others DLT (Distributed Ledger Technologies) far more advanced, with real life use cases and without that monstruosity called Proof of Work.

Darmody 7y ago
I forgot to add that using it as an asset is not the best idea. It has some nice features that makes it look good as a long term investment but it's heavily manipulated by big whales, mostly with Tether. Sad but true.

exabrial 7y ago

No. Please use Stellar/Lumens for that.

companyhen 7y ago
You mean use DAI for that.

HashThis 7y ago

I had a big insight on bitcoin: * "Sound money" groups have one set of wishes of what will happen to the US Dollar * Some parts of the population want money printing to pay for services. * WallStreet likes money printing US Dollars to bail them out. * Everyone has an agenda for US Dollars. Here is what happens to bitcoin: * Bitcoin (and Ethereum) were given a historic strategic value by the US Gov because they get grand fathered in that they are not required to have KYC & AML. Future crypto tokens will, and they will be held back. * Bitcoin is where citizens can turn to, when money printing doesn't match their agenda. What is amazing, is that they don't need to get approval from the full citizen base. This is great for citizens that are hurt by money printing. Right now, it is for speculation for investors. But the investors are investing towards more usage as a currency in the future.

api 7y ago
Why would you spend or invest a currency that magically goes up whenever there is demand for it? The hard money aspect of Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies guarantees that they will be speculation devices that will behave like iterative Ponzi-like games of chance (even if they were not explicitly intended as such). Any increase in their use as currencies will drive their value up which will paradoxically discourage their use as a currency, leading to boom-bust cycles. These will be quite extreme as Bitcoin and its ilk are much more deflationary than precious metals or other traditional commodity monies. They are not only absolutely finite but are subject to breakage (permanent loss) due to lost secret keys. This is why the entire world rejected hard asset money and fiat money pegged to hard assets. It's bad for the actual economy where actual economy is defined as actually doing things in the real world. Money is a means to an end not an end in itself.
- whb07 7y ago
  Because what you're saying is some dreamland example everyone always repeats like a scratched disc. Why would you buy a CPU today when you know next year it will be at least 1/2 price or twice more performant? Why buy a new phone today when tomorrow it will be cheaper? Why marry a woman/guy today when you know tomorrow there will be a younger and better looking person out there? Thats what you're saying. It doesn't hold true. I want something TODAY, not tomorrow, or next week. So if i had some gold or bitcoin, i would exchange some of it for the thing i want. Lastly, some of the bitcoin-USD payment processors saw the largest volumes DURING the bubble of Dec 2017. What that means is as people got richer they started buying goods with their highly appreciated bitcoin.

einpoklum 7y ago

It's a pyramid scheme. Blockchain as a technology isn't, although distributed ledgering isn't just blockchain. But Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme.

_eht 7y ago
Bitcoin aside, for your own personal financial safety I recommend researching what a pyramid scheme is.
qertoip 7y ago
It's not because it does not promise any returns. In fact, you won't even find "invest" word on the website. There is zero promise, nor even implied, about future value.

mundo 7y ago

Equivocating over the technical definition of "money" won't obscure the plain fact that it's been out for a decade and you can't buy stuff with it. More generally, the whole point of BTC was supposed to be that it would be free of external control. Now, everyone seems resigned to the fact that the only way to scale it is off-chain ledgers run by financial corporations. Doesn't seem to be much more to say about it.

_eht 7y ago
I don’t know about the rest of what you’re saying, but I buy stuff with it. Have for the last decade or so... Take that for what it’s worth, but yeah, you’re wrong.
- the_gastropod 7y ago
  People buy stuff with Chuck E. Cheese tokens too (and I suspect more goods are bought with _them_ than Bitcoin). It's still a pretty rare phenomenon.
- mundo 7y ago
  "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
  - _eht 7y ago
    Not criticizing, just letting you know that the fact you stated is false.
  - LMYahooTFY 7y ago
    If you're going to reference the rules, you might put more effort into articulating the nuances rather than stating it as an absolute, as what you stated is clearly false.
    - mundo 7y ago
      Alice: "You can't buy stuff with it." Bob: "That's technically false! The truth is you mostly can't buy stuff with it." Whatever; the point stands. Separate from that, you might put some thought in to why the HN guidelines say "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation" instead of "Please try to phrase your comments so carefully that there is only one possible interpretation."

adaisadais 7y ago

I would highly recommend Felix Martin’s “Money: The Unauthorized Biography” to anyone who is interested in the underlying subject of money. Martin’s basic argument is that money is simply a social technology. I don’t believe that bitcoin is the internet’s native “money” but I do believe it is the internet’s native “gold.” I believe future currencies (as some currently do) will peg their value to Bitcoin. However, once the first major corporation begins accepting bitcoin then it just might as well be what we classically view as “money”. https://www.amazon.com/Money-Unauthorized-Biography-Coinage-Cryptocurrencies/dp/0345803558 https://www.amazon.com/Money-Unauthorized-Biography-Coinage-...

GuB-42 7y ago

For now, you can't do much with Bitcoin besides buying drugs and paying ransoms. But people expect it to become more important in the future, and that's the main reason why they buy Bitcoin. So, it is like 99% speculation and 1% "internet money", a big part of that 1% is for illegal activity.

bsurmanski 7y ago
The main reason its only for illegal activities right now is because (for almost every case) it provides no advantage over using a credit card. The biggest problem is the user now owns liability. With a credit card, if someone steals your card you can call up the provider and get the charges reversed. Without a centralized authority, if something goes wrong with your bitcoin account your out of luck. Other than that, its somewhat inconvenient to get your hands on it. BTC exchanges feel a little shady. And it's not as private as you'd think. All of your transactions are public. On the plus side, you don't need a credit card provider to bless your business, so sketchy or illegal businesses are free to transact online now. And lastly, it's decoupled from any one government. But that's not a benefit unless you live in a volatile region.
tfang17 7y ago
Cash is used for illegal activity at a scale that dwarfs Bitcoin.
- rkoten 7y ago
  True, and cash is used for any activity at a scale that dwarfs Bitcoin. It makes sense to compare their ratio of illegal to all transactions in this case.
qertoip 7y ago
Bitcoin is massively used as a remittance infrastructure tool by Venezuelans. See this report be Venezuelan citizen: https://stephanlivera.com/episode/143/ https://stephanlivera.com/episode/143/

Aaronstotle 7y ago

Bitcoin is terrible for transacting (slow, expensive, traceable), but I think its use case will be to provide a store of value, hence the "digital gold" description. Monero is closer to Internet's native money imo, and that doesn't seem to have nearly the drastic swings that BTC has had in the last few months. That being said, use case for store of value is difficult since whales can manipulate the price so easily.

jmeyer2k 7y ago
It doesn't have to be terrible for transacting though. There are tons of ways to make Bitcoin better, but nobody wants to try them.
- brink 7y ago
  Why make bitcoin better when you can just reimplement it from the ground up? Look at Stellar. Transactions take <5 seconds and the chain is kind to the environment with trust based transactions rather than POW.
  - companyhen 7y ago
    Look at how centralized Stellar is and then you have your answer for <5s tx
    - jmeyer2k 7y ago
      There is the question of, is trustlessness even needed or is federation enough?
- wtsnz 7y ago
  the Bitcoin SV project is trying them out https://bitcoinsv.io/ https://bitcoinsv.io/
  - qertoip 7y ago
    Bitcoin SV is a scam created by well known fraudster Craig Wright.

brighton36 7y ago

You know, if there's a ticker symbol at the top left of the article ... that's probably a vote for speculation.

speedgoose 7y ago

I may be wrong but I think it's too risky to put so much value into crypto currencies before we have a proof that P≠NP. I also hope that P=NP.

tromp 7y ago
Given how extremely useful public key technology is, I certainly hope that P ≠ NP (as well as the stronger BPP ≠ NP).

schmichael 7y ago

None of the items in "Bitcoin’s Advantages Over Traditional Money" are without significant caveats: > Bitcoin’s supply is limited to 21 million coins... Until it's not. There are already discussions at the highest levels of the Bitcoin community to raise the cap[0]. Also what are forks and new coins if not new currency in circulation? The supply of "bitcoin" doubled when BCH forked. The supply doubled again when BSV forked. > Low and predictable inflation rate. See caveats above. Also the inflation rate has appeared to have 0 impact on the price of BTC so far, so it doesn't appear to be a meaningful metric. Payments for goods and services using BTC are almost always denominated in fiat with BTC being used as the medium of exchange (eg a seller wants $50 for some pills but accepts payment in $50 worth of BTC). BTC's inflation rate is meaningless in this scenario. > Lack of a central authority. This makes Bitcoin resistant to censorship and voluntary manipulation of its parameters. This is arguably somewhat true. However, there are very few meaningfully sized Bitcoin miners, and it's not unreasonable to assume a single miner may have or be able to have >51% of the hashrate if they desired. The core development team is also fairly small with a relatively small number of people and organizations controlling what ships. As for censorship: exchanges censor bitcoin addresses and manipulate (eg lose, socialize losses) balances all the time. As long as bitcoin is beholden to fiat for its value, it's far from censorship proof. > Low transaction costs and acceptable processing speed. "acceptable processing speed" is laughable from a retail transaction perspective. "Low transaction cost" is arguably somewhat true, but there's also times of fee volatility as well as a times of high risk if you don't pay enough fees to get processed quickly. Resubmitting transactions with higher fees is possible but complex and imperfect. > Security and irreversibility of transactions "Security of transactions" is arguably true in the technical sense that the PKI protecting a transaction is so far unbreakable. However that's just one attack vector: it's untrue and meaningless for the vast majority of financial attack vectors. Sure double spends are exceptionally hard, but theft is rampant, loss due to technical error/bugs is common, and then irreversibility is a liability not an advantage. [0] https://twitter.com/mhluongo/status/1092559017178734594 https://twitter.com/mhluongo/status/1092559017178734594

k_vi 7y ago

Bitcoin value is in it's potential to become a savings technology(store of value, digital gold, hard money) on the internet. Decentralisation is a spectrum, expensive and slow is intentional in it's design to provide the highest level of security and trustlesness. If you want fast and cheap transactions then blockchain is not the answer. If Bitcoin goes mainstream, layer 0 will be used for large value transactions. Rest will be moved off chain to custodial wallets and on probably a much smaller scale lightning, liquid and ethereum. Compared to fiat, transparency and opting out of centralized systems are easier. The real question is not whether Bitcoin is a good SoV but if Austrian economics and sound money are a better alternative to our present economic system[1]. Either way, I believe Bitcoin might become the safe-haven asset that people could fall back on in times of inflation[2]. I think the following arguments against Bitcoin are not useful. - X blockchain is faster than bitcoin. - PoW is wasteful. - Bitcoin is used for drugs so cannot be money. - Whales can manipulate the price. [1] http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/whyaust.htm http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/whyaust.htm [2] https://news.bitcoin.com/countries-suffering-from-rapid-inflation-show-significant-demand-for-cryptos/ https://news.bitcoin.com/countries-suffering-from-rapid-infl...