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Cryptocurrency is a blind spot where Hacker News’ normal optimism towards innovation has disappointed for a decade. May this thread be one we can reference year

Cryptocurrency is a blind spot where Hacker News’ normal optimism towards innovation has disappointed for a decade. May this thread be one we can reference years later as another example of “our collective opinions can be very wrong about technologies that were transformative in hindsight.” Innovators, follow regulations and go for it. Don’t let the HN crowd get you down. Few of these commenters have ever been unbanked. You’re on to something, close the tab and get to work.

graeme 6y ago
What exactly is the bull case for bitcoin? I have not seen it clearly explained. I’ve got an open mind. In more specific terms you mentioned the unbanked. How does crypto solve the problems that leave them unbanked?
- ddtaylor 6y ago
  Anyone can send or receive cryptocurrency without third party authorization.
  - graeme 6y ago
    But why does that require a specific monetary value for bitcoin? And doesn’t this apply to any cryotocurrency?
    - RhodoGSA 6y ago
      it doesn't. People just like to exchange it for real money. There's no real need, everyone just still prices things in USD instead of btc. Once btc has around a $20T market cap, it will be much less volatile.
  - skizm 6y ago
    Why would you want to though? It takes at least an hour to confirm (~6 blocks) without a third-party and the fees are getting super high (costs around $13.50 / 30624 satoshis per transaction to get reasonable transfer times). So unless you're transferring a large amount, you're better off using a third party that can just hold all the money and flip a bit in their database saying the money is moved.
    - ddtaylor 6y ago
      Bitcoin takes an hour to confirm, there are other cryptocurrencies that take much less time. Bitcoin also has the fee problem, and more recently Ethereum. Other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin Cash with larger block sizes don't have the same transaction fee problems. Cryptocurrencies are still relatively new. Most of the problems are being solved and the technologies are improving rapidly.
  - GeneralTspoon 6y ago
    True. But you can’t really buy anything with it. Which means you need to cash out to fiat $$$. And then you need 3rd party authorisation while jumping through all the KYC hoops.
    - ddtaylor 6y ago
      PayPal accepts cryptocurrencies now, so I don't think it's fair to say you can't buy anything with it. Also there are decentralized marketplaces like OpenBazaar, which are still pretty new too.
- whitepaint 6y ago
  Why has gold prevailed over thousands of years while almost all fiat currencies went to 0?
  - graeme 6y ago
    Gold stores value but it hasn’t really appreciated. Whereas the claim for bitcoin is that it will soar in value. Why? Warren Buffett said it best on gold. It just sits there. Here’s one quote I found. In another he compared buying gold in 1900 vs us stocks. “ I will say this about gold. If you took all the gold in the world, it would roughly make a cube 67 feet on a side…Now for that same cube of gold, it would be worth at today’s market prices about $7 trillion dollars – that’s probably about a third of the value of all the stocks in the United States…For $7 trillion dollars…you could have all the farmland in the United States, you could have about seven Exxon Mobils, and you could have a trillion dollars of walking-around money…And if you offered me the choice of looking at some 67 foot cube of gold and looking at it all day, and you know me touching it and fondling it occasionally…Call me crazy, but I’ll take the farmland and the Exxon Mobils.” I
    - cconroy 6y ago
      he is conflating things with value and a good unit to measure said value -- which is itself very valuable.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Daniel_sk 6y ago
      The same argument can be said about BTC. BTC doesn't pay dividends. I would rather own a company than the amount in BTC. Well in case of Gold in worst case you will be left with some shiny metal, that also has some intrinsic value because it's used in electronics (e.g. gold plated contacts). If BTC goes down then you will have nothing.
      - graeme 6y ago
        Yes that was my point. People say BTC is the new gold, but....gold isn’t that gold as a long run investment. It merely holds value, it doesn’t do anything.
- RhodoGSA 6y ago
  Bitcoin unleashes a million possibilities and overall guides the market. Check out Ethereum, Polkadot and Cardano if you want to see a real use case - Until then the usecase for bitcoin is the same as gold. But one day Bitcoin will pour it's 'Gold' Into the broader crypto market.
  - graeme 6y ago
    Does ethereum in some way depend on bitcoin? I could see there being some crypto use case I haven’t understood yet. But I don’t understand why bitcoin specifically needs to rise in value. It seems like a rent based system rewarding the original owners. And that would only work if other systems depended on bitcoin.
    - acapybara 6y ago
      No, Ethereum does not specifically depend on Bitcoin. However, the use cases are very different. Bitcoin is about money (as a distinct concept from currency). Think of it as a new type of central bank --that's Bitcoin's target market, and always has been (look up "Chancellor on the brink" in the 1st Bitcoin block). Bitcoin also intends to be peer-to-peer cash. This is what the lightning network aims to be, or the BCH fork depending on your point of view. Ethereum is about smart contracts. Think: decentralized organizations, tokenized probabilistic outcomes, insurance, yield generating investments, etc. As it turns out, the two can be very complementary. For example, Bitcoin can be wrapped (WBTC or similar) and represented on the Ethereum chain. This allows Bitcoin to be a store of value which can be collateralized and borrowed against using an Ethereum contract (e.g. Compound, AAVE, etc.). This is one narrow, but important use case: Ethereum can enable BTC holders to access liquidity.
  - ma2rten 6y ago
    Can you name a single compelling use case for Ethereum, Polkadot or Cardano?
    - bouncycastle 6y ago
      For Ethereum, Defi.(Decentralized finance). Basically crypto based financial services run on smart contracts as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). Services include lending and borrowing, decentralized exchange, insurance, stablecoins, derivatives, portfolio management and more. MakerDao, Uniswap, Compound Finance, Yearn Finance, just to name a few. It's only just starting to take off, see more metrics here https://defipulse.com/ https://defipulse.com/ Another area taking off on Ethereum right now are "Non Fungible Tokens". Basically digital art trading on crypto.
- buildbuildbuild 6y ago
  Cryptocurrency in general allows people to be their own bank in a more secure and lightweight way than ever before in history. Bitcoin is an MVP with immense traction that has inspired hundreds of related innovations which will be worth trillions. It is the most widely accepted cryptocurrency at today’s merchants and exchanges, and likely the most researched and understood.
- rax0m 6y ago
  Graeme I've got the perfect article for you [1]. [1]: https://vijayboyapati.medium.com/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoin-6ecc8bdecc1 https://vijayboyapati.medium.com/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoi... Please let me know what you think
  - graeme 6y ago
    Thanks. It didn’t seem very focussed. One of the major thesis is that all currencies follow four steps to adoption as a medium of exchange. For this they cite Jevons’ and his discussion of gold. And indeed, Jevons said gold followed those four steps. But I looked at the source text and saw Jevons said gold was an exception to the rule in that it developed as a currency late in the cycle. “ The use of esteemed articles as a store or medium for conveying value may in some cases precede their employment as currency.” The author has made a basic error in their major thesis. And they still haven’t shown why bitcoin needs to have a sky high value. The other half of the essay is describing ratings for different types of currencies. But this is description, not argument for why it must rise in value.
    - graeme 6y ago
      I’ve looked elsewhere and “the four stages of the currencycycle” seems to be a talking point in bitcoin world. And it appears to be nonsense taken from a misread of Jevons.
    - rax0m 6y ago
      Personally I'm not so concerned about the step "store of value" -> "medium of exchange". Let's imagine for a second that most people on earth want to hold bitcoin, becuase they believe the price will not go down (i.e., it will remain stable or go up). Then, they would rather accept bitcoin for payment, were it as easy to accept the fiat of whereever they live. This is because fiat is designed to lose purchasing power. The way to make it "easy" will be solved by second layer solutions like lightning or even custodial solutions, these need not occur on the bottom layer all the time. Anyway, to your last sentence. Why it must rise in value. Satoshi created "number go up" technology which aligns perfectly with human greed and adjusted to occur in large swings on a four-year basis. No growth in price can be linear btw, because how would the front-running look? Believers in bitcoin believe in "number go up" [1] [1]: https://www.ministryofnodes.com.au/2021/01/26/what-is-number-go-up-technology/ https://www.ministryofnodes.com.au/2021/01/26/what-is-number...
- mrtksn 6y ago
  Unrest in every country, legal systems non existent or not robust enough to solve national or international disputes but local warlords still need to trade and cooperate. Then obviously Bitcoin would be extremely valuable and useful.
  - graeme 6y ago
    Just the opposite. Bitcoin seems to depend upon a stable computing network and legal authorities who can punish those who hack bitcoin. If such networks collapsed how could most people keep bitcoin secure? Or run the computing power to power the network? With gold, money and other valuables you can carry them with you and hide them.
    - mrtksn 6y ago
      No one can hack bitcoin, it's created through robust mathematical models. What can be hacked are exchanges and wallets. You can keep your coins out if these as long as you want and carry them as gold or cash and do in place transactions whenever the network is available. You can even use physical coins, which are simply piece of paper with the key written on it. The receiver would need to have a connection to verify that the funds are still there though. No jurisdiction has any power over who owns what coins. The best they can do is to physically extract the fund from person like extracting any secret(torture, punishment if they don't comply etc.). If the person of interest dies with his secret, the coins are gone forever because the premise of BTC is that it is kept in a distributed database that can only be changed(and the only possible change is addin new records) with cryptographic validation and governments don't have a power over mathematics.
      - manderley 6y ago
        The mathematical models aren't running the Bitcoin network, clients running program code are. And those have had fatal flaws found in them multiple times now, it all isn't as robust as you're saying.
        6y ago
- villasv 6y ago
  Whatever the bull case is, we're approaching 15 years of it not coming to fruition. Makes you think if the time for a reality check isn't due.
- buildbuildbuild 6y ago
  Cryptocurrency allows users to send, receive, or immigrate with money - without an inbuilt requirement to open accounts or disclose private information to third parties. Gold cannot be memorized nor can its total amount in existence, in the universe, be known. It does, however, work without electricity.
  - pwinnski 6y ago
    It trades the requirement to open an account for a requirement to create and maintain a wallet, which, given the most common demographics of the unbanked, doesn't seem any better.
- scottmsul 6y ago
  Michael Saylor pulled the same move six months ago and explains it really well. Highly recommend watching any of his interviews. The one with Preston Pysh is particularly enlightening. Essentially bitcoin is a really good store of value with superior monetary properties to all other assets. If you want to store wealth for a hundred years there's nothing better. Even gold has 2% devaluation per year and has custodial risk, whereas bitcoin has no devaluation (21M supply cap), is easy to self-custody, and is very secure (high energy use/decentralized).
  - groone 6y ago
    I had a big problem with his interview. It does not mention bitcoin's reliance on "demand". If you look at bitcoin as a closed system and realize that money that goes in also goes out. The cash from your bank account is transferred to early adopters and used to pay for the huge electricity bills. It does not get stored. It is not there. You cannot get it out. Unless you find a greater fool to buy some bitcoin at higher price. You cannot find greater fools forever, so bitcoin as a system is unsustainable. When people stop believing there will be someone to relieve them the price will go up they stop buying. When that happens and money stops coming, the doors are shut and you are stuck with worthless bitcoin.
    - scottmsul 6y ago
      The way I see it, dollars and bitcoin are two competing forms of money. To calculate the equilibrium market cap of bitcoin, multiply each person's net worth by the fraction they wish to allocate to bitcoin and sum over the population. For example if the total value of all goods is 200T and the net-worth weighted allocation fraction is 1%, then the equilibrium market cap would be 2T. You don't need "greater fools" because people are constantly buying and selling in equilibrium, not just selling, similar to how gold maintains a pretty steady 10T market cap. However bitcoin has superior intrinsic monetary properties to all other stores of value, including gold, so the equilibrium market cap might be extremely high.
- sixQuarks 6y ago
  Bitcoin has been the best 10 year investment in the HISTORY OF THE WORLD. What more of a bull case do you want?
christiansakai 6y ago
Generalization much?
rognjen 6y ago
I love this comment because it doesn't state a position and can be used as proof of being right no matter the outcome. Brilliant.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
This thread isn't about innovation, though? Tesla isn't directing $1.5B towards future applications or research into cryptocurrency; they're making a $1.5B bet that a single specific cryptocurrency will be worth more in the future.
edanm 6y ago
Maybe you're right. But the truth isn't a popularity contest - in either direction. Just because something is popular doesn't make it good. Just because something is unpopular doesn't mean it's a transformative technology that's being misunderstood. (Fwiw, I'm a blockchain skeptic - I think about the only thing the blockchain technology is good for is cryptocurrencies. About cryptos specifically, I'm very unsure whether they are "good" or not.)
phreeza 6y ago
Doesn't the fact that bitcoin hasn't taken off yet kind of validate the reservations that HN has? If Dropbox was still at 100 active users 10 years later, would someone be complaining about the dismissive comments HN had at the launch announcement?
- patricius 6y ago
  What should happen for you to say that Bitcoin has taken off?
  - phreeza 6y ago
    I guess I should clarify that I mean scepticism relative to what early proponents of bitcoin were suggesting would happen. So by taken off I mean things like replacing fiat currency in everyday use for a large number of people. Edit: Compare to that what Dropbox may have suggested at their launch, something like "we will replace USB thumb drives", which would have sounded very ambitious at the time but was in fact pretty much true, for a large number of people.
robjan 6y ago
During a bull market the bulls say the bears are stupid. During a bear market the bears call the bulls stupid.

graeme 6y ago

What exactly is the bull case for bitcoin? I have not seen it clearly explained. I’ve got an open mind. In more specific terms you mentioned the unbanked. How does crypto solve the problems that leave them unbanked?

ddtaylor 6y ago
Anyone can send or receive cryptocurrency without third party authorization.
- graeme 6y ago
  But why does that require a specific monetary value for bitcoin? And doesn’t this apply to any cryotocurrency?
  - RhodoGSA 6y ago
    it doesn't. People just like to exchange it for real money. There's no real need, everyone just still prices things in USD instead of btc. Once btc has around a $20T market cap, it will be much less volatile.
- skizm 6y ago
  Why would you want to though? It takes at least an hour to confirm (~6 blocks) without a third-party and the fees are getting super high (costs around $13.50 / 30624 satoshis per transaction to get reasonable transfer times). So unless you're transferring a large amount, you're better off using a third party that can just hold all the money and flip a bit in their database saying the money is moved.
  - ddtaylor 6y ago
    Bitcoin takes an hour to confirm, there are other cryptocurrencies that take much less time. Bitcoin also has the fee problem, and more recently Ethereum. Other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin Cash with larger block sizes don't have the same transaction fee problems. Cryptocurrencies are still relatively new. Most of the problems are being solved and the technologies are improving rapidly.
- GeneralTspoon 6y ago
  True. But you can’t really buy anything with it. Which means you need to cash out to fiat $$$. And then you need 3rd party authorisation while jumping through all the KYC hoops.
  - ddtaylor 6y ago
    PayPal accepts cryptocurrencies now, so I don't think it's fair to say you can't buy anything with it. Also there are decentralized marketplaces like OpenBazaar, which are still pretty new too.
whitepaint 6y ago
Why has gold prevailed over thousands of years while almost all fiat currencies went to 0?
- graeme 6y ago
  Gold stores value but it hasn’t really appreciated. Whereas the claim for bitcoin is that it will soar in value. Why? Warren Buffett said it best on gold. It just sits there. Here’s one quote I found. In another he compared buying gold in 1900 vs us stocks. “ I will say this about gold. If you took all the gold in the world, it would roughly make a cube 67 feet on a side…Now for that same cube of gold, it would be worth at today’s market prices about $7 trillion dollars – that’s probably about a third of the value of all the stocks in the United States…For $7 trillion dollars…you could have all the farmland in the United States, you could have about seven Exxon Mobils, and you could have a trillion dollars of walking-around money…And if you offered me the choice of looking at some 67 foot cube of gold and looking at it all day, and you know me touching it and fondling it occasionally…Call me crazy, but I’ll take the farmland and the Exxon Mobils.” I
  - cconroy 6y ago
    he is conflating things with value and a good unit to measure said value -- which is itself very valuable.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Daniel_sk 6y ago
    The same argument can be said about BTC. BTC doesn't pay dividends. I would rather own a company than the amount in BTC. Well in case of Gold in worst case you will be left with some shiny metal, that also has some intrinsic value because it's used in electronics (e.g. gold plated contacts). If BTC goes down then you will have nothing.
    - graeme 6y ago
      Yes that was my point. People say BTC is the new gold, but....gold isn’t that gold as a long run investment. It merely holds value, it doesn’t do anything.
RhodoGSA 6y ago
Bitcoin unleashes a million possibilities and overall guides the market. Check out Ethereum, Polkadot and Cardano if you want to see a real use case - Until then the usecase for bitcoin is the same as gold. But one day Bitcoin will pour it's 'Gold' Into the broader crypto market.
- graeme 6y ago
  Does ethereum in some way depend on bitcoin? I could see there being some crypto use case I haven’t understood yet. But I don’t understand why bitcoin specifically needs to rise in value. It seems like a rent based system rewarding the original owners. And that would only work if other systems depended on bitcoin.
  - acapybara 6y ago
    No, Ethereum does not specifically depend on Bitcoin. However, the use cases are very different. Bitcoin is about money (as a distinct concept from currency). Think of it as a new type of central bank --that's Bitcoin's target market, and always has been (look up "Chancellor on the brink" in the 1st Bitcoin block). Bitcoin also intends to be peer-to-peer cash. This is what the lightning network aims to be, or the BCH fork depending on your point of view. Ethereum is about smart contracts. Think: decentralized organizations, tokenized probabilistic outcomes, insurance, yield generating investments, etc. As it turns out, the two can be very complementary. For example, Bitcoin can be wrapped (WBTC or similar) and represented on the Ethereum chain. This allows Bitcoin to be a store of value which can be collateralized and borrowed against using an Ethereum contract (e.g. Compound, AAVE, etc.). This is one narrow, but important use case: Ethereum can enable BTC holders to access liquidity.
- ma2rten 6y ago
  Can you name a single compelling use case for Ethereum, Polkadot or Cardano?
  - bouncycastle 6y ago
    For Ethereum, Defi.(Decentralized finance). Basically crypto based financial services run on smart contracts as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). Services include lending and borrowing, decentralized exchange, insurance, stablecoins, derivatives, portfolio management and more. MakerDao, Uniswap, Compound Finance, Yearn Finance, just to name a few. It's only just starting to take off, see more metrics here https://defipulse.com/ https://defipulse.com/ Another area taking off on Ethereum right now are "Non Fungible Tokens". Basically digital art trading on crypto.
buildbuildbuild 6y ago
Cryptocurrency in general allows people to be their own bank in a more secure and lightweight way than ever before in history. Bitcoin is an MVP with immense traction that has inspired hundreds of related innovations which will be worth trillions. It is the most widely accepted cryptocurrency at today’s merchants and exchanges, and likely the most researched and understood.
rax0m 6y ago
Graeme I've got the perfect article for you [1]. [1]: https://vijayboyapati.medium.com/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoin-6ecc8bdecc1 https://vijayboyapati.medium.com/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoi... Please let me know what you think
- graeme 6y ago
  Thanks. It didn’t seem very focussed. One of the major thesis is that all currencies follow four steps to adoption as a medium of exchange. For this they cite Jevons’ and his discussion of gold. And indeed, Jevons said gold followed those four steps. But I looked at the source text and saw Jevons said gold was an exception to the rule in that it developed as a currency late in the cycle. “ The use of esteemed articles as a store or medium for conveying value may in some cases precede their employment as currency.” The author has made a basic error in their major thesis. And they still haven’t shown why bitcoin needs to have a sky high value. The other half of the essay is describing ratings for different types of currencies. But this is description, not argument for why it must rise in value.
  - graeme 6y ago
    I’ve looked elsewhere and “the four stages of the currencycycle” seems to be a talking point in bitcoin world. And it appears to be nonsense taken from a misread of Jevons.
  - rax0m 6y ago
    Personally I'm not so concerned about the step "store of value" -> "medium of exchange". Let's imagine for a second that most people on earth want to hold bitcoin, becuase they believe the price will not go down (i.e., it will remain stable or go up). Then, they would rather accept bitcoin for payment, were it as easy to accept the fiat of whereever they live. This is because fiat is designed to lose purchasing power. The way to make it "easy" will be solved by second layer solutions like lightning or even custodial solutions, these need not occur on the bottom layer all the time. Anyway, to your last sentence. Why it must rise in value. Satoshi created "number go up" technology which aligns perfectly with human greed and adjusted to occur in large swings on a four-year basis. No growth in price can be linear btw, because how would the front-running look? Believers in bitcoin believe in "number go up" [1] [1]: https://www.ministryofnodes.com.au/2021/01/26/what-is-number-go-up-technology/ https://www.ministryofnodes.com.au/2021/01/26/what-is-number...
mrtksn 6y ago
Unrest in every country, legal systems non existent or not robust enough to solve national or international disputes but local warlords still need to trade and cooperate. Then obviously Bitcoin would be extremely valuable and useful.
- graeme 6y ago
  Just the opposite. Bitcoin seems to depend upon a stable computing network and legal authorities who can punish those who hack bitcoin. If such networks collapsed how could most people keep bitcoin secure? Or run the computing power to power the network? With gold, money and other valuables you can carry them with you and hide them.
  - mrtksn 6y ago
    No one can hack bitcoin, it's created through robust mathematical models. What can be hacked are exchanges and wallets. You can keep your coins out if these as long as you want and carry them as gold or cash and do in place transactions whenever the network is available. You can even use physical coins, which are simply piece of paper with the key written on it. The receiver would need to have a connection to verify that the funds are still there though. No jurisdiction has any power over who owns what coins. The best they can do is to physically extract the fund from person like extracting any secret(torture, punishment if they don't comply etc.). If the person of interest dies with his secret, the coins are gone forever because the premise of BTC is that it is kept in a distributed database that can only be changed(and the only possible change is addin new records) with cryptographic validation and governments don't have a power over mathematics.
    - manderley 6y ago
      The mathematical models aren't running the Bitcoin network, clients running program code are. And those have had fatal flaws found in them multiple times now, it all isn't as robust as you're saying.
      - 6y ago
villasv 6y ago
Whatever the bull case is, we're approaching 15 years of it not coming to fruition. Makes you think if the time for a reality check isn't due.
buildbuildbuild 6y ago
Cryptocurrency allows users to send, receive, or immigrate with money - without an inbuilt requirement to open accounts or disclose private information to third parties. Gold cannot be memorized nor can its total amount in existence, in the universe, be known. It does, however, work without electricity.
- pwinnski 6y ago
  It trades the requirement to open an account for a requirement to create and maintain a wallet, which, given the most common demographics of the unbanked, doesn't seem any better.
scottmsul 6y ago
Michael Saylor pulled the same move six months ago and explains it really well. Highly recommend watching any of his interviews. The one with Preston Pysh is particularly enlightening. Essentially bitcoin is a really good store of value with superior monetary properties to all other assets. If you want to store wealth for a hundred years there's nothing better. Even gold has 2% devaluation per year and has custodial risk, whereas bitcoin has no devaluation (21M supply cap), is easy to self-custody, and is very secure (high energy use/decentralized).
- groone 6y ago
  I had a big problem with his interview. It does not mention bitcoin's reliance on "demand". If you look at bitcoin as a closed system and realize that money that goes in also goes out. The cash from your bank account is transferred to early adopters and used to pay for the huge electricity bills. It does not get stored. It is not there. You cannot get it out. Unless you find a greater fool to buy some bitcoin at higher price. You cannot find greater fools forever, so bitcoin as a system is unsustainable. When people stop believing there will be someone to relieve them the price will go up they stop buying. When that happens and money stops coming, the doors are shut and you are stuck with worthless bitcoin.
  - scottmsul 6y ago
    The way I see it, dollars and bitcoin are two competing forms of money. To calculate the equilibrium market cap of bitcoin, multiply each person's net worth by the fraction they wish to allocate to bitcoin and sum over the population. For example if the total value of all goods is 200T and the net-worth weighted allocation fraction is 1%, then the equilibrium market cap would be 2T. You don't need "greater fools" because people are constantly buying and selling in equilibrium, not just selling, similar to how gold maintains a pretty steady 10T market cap. However bitcoin has superior intrinsic monetary properties to all other stores of value, including gold, so the equilibrium market cap might be extremely high.
sixQuarks 6y ago
Bitcoin has been the best 10 year investment in the HISTORY OF THE WORLD. What more of a bull case do you want?

christiansakai 6y ago

Generalization much?

rognjen 6y ago

I love this comment because it doesn't state a position and can be used as proof of being right no matter the outcome. Brilliant.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

This thread isn't about innovation, though? Tesla isn't directing $1.5B towards future applications or research into cryptocurrency; they're making a $1.5B bet that a single specific cryptocurrency will be worth more in the future.

edanm 6y ago

Maybe you're right. But the truth isn't a popularity contest - in either direction. Just because something is popular doesn't make it good. Just because something is unpopular doesn't mean it's a transformative technology that's being misunderstood. (Fwiw, I'm a blockchain skeptic - I think about the only thing the blockchain technology is good for is cryptocurrencies. About cryptos specifically, I'm very unsure whether they are "good" or not.)

phreeza 6y ago

Doesn't the fact that bitcoin hasn't taken off yet kind of validate the reservations that HN has? If Dropbox was still at 100 active users 10 years later, would someone be complaining about the dismissive comments HN had at the launch announcement?

patricius 6y ago
What should happen for you to say that Bitcoin has taken off?
- phreeza 6y ago
  I guess I should clarify that I mean scepticism relative to what early proponents of bitcoin were suggesting would happen. So by taken off I mean things like replacing fiat currency in everyday use for a large number of people. Edit: Compare to that what Dropbox may have suggested at their launch, something like "we will replace USB thumb drives", which would have sounded very ambitious at the time but was in fact pretty much true, for a large number of people.

robjan 6y ago

During a bull market the bulls say the bears are stupid. During a bear market the bears call the bulls stupid.