7 ms·

When You Know

76 points by hypomnemata 6y ago

1996 6y ago
The author seems to keep making the same mistakes - the latest being on iPhones and BTC. Do I care that Android devices have larger market share? Not at all. Apple is on the high end, profitable part. Should you care that the crypto ecosystem has a few bad actors, and may not be for 90% of the population? Not at all, and for the same reason. Some customers are said to be the "harbinger of failure" [1]. Considering the author employment history, I might say the same: some employees may be harbingers of doom for the company that hires them. If he had been working at Apple (=>iPhone) instead of Sun then Google, he might have had more of a point... but still, past performance not being indicative of future performance, I'm extremely cautious about old hackers who think they know it all and extrapolate WAY outside their area of competence. [1] https://news.mit.edu/2015/harbinger-failure-consumers-unpopular-products-1223 https://news.mit.edu/2015/harbinger-failure-consumers-unpopu...
sxp 6y ago
Is there a trusted broker that can be used to short Bitcoin? It's unclear to me if BTC will work in the long run, but it would be nice if all the people claiming it's going to crash would put their money where their mouth is. It's possible that the BTC market "can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent", but people have been saying this for the past decade and it's boring to see people make claims without updating their beliefs based on new evidence. At least the TSLA bears are investing money into short positions as a demonstration of their beliefs.
- hpkuarg 6y ago
  The most regulated way to short it is via CME Bitcoin futures[0]. However, it's quite heavily leveraged at 5 bitcoins per contract -- meaning each contract is ~$157k of notional value at today's close. This, combined with the volatility of the thing, is easily above my personal risk tolerance, but obviously YMMV. Given the history of how financial bubbles play out, I personally would not recommend shorting it outright. [0]: https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/equity-index/us-index/bitcoin_contract_specifications.html https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/equity-index/us-index/bitco...
- microtherion 6y ago
  Just because it might be a bad idea to go long Bitcoin doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good idea to short Bitcoin. As you mention, market timing is always a problem in such trades. A problem more specific to Bitcoin is that the market is not all that liquid, and that it is subject to the whims of some whales. Last of all, I suspect that Bitcoin bets might carry a significantly higher counterparty risk that e.g. shorting TSLA.
reidjs 6y ago
Spoiler: the post boils down to an anti-Bitcoin warning using the old motto “it’s not real money” because you can’t pay your taxes with it. I can’t pay my taxes in Yen but that doesn’t mean Yen isn’t real money. This is an example of a tech person extrapolating their expertise outside tech. Bitcoin is an experiment in economics as much as it’s an experiment in technology. Just because the network is slow to process transactions doesn’t mean the entire system is worthless. The first 90% of the article isn’t bad, but IMO author didn’t really backup his claims.
- burade 6y ago
  No, that's not the argument. That argument is that the global bitcoin network is slow as shit, and it would take 5 entire months just to process 140 million US citizens' taxes. Meaning that it's not really viable, unless some technological breakthrough happens.
  - reidjs 6y ago
    Why would the US Gov want people to pay their taxes in BTC instead of USD?
  - googlryas 6y ago
    It needs a social/political breakthrough, not technological. You could just make block sizes 1000x larger and be done with it. Literally just a configuration variable if everyone would get on board.
    - throw0101a 6y ago
      > Literally just a configuration variable if everyone would get on board. If.
      - googlryas 6y ago
        Right. Almost an impossible task based on precedent. But my point was that it isn't like the system as designed can't handle way more transactions than it currently does. If you have a sports car that is limited to do 15mph, but can actually do 215mph if you remove the artificial limiter, then you don't need a technological breakthrough to get the car to go to 215mph.
ciupicri 6y ago
By the way, what happened with "Ohio Becomes First US State to Allow Taxes to Be Paid in Bitcoin"? [1] [1]: https://www.coindesk.com/ohio-becomes-first-us-state-to-allow-taxes-to-be-paid-in-bitcoin https://www.coindesk.com/ohio-becomes-first-us-state-to-allo...
mmcclure 6y ago
I'd put myself in the "very intrigued by the idea of crypto but extremely skeptical in practice" camp. I do agree with him that it's largely a Ponzi scheme that will absolutely continue its cycle of boom and bust, but his "money" argument feels exceedingly weak. I very rarely hear the bitcoin crowd claiming anything around bitcoin as money, but more like gold; a store of value that is admittedly difficult to move around. You can't pay your taxes in any asset that isn't money. The government isn't going to take a bar of gold (or if they will, I certainly don't know how to give it to them), and they definitely won't take your Micky Mantle baseball card or Rembrandt painting unless you've gotten so far down the hole that they've got people liquidating those things to wring the money out of them to pay your debt. There are a lot of things that represent monetary value that definitively aren't money and can't be used as such, but that doesn't negate their value.
- dgellow 6y ago
  Doesn’t any Ponzi scheme a “store of value”? Until it isn’t.
- rednerrus 6y ago
  The underlying asset has to have some intrinsic value for it to be a store of value. Gold is a value store because people can use it to make things, and historically it's been one of the assets that women could own.
  - scubbo 6y ago
    > The underlying asset has to have some intrinsic value for it to be a store of value That's an interesting claim, especially since you don't specify _stable_ store of value. Do you believe that trading cards are not a store of value? Or shares? The only inherent value of a trading card is that you can wipe your ass with it or set it on fire to stay warm, and yet people often pay hundreds of dollars (or more!) for them.
  - bhupy 6y ago
    One could argue that the "intrinsic value" of crypto is that it enables censorship resistant point-to-point data transfer (transactions). As long as some subset of people are using it for that purpose, it has value, even if it's a tiny minority. I imagine that of all the gold in the world, the vast majority of it is the "store of value" kind, and not the "computer chip ingredient" or "jewelry" kind.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
davidw 6y ago
I recall when I first got internet access in the early 90ies, via a text terminal. I had access to both Gopher, and the WWW, via Lynx or some other text-based browser. I thought the WWW stuff looked very disorganized and ugly compared to the more nicely-organized and hierarchical Gopher, and wasn't really sure the 'web' thing would catch on. I try and keep that in mind when I feel too tempted to get into the predictions game. I wouldn't get into Bitcoin either, though.
- aargh_aargh 6y ago
  When I first got on the internet, there was Altavista and there were some web directories. Alstavista was nice, but the directories were much more organized and I saw them as the future, so much that at one point I even maintained some categories at dmoz. When Google took off to the point that non-tech people I knew recognized it and dmoz closed down, I was pretty disappointed even though Google was clearly the future by then (And it was better at actually finding stuff back then. Nowadays it's an echo chamber and worse, it just feeds you anything, I don't think I've seen a "no results found" page in a decade.).
- danaliv 6y ago
  Don’t feel too bad. I thought Java was DOA. Oops. (Might be fun to do a “your worst tech predictions” topic on HN.)
throw0101a 6y ago
When it comes to Bitcoin, I kind of see it as being similar to gold in the modern world. See Buffett's 2011 letter: > The major asset in this category is gold, currently a huge favorite of investors who fear almost all other assets, especially paper money (of whose value, as noted, they are right to be fearful). Gold, however, has two significant shortcomings, being neither of much use nor procreative. True, gold has some industrial and decorative utility, but the demand for these purposes is both limited and incapable of soaking up new production. Meanwhile, if you own one ounce of gold for an eternity, you will still own one ounce at its end. > What motivates most gold purchasers is their belief that the ranks of the fearful will grow. During the past decade that belief has proved correct. Beyond that, the rising price has on its own generated additional buying enthusiasm, attracting purchasers who see the rise as validating an investment thesis. As “bandwagon” investors join any party, they create their own truth – for a while. […] > Today the world’s gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce – gold’s price as I write this – its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A. > Let’s now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world’s most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B? […] > A century from now the 400 million acres of farmland will have produced staggering amounts of corn, wheat, cotton, and other crops – and will continue to produce that valuable bounty, whatever the currency may be. Exxon Mobil will probably have delivered trillions of dollars in dividends to its owners and will also hold assets worth many more trillions (and, remember, you get 16 Exxons). The 170,000 tons of gold will be unchanged in size and still incapable of producing anything. You can fondle the cube, but it will not respond. * https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2011ltr.pdf https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2011ltr.pdf In some ways this is a form of Greater Fool Theory: you'll only make a profit if someone comes along later and is willing to pay more for it, as it otherwise doesn't not have any productive use. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory And given it was designed to have a finite amount, that means it is deflationary over the long-term which incentivizes hoarding. An observation from a paper I ran across: > An ECB publication states that bitcoin’s theoretical roots are in Austrian economics[11]. Bitcoin corresponds with Austrian economic ideas in that bitcoin was intended to provide a monetary alternative that is beyond the reach of governments to regulate. Bitcoin has correspondence with libertarian ideas, which have some relationship with Austrian ideas. In the USA, my experience is that bitcoin proponents appear to have obtained their theory from science-fiction, radical libertarian popular literature, anti- government/anti-tax activism, and often from nothing that is apparent except their own thoughts. * https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.2048.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.2048.pdf * https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.2048 https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.2048 I remain skeptical about any mainstream use. Though having a bit (<5%) in one's portfolio isn't crazy as some 'play money'. Similarly I don't bother holding gold (bullion or ETFs), but if someone has a portfolio with a few percentage points' worth it isn't unreasonable. Generally gold isn't as useful as many people think it is: * https://www.pwlcapital.com/will-gold-save-the-day/ https://www.pwlcapital.com/will-gold-save-the-day/
elwell 6y ago
Slowness of transactions and low throughput is a weak argument against Bitcoin. With innovation, or workarounds, I just don't see that as a real hangup here. Anyways, would be interested in author's opinion of other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum.
- rednerrus 6y ago
  What is the problem crypto is trying to solve? We have wire transfers to move money around. If we wanted to create a public ledger of all money transactions, we could do it using a lot less energy than we are using on crypto right now.
  - elwell 6y ago
    > What is the problem crypto is trying to solve? Digital money without trusting a centralized authority. However, Ethereum is even more interesting in that it can be a 'world computer' for things other than money.
throw-08408204 6y ago
This is an interesting instance of cherry-picking and retrospective determinism in an attempt to convince the reader that the author's personal bias is valid and deserved. After reading this we should be careful not to make an argument from fallacy. This may be a fallacious argument but that does not mean the conclusion is wrong.
- mr_woozy 6y ago
  >but that does not mean the conclusion is wrong. nor does it make it right either. It does however show how consistently rather knowledgeable people in one domain confidently make bad faith arguments about how bitcoin is bad with bad logic.
oh_sigh 6y ago
Saying what you got right in the past isn't enough - Tim should also post about the things that he had a hunch about and then turned out completely wrong.
- mr_woozy 6y ago
  I'd say working for Sun is on that list at least.
thrawa567 6y ago
Well, that's an easy one. I "knew" that in 2013 after a bit of research. I'd be more curious about something less obvious, e.g. in 2030 50% of software running was not written by humans or the like.
daze42 6y ago
Is he talking about Bitcoin specifically or cryptocurrency as a whole? If just Bitcoin, yes, I agree that the transactions per second (TPS) is too low for global adoption. But as far as I know, there's no technical reason it has to be that slow for all cryptocurrencies. Ethereum 2.0 is supposed to support 100,000+ TPS according to Vitalik. https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1277961594958471168 https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/127796159495847116...
LinuxBender 6y ago
Something I rarely see discussed is the risk around power regulation as it pertains to bitcoin. As virtual currencies become more popular and easier for people to utilize, the demand to create coins will increase. I've seen some articles discussing how mining coins has put a strain on some power grids that are already stressed beyond capacity. Could this reach a point where governments require something to the effect of additional carbon credits or such?
jeffreyrogers 6y ago
I mostly agree with him, but very hard to say it's wrong to speculate on crypto/bitcoin. I personally know at least two people who do not have to work because of the amount of money they made from bitcoin (they were very early adopters). Yes, it is largely building castles in the sky, but some people will get genuinely wealthy from it. In my opinion you should approach it like you would any other form of speculation: risk what you're comfortable losing and have a plan for when you'll take your winnings.
- avaldeso 6y ago
  > I personally know at least two people who do not have to work because of the amount of money they made from bitcoin (they were very early adopters). Coincidentally, that's exactly how a Ponzi Scheme works.
  - jeffreyrogers 6y ago
    Sure, it's also how Tesla works.
marcinjachymiak 6y ago
"It is completely unambiguously obvious to me that" the author is an intellectually lazy rube who recycles tired old arguments. Anyone who talks about "China-based" miners hasn't done their research on the actual hashrate distribution today. That's a talking point from like 2015. What the author misses, and what many on HN miss, is that technical expertise does not translate into financial/economic expertise. You may grok Bitcoin on the CS level and still totally misunderstand the economics.
kristianp 6y ago
He posted about selling his bitcoin in 2017: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2017/12/19/How-To-Sell-Bitcoin-in-Canada https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2017/12/19/How-To-Se... He talked about limited transaction rates then too.

76 points by hypomnemata 6y ago

1996 6y ago

The author seems to keep making the same mistakes - the latest being on iPhones and BTC. Do I care that Android devices have larger market share? Not at all. Apple is on the high end, profitable part. Should you care that the crypto ecosystem has a few bad actors, and may not be for 90% of the population? Not at all, and for the same reason. Some customers are said to be the "harbinger of failure" [1]. Considering the author employment history, I might say the same: some employees may be harbingers of doom for the company that hires them. If he had been working at Apple (=>iPhone) instead of Sun then Google, he might have had more of a point... but still, past performance not being indicative of future performance, I'm extremely cautious about old hackers who think they know it all and extrapolate WAY outside their area of competence. [1] https://news.mit.edu/2015/harbinger-failure-consumers-unpopular-products-1223 https://news.mit.edu/2015/harbinger-failure-consumers-unpopu...

sxp 6y ago

Is there a trusted broker that can be used to short Bitcoin? It's unclear to me if BTC will work in the long run, but it would be nice if all the people claiming it's going to crash would put their money where their mouth is. It's possible that the BTC market "can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent", but people have been saying this for the past decade and it's boring to see people make claims without updating their beliefs based on new evidence. At least the TSLA bears are investing money into short positions as a demonstration of their beliefs.

hpkuarg 6y ago
The most regulated way to short it is via CME Bitcoin futures[0]. However, it's quite heavily leveraged at 5 bitcoins per contract -- meaning each contract is ~$157k of notional value at today's close. This, combined with the volatility of the thing, is easily above my personal risk tolerance, but obviously YMMV. Given the history of how financial bubbles play out, I personally would not recommend shorting it outright. [0]: https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/equity-index/us-index/bitcoin_contract_specifications.html https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/equity-index/us-index/bitco...
microtherion 6y ago
Just because it might be a bad idea to go long Bitcoin doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good idea to short Bitcoin. As you mention, market timing is always a problem in such trades. A problem more specific to Bitcoin is that the market is not all that liquid, and that it is subject to the whims of some whales. Last of all, I suspect that Bitcoin bets might carry a significantly higher counterparty risk that e.g. shorting TSLA.

reidjs 6y ago

Spoiler: the post boils down to an anti-Bitcoin warning using the old motto “it’s not real money” because you can’t pay your taxes with it. I can’t pay my taxes in Yen but that doesn’t mean Yen isn’t real money. This is an example of a tech person extrapolating their expertise outside tech. Bitcoin is an experiment in economics as much as it’s an experiment in technology. Just because the network is slow to process transactions doesn’t mean the entire system is worthless. The first 90% of the article isn’t bad, but IMO author didn’t really backup his claims.

burade 6y ago
No, that's not the argument. That argument is that the global bitcoin network is slow as shit, and it would take 5 entire months just to process 140 million US citizens' taxes. Meaning that it's not really viable, unless some technological breakthrough happens.
- reidjs 6y ago
  Why would the US Gov want people to pay their taxes in BTC instead of USD?
- googlryas 6y ago
  It needs a social/political breakthrough, not technological. You could just make block sizes 1000x larger and be done with it. Literally just a configuration variable if everyone would get on board.
  - throw0101a 6y ago
    > Literally just a configuration variable if everyone would get on board. If.
    - googlryas 6y ago
      Right. Almost an impossible task based on precedent. But my point was that it isn't like the system as designed can't handle way more transactions than it currently does. If you have a sports car that is limited to do 15mph, but can actually do 215mph if you remove the artificial limiter, then you don't need a technological breakthrough to get the car to go to 215mph.

ciupicri 6y ago

By the way, what happened with "Ohio Becomes First US State to Allow Taxes to Be Paid in Bitcoin"? [1] [1]: https://www.coindesk.com/ohio-becomes-first-us-state-to-allow-taxes-to-be-paid-in-bitcoin https://www.coindesk.com/ohio-becomes-first-us-state-to-allo...

mmcclure 6y ago

I'd put myself in the "very intrigued by the idea of crypto but extremely skeptical in practice" camp. I do agree with him that it's largely a Ponzi scheme that will absolutely continue its cycle of boom and bust, but his "money" argument feels exceedingly weak. I very rarely hear the bitcoin crowd claiming anything around bitcoin as money, but more like gold; a store of value that is admittedly difficult to move around. You can't pay your taxes in any asset that isn't money. The government isn't going to take a bar of gold (or if they will, I certainly don't know how to give it to them), and they definitely won't take your Micky Mantle baseball card or Rembrandt painting unless you've gotten so far down the hole that they've got people liquidating those things to wring the money out of them to pay your debt. There are a lot of things that represent monetary value that definitively aren't money and can't be used as such, but that doesn't negate their value.

dgellow 6y ago
Doesn’t any Ponzi scheme a “store of value”? Until it isn’t.
rednerrus 6y ago
The underlying asset has to have some intrinsic value for it to be a store of value. Gold is a value store because people can use it to make things, and historically it's been one of the assets that women could own.
- scubbo 6y ago
  > The underlying asset has to have some intrinsic value for it to be a store of value That's an interesting claim, especially since you don't specify _stable_ store of value. Do you believe that trading cards are not a store of value? Or shares? The only inherent value of a trading card is that you can wipe your ass with it or set it on fire to stay warm, and yet people often pay hundreds of dollars (or more!) for them.
- bhupy 6y ago
  One could argue that the "intrinsic value" of crypto is that it enables censorship resistant point-to-point data transfer (transactions). As long as some subset of people are using it for that purpose, it has value, even if it's a tiny minority. I imagine that of all the gold in the world, the vast majority of it is the "store of value" kind, and not the "computer chip ingredient" or "jewelry" kind.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

davidw 6y ago

I recall when I first got internet access in the early 90ies, via a text terminal. I had access to both Gopher, and the WWW, via Lynx or some other text-based browser. I thought the WWW stuff looked very disorganized and ugly compared to the more nicely-organized and hierarchical Gopher, and wasn't really sure the 'web' thing would catch on. I try and keep that in mind when I feel too tempted to get into the predictions game. I wouldn't get into Bitcoin either, though.

aargh_aargh 6y ago
When I first got on the internet, there was Altavista and there were some web directories. Alstavista was nice, but the directories were much more organized and I saw them as the future, so much that at one point I even maintained some categories at dmoz. When Google took off to the point that non-tech people I knew recognized it and dmoz closed down, I was pretty disappointed even though Google was clearly the future by then (And it was better at actually finding stuff back then. Nowadays it's an echo chamber and worse, it just feeds you anything, I don't think I've seen a "no results found" page in a decade.).
danaliv 6y ago
Don’t feel too bad. I thought Java was DOA. Oops. (Might be fun to do a “your worst tech predictions” topic on HN.)

throw0101a 6y ago

When it comes to Bitcoin, I kind of see it as being similar to gold in the modern world. See Buffett's 2011 letter: > The major asset in this category is gold, currently a huge favorite of investors who fear almost all other assets, especially paper money (of whose value, as noted, they are right to be fearful). Gold, however, has two significant shortcomings, being neither of much use nor procreative. True, gold has some industrial and decorative utility, but the demand for these purposes is both limited and incapable of soaking up new production. Meanwhile, if you own one ounce of gold for an eternity, you will still own one ounce at its end. > What motivates most gold purchasers is their belief that the ranks of the fearful will grow. During the past decade that belief has proved correct. Beyond that, the rising price has on its own generated additional buying enthusiasm, attracting purchasers who see the rise as validating an investment thesis. As “bandwagon” investors join any party, they create their own truth – for a while. […] > Today the world’s gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce – gold’s price as I write this – its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A. > Let’s now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world’s most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B? […] > A century from now the 400 million acres of farmland will have produced staggering amounts of corn, wheat, cotton, and other crops – and will continue to produce that valuable bounty, whatever the currency may be. Exxon Mobil will probably have delivered trillions of dollars in dividends to its owners and will also hold assets worth many more trillions (and, remember, you get 16 Exxons). The 170,000 tons of gold will be unchanged in size and still incapable of producing anything. You can fondle the cube, but it will not respond. * https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2011ltr.pdf https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2011ltr.pdf In some ways this is a form of Greater Fool Theory: you'll only make a profit if someone comes along later and is willing to pay more for it, as it otherwise doesn't not have any productive use. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory And given it was designed to have a finite amount, that means it is deflationary over the long-term which incentivizes hoarding. An observation from a paper I ran across: > An ECB publication states that bitcoin’s theoretical roots are in Austrian economics[11]. Bitcoin corresponds with Austrian economic ideas in that bitcoin was intended to provide a monetary alternative that is beyond the reach of governments to regulate. Bitcoin has correspondence with libertarian ideas, which have some relationship with Austrian ideas. In the USA, my experience is that bitcoin proponents appear to have obtained their theory from science-fiction, radical libertarian popular literature, anti- government/anti-tax activism, and often from nothing that is apparent except their own thoughts. * https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.2048.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.2048.pdf * https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.2048 https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.2048 I remain skeptical about any mainstream use. Though having a bit (<5%) in one's portfolio isn't crazy as some 'play money'. Similarly I don't bother holding gold (bullion or ETFs), but if someone has a portfolio with a few percentage points' worth it isn't unreasonable. Generally gold isn't as useful as many people think it is: * https://www.pwlcapital.com/will-gold-save-the-day/ https://www.pwlcapital.com/will-gold-save-the-day/

elwell 6y ago

Slowness of transactions and low throughput is a weak argument against Bitcoin. With innovation, or workarounds, I just don't see that as a real hangup here. Anyways, would be interested in author's opinion of other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum.

rednerrus 6y ago
What is the problem crypto is trying to solve? We have wire transfers to move money around. If we wanted to create a public ledger of all money transactions, we could do it using a lot less energy than we are using on crypto right now.
- elwell 6y ago
  > What is the problem crypto is trying to solve? Digital money without trusting a centralized authority. However, Ethereum is even more interesting in that it can be a 'world computer' for things other than money.

throw-08408204 6y ago

This is an interesting instance of cherry-picking and retrospective determinism in an attempt to convince the reader that the author's personal bias is valid and deserved. After reading this we should be careful not to make an argument from fallacy. This may be a fallacious argument but that does not mean the conclusion is wrong.

mr_woozy 6y ago
>but that does not mean the conclusion is wrong. nor does it make it right either. It does however show how consistently rather knowledgeable people in one domain confidently make bad faith arguments about how bitcoin is bad with bad logic.

oh_sigh 6y ago

Saying what you got right in the past isn't enough - Tim should also post about the things that he had a hunch about and then turned out completely wrong.

mr_woozy 6y ago
I'd say working for Sun is on that list at least.

thrawa567 6y ago

Well, that's an easy one. I "knew" that in 2013 after a bit of research. I'd be more curious about something less obvious, e.g. in 2030 50% of software running was not written by humans or the like.

daze42 6y ago

Is he talking about Bitcoin specifically or cryptocurrency as a whole? If just Bitcoin, yes, I agree that the transactions per second (TPS) is too low for global adoption. But as far as I know, there's no technical reason it has to be that slow for all cryptocurrencies. Ethereum 2.0 is supposed to support 100,000+ TPS according to Vitalik. https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/1277961594958471168 https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/127796159495847116...

LinuxBender 6y ago

Something I rarely see discussed is the risk around power regulation as it pertains to bitcoin. As virtual currencies become more popular and easier for people to utilize, the demand to create coins will increase. I've seen some articles discussing how mining coins has put a strain on some power grids that are already stressed beyond capacity. Could this reach a point where governments require something to the effect of additional carbon credits or such?

jeffreyrogers 6y ago

I mostly agree with him, but very hard to say it's wrong to speculate on crypto/bitcoin. I personally know at least two people who do not have to work because of the amount of money they made from bitcoin (they were very early adopters). Yes, it is largely building castles in the sky, but some people will get genuinely wealthy from it. In my opinion you should approach it like you would any other form of speculation: risk what you're comfortable losing and have a plan for when you'll take your winnings.

avaldeso 6y ago
> I personally know at least two people who do not have to work because of the amount of money they made from bitcoin (they were very early adopters). Coincidentally, that's exactly how a Ponzi Scheme works.
- jeffreyrogers 6y ago
  Sure, it's also how Tesla works.

marcinjachymiak 6y ago

"It is completely unambiguously obvious to me that" the author is an intellectually lazy rube who recycles tired old arguments. Anyone who talks about "China-based" miners hasn't done their research on the actual hashrate distribution today. That's a talking point from like 2015. What the author misses, and what many on HN miss, is that technical expertise does not translate into financial/economic expertise. You may grok Bitcoin on the CS level and still totally misunderstand the economics.

kristianp 6y ago

He posted about selling his bitcoin in 2017: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2017/12/19/How-To-Sell-Bitcoin-in-Canada https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2017/12/19/How-To-Se... He talked about limited transaction rates then too.