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Ok, I have to admit that I am one of those people who knew about BTC very, very early but never bought any. Now, of course I should have mined at least 100 back

• shp0ngle 6y ago
  It’s good for telling other people to buy more and checking price daily.
  • octocop 6y ago
    And making whiny comments on HN when it's mentioned.
• hobofan 6y ago
  Determining fully decentralized consensus between arbitrary participants (or at least one of the best approximations of that). In Bitcoin that consensus is limited to transactions, in Ethereum with smart contracts it can be used for much more (though that might require additional layers of incentivation to work properly, depending on the use case).
  • grey-area 6y ago
    Nobody actually wants fully decentralised irreversible consensus between arbitrary participants on a public ledger because it is slow, costly and doesn’t solve real-word problems of identity verification, trust, reversible transactions, private transactions etc etc. People have tried and failed for years to find a compelling use for it. It’s a very interesting experiment in social engineering but I find it difficult to find a concrete example of bitcoin being useful. Making some people very rich at the cost of others is not sufficient justification. If anything fewer people are actually using bitcoin now for real transactions not involving speculation on prices than in 2015 say.
    • blhack 6y ago
      >Nobody actually wants fully decentralised irreversible consensus between arbitrary participants on a public ledger because it is slow, costly and doesn’t solve real-word problems of identity verification, trust, reversible transactions, private transactions etc etc. Are you sure? In fact it seems like quite a few people want that, as evidenced by the entire crypto space.
      • viro 6y ago
        yes, most people are invested in crypto because they wanna get rich with that 355% increase FULL STOP. No one with a brain uses it as currency. For the same reason that inflation is ALWAYS better than deflation. you lose money using bitcoin to buy something.
        • noch 6y ago
          > yes, most people are invested in crypto because they wanna get rich with that 355% increase FULL STOP. Wanting to get rich is an excellent incentive for anyone. Most other incentives (e.g. altruism) quickly become perverse as they devolve into status-seeking or coercion through force or in subsidisation and centralised planning. In fact, without that desire to get rich (acquire resources), it's hard to imagine businesses being incentivised to provide value to the largest number of people in the most efficient way possible. The profit motive is the best incentive humans have encountered because, in a society that respects individual freedom and property rights, the profit motive forces us to innovate to provide others with value in order to receive value from them.
          • allturtles 6y ago
            But if acquiring currency and holding it causes you to get rich, that's a serious defect. That means it won't get spent which means the economy grinds to a halt and depression ensues. This is not a feature we want for a currency.
            • 6y ago
  • lottin 6y ago
    > Determining fully decentralized consensus But this only solves a problem specific to bitcoin that no one else has, because no one else keeps a centralised database with every transaction, so I'm not sure it counts as an advantage.
  • betterunix2 6y ago
    "fully decentralized consensus" Can someone define this term? Do we ignore P2P bootstrapping issues? Do we ignore the roll of IANA, RIRs, and other authorities that manage IP address and ASN assignments? Or perhaps more to the point, why would it not work to have a consortium of banks set up and operate a distributed public ledger (thus avoiding the energy-intensive "mining" process)?
    • DennisP 6y ago
      You don't even need a consortium to avoid the energy-intensive mining. Ethereum's beacon chain has been running a low-energy consensus process for months with no problems so far, and $5 billion in ETH participating, on about 100K nodes. They haven't migrated the legacy chain to it yet but that's coming in a year or so.
    • ric2b 6y ago
      > Do we ignore the roll of IANA, RIRs, and other authorities that manage IP address and ASN assignments? Yes, because Bitcoin doesn't have those issues. It follows the chain with the largest amount of PoW, it doesn't matter where it comes from.
• golemotron 6y ago
  Inflation-proof store of value.
  • darkstar999 6y ago
    By trading inflation for volatility?
  • betterunix2 6y ago
    Anything of value that is not the currency used in your country meets that definition, and most of those things do not consume vast amounts of electricity.
  • mortehu 6y ago
    Only a given bitcoin fork is inflation proof. Bitcoin itself is infinitely forkable, and if someone greatly improves the experience of creating and trading forks, we're at risk of inflation in a way fiat currencies are not.
• Rallerbabs 6y ago
  Follow the big money. Michael Saylor from Microstrategies: $1B. Elon Musk from Tesla: $1.5B. GrayScale: not sure how many dollars, but they own >550,000 bitcoins. Big money is of the opinion that bitcoin is an excellent store of value. Only a matter of time before it becomes a medium of exchange. And later on, a unit of account. By that time, you won't be asking yourself what 1 bitcoin is worth anymore. Things will be priced in bitcoin. And those who have it, have it good.
  • janvanbergen 6y ago
    Bitcoin will never become a standard currency, it's slow, it has zero privacy (if I send you money once you can see ALL my transactions), it is EXTREMELY energy inefficient. Even if you believe crypto will one day become the standard (which I dont), it won't be bitcoin because there are better alternatives; proof of work is dumb, bitcoin has a finite supply of bitcoins, etc.
    • mnx 6y ago
      The finite supply is a feature, not a bug. I agree there are many aspects of bitcoin that suck, but not this one. We are right now witnessing many governments printing more and more money, which makes it less and less valuable. Bitcoin avoids that.
      • Rallerbabs 6y ago
        There is absolutely nothing about bitcoin that sucks. It is exactly what it needs to be: the world's hardest store of value. Every design decision comes with trade offs. All the right trade offs have been made. If you'd reinvent it from scratch, you'd end up with the exact same thing. The only thing about bitcoin that sucks, is that nocoiners don't have any. And they won't have any until it's $1M. Nobody wants to be the first. But everybody wants to be second.
      • totalZero 6y ago
        Central banking does have some benefits. Printing money can make a currency more valuable if it reduces volatility, because that draws more participants into the currency. > The finite supply is a feature, not a bug. Finite supply means that a guy who mined a bunch of bitcoin in his dorm room in 2011 because the university gave him free electricity can move the price when he decides to sell.
• blhack 6y ago
  Do you understand what the purpose of money is? It allows you to abstract your work into a (near) universally acceptable intermediary. For instance: I am great at writing web APIs in golang, but unfortunately for me the people coming to my house today to deliver a dumpster (we're doing some spring cleaning) do not accept "golang apis" as a method of payment. So I find somebody wants "golang APIs", agree to exchange with them for some money, and then use that money to pay the dumpster guys. Money is a hugely innovative concept which has obviously driven a huge amount of innovation (now you can do work like "write golang APIs" instead of only doing things like "grow potatoes"). Does that help you understand what the point of bitcoin is?
  • anthonypasq 6y ago
    what does this have to do with cryptocurrency? You already do that now. its called a job.
    • blhack 6y ago
      None of my customers pay me in potatoes, dumpsters, or iced coffee/chocolate chip scones. They pay my in money, which I then give to the person at the coffee shop and she gives me the coffee. And then the coffee shop people give that money to their landlord, the power company, the coffee bean people, and also their employees. --- It seems like such bad faith arguments to claim that bitcoin doesn't have a use. It has an obvious use. HNers might not agree that it solves the problem it claims to solve, but if that's what you think then argue that. Don't pretend like you "don't understand" what the purpose is.
      • anthonypasq 6y ago
        yes thank you, im aware of how money is different than bartering. What does this have to do with cryptocurrency?
        • blhack 6y ago
          >crypto currency Bitcoin is a crypto CURRENCY. It IS money.
• josalhor 6y ago
  I see a huge potential in cryptocurrencies, just not in Bitcoin per se. I can totally see the European Central Bank controlling some kind of CryptoEuro that is tied to the real euro and allows individuals to make transactions without banks. Banks would become an optional frontend on this transaction system, with security features built-in, etc.
  • xur17 6y ago
    If you see something like the CryptoEuro taking off, doesn't it naturally follow that there would be a cryptocurrency that would take off that was global, and not issued by any individual country?
    • IanCal 6y ago
      Not really. I would find a way of transferring "cash" that's tied to my local currency far more useful on a day to day basis than one that fluctuates when measured against it. Most people don't really need or want to take on foreign exchange rate risks.
      • xur17 6y ago
        To each their own.
  • mikepurvis 6y ago
    I don't think most normal people see "without banks" as a feature. Indeed, banks have already been peering with each other on transaction-clearing since forever, and I don't think it would take much for the EU to mandate a particular set of common APIs and maybe some entry criteria that allow increasingly smaller players access to the already-existing framework. All of this seems a lot easier and cheaper than bitcoin's distributed ledger.
    • josalhor 6y ago
      > I don't think most normal people see "without banks" as a feature. The other day I walked into a shop where I couldn't pay by card because the banks didn't provide the service to them. Users don't see "without banks" as a feature, but businesses will. It will reduce their fees and their dependency to the whole industry.
• axxxo93 6y ago
  I appreciate an honest question. The negative sentiment around crypto is a bit extreme imo. Bitcoin does have intrinsic value. A trustless P2P payment network has value. Is POW flawed, yes. This is a big reason why I prefer and hold Ethereum. Eth is moving to POS which is vastly more efficient. It also has additional programability in the form of smart contracts that bitcoin does not have. Look into the DeFi space for further use cases.
  • kgwgk 6y ago
    When even the people who says that Bitcoin has intrinsic value prefer something else it's hard to buy the argument. What's the intrinsic value of Bitcoin then? $10000? $100? $1?
    • marliechiller 6y ago
      whats the intrinsic value of anything. currency is just an idea that a group of people all agree to abide by. I wont accept French Francs for payment - 30 years ago they were worth something - now people have agreed it should be replaced by the Euro. there is nothing physically different between the Frank and the Euro beyond the combined trust of the group. BTC is just another example except it doesnt have a physical existence
    • axxxo93 6y ago
      > When even the people who says that Bitcoin has intrinsic value prefer something else it's hard to buy the argument. This argument doesn't make any sense. I prefer BTC over gold. This does not negate the intrinsic value of gold in any way.
      • jefftk 6y ago
        > I prefer BTC over gold What does that mean? That if you had some amount of gold you would sell it and buy bitcoin instead?
        • ric2b 6y ago
• tmoravec 6y ago
  Bitcoin is a potentially revolutionary technology in a very early stage. The important new part, the consensus algorithm, is ground breaking. Now, the very first implementation (Bitcoin) kinda sucks, like most technologies in their first versions. But there are newer generations, each more interesting, and each unlocking more possibilities. We are for example getting: * No-autority enforcement of contracts (Ethereum). * A distributed computation (operating) system (EOS). * Decentralised finance, for example lending platforms (AAVE). * Cash-like payment system suitable for real-world payments (Monero). We're only eleven years in so it's a bit too early to say if it's all rubbish or if it will change the world.
  • wil421 6y ago
    Bitcoin is over a decade old by now. It’s certainly not become a revolutionary technology and is not in its infancy.
    • louwrentius 6y ago
      Fully agree, I bet somebody will reply that Bitcoin is like the early internet soon... https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-but-bitcoin-is-like-the-early-internet/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-bu...
    • godelzilla 6y ago
      They're talking more generally about cryptographic protocols which have advanced far beyond bitcoin.
  • lottin 6y ago
    Do you have any idea about what 'finance' is? Shuffling money around is not finance.
    • rodiger 6y ago
      Do you know what Aave is or any of the other decentralized finance protocols? Also: "the management of large amounts of money, especially by governments or large companies" it literally is shuffling money around.
• doctorwho42 6y ago
  I'm in your boat, when it was first explained to me in a hacker space at college when it was first growing and priced at a few cents per 100++ Bitcoin. All I could see was a waste of energy and resources (time, energy, hardware). It will always be a drain on society, and it scares me that it hasn't failed because we see it draining our GPU industry to the point that market prices have gone insane and availability is practically non-existent / all left up to chance. It does take a rocket science to see the trends, as long as it's tied to needing hardware to compute arbitrary calculations to work... It's going to waste computer resources and energy. Both which are finite resources... Yes finite, solar cells aren't free to make, they don't last forever after you make them. Same with any other green technology. Maybe if fusion was our only power source it would be less of a concern, but we still haven't cracked Q=1, so... Yes it is a waste of finite resources.
  • dieortin 6y ago
    It’s not draining the GPU industry. No one buys GPUs for mining Bitcoin anymore, they use ASICs.
    • totalZero 6y ago
      I'm not sure about that...Search "best GPU mining 2021" on Google and you'll get several hits.
      • jefftk 6y ago
        None of those seem to be about Bitcoin? For example https://www.nicehash.com/blog/post/best-mining-gpu-in-2021 https://www.nicehash.com/blog/post/best-mining-gpu-in-2021 lists a "DaggerHashimoto" hashrate which would be for Etherium.
      • shawabawa3 6y ago
        Most people mining use something like NiceHash, which rents out your hashpower to people who use it to mine the currently most efficient asset (usually ethereum/monero/doge+ltc) Mining bitcoin with a GPU would take around 5000 years in the best case scenario to pay off _with free electricity_
• louwrentius 6y ago
  Well, I think they aren't any good for anything. They seem to be a solution to a problem nobody has. [0] [0]: https://louwrentius.com/cryptocurrencies-are-detrimental-to-society.html https://louwrentius.com/cryptocurrencies-are-detrimental-to-...
• jakupovic 6y ago
  The problem that you and others like you have is you don't have any BTC and now are struggling to understand why anyone else would have any. I think it's mostly from the fact you didn't get any when you should have and now there is no reason as it's expensive and again you don't have any. Simple really.
  • ThomPete 6y ago
    you can just buy satochis, dont think about the price of bitcoin, think about how much money you want to invest.
  • RobertKerans 6y ago
    That doesn't really answer the question "what is the point of it" unless the only point is to create wealth for the people who do have it.
    • jakupovic 6y ago
      "what is the point of it" From bitcoin wiki: Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency, without a central bank or single administrator, that can be sent from user to user on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network without the need for intermediaries. The trustless exchange part was worked on for a long time and Bitcoin came around and solved it. This is why questions like that are completely ignorant of anything technology and really makes me question the instigator's motives. Edit: adding a link to an answer provided to the same question on this site https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25256738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25256738
      • RobertKerans 6y ago
        I think you're seriously misrepresenting the questioner. People who question the point of it understand that the aim is to be currency. Calling people questioning the point idiots who don't understand technology doesn't answer the question either, it just makes you look like a dick. You're on a forum where the majority of posters have at least a higher-than average understanding of current technologies, so I'm skeptical that you have a much deeper understanding than most of them. And even if that is the case, what you're saying is just rude. There are negative stereotypes surrounding bitcoin enthusiasts that you are playing into very successfully here.
• totalZero 6y ago
  If everyone were to get excited about Monopoly money as a store of value, it would be wrong to tell you that you fail to see the huge potential. The crowd decided that bitcoin is worth something, and thus it is worth something. That doesn't make you wrong for not being part of the crowd. Today Elon Musk chooses BTC and it goes up. Tomorrow the US government could crack down on BTC and it could go down. Maybe a technical weakness arises. Maybe the dollar breaks and it goes to a million. That doesn't mean it has potential, nor that it's useful. It just means there's uptake.
  • JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > doesn't mean it has potential, nor that it's useful. It just means there's uptake. This is a bit nihilistic. Bitcoin’s value has reallocated a huge amount of technical talent and resources in the global economy. It also has a growing carbon footprint. These give the public, and by extension its members, legitimate exposure to its downsides. Given that exposure, it’s valid to consider managing it.
    • totalZero 6y ago
      So you determine the inherent value of something based on its price action? To flesh this out: I'm not arguing that BTC has no value, nor that it has no externalities, so I really don't understand what motivates your reply. I don't feel that there's anything nihilistic about pointing out the logical flaw in saying, "oh the concept of Bitcoin has 12% more inherent value now than yesterday because the price went up by that much." I recognize that the article is about electricity, but I'm not sure how you get from my comment to electricity. If Bitcoin crashes tomorrow, does that mean that the inherent value (or conversely, the societal burden) of the concept went down?
      • JumpCrisscross 6y ago
        > So you determine the inherent value of something based on its price action? Not at all. But in this case, the broader cost of Bitcoin scales with its price.
• mensetmanusman 6y ago
  If tens of thousands of folks like yourself had mined and kept the coins, it wouldn’t be nearly as valuable as it is today. It’s a deflationary asset, meaning the less it gets used the more valuable it is.
  • minitoar 6y ago
    I don’t follow your logic here. How would more mining early on have impacted the Bitcoin price?
  • squarehorse 6y ago
    How do you make that out? There would still be the same amount of bitcoin in circulation.
• throwaway5752 6y ago
  No, I agree with you completely. I have missed the whole thing, from $100 up. So a bit later than you, but I have the same questions and some more about viability.
• arminiusreturns 6y ago
  I'll make it to the point since I was in on bitcoin back in the cpu crunch days too: 1. As a medium of exchange. This was what the global community, and more particularly the techie community behind it wanted to use it as. We wanted a quick way to exchange payment across the globe without dealing with shitty companies like Paypal etc. but at some point, it became instead 2. A store of value. I'm not sure the order of effect on this, but then rich people who had the ability to influence the network effect started dumping real money into it, further inflating the price. I theorized at one point the central banks might have even participated on the dl, just because it's an easy bet to hedge on if you can poof money from thin air like they can. I think #2 has completely overtaken it's use as #1, and due to that and other factors, I expect a major collapse at some inevitable but undetermined point in the future. My personal evaluation and why I skipped bitcoin was because I saw that it did not have privacy protections built in, which is what the early coin community wanted (or so I thought). I kick myself for not keeping a few blocks sometimes (at one point I think I spent ~20 btc on a food order!), but oh well.
• esotericn 6y ago
  You can send me money across the globe without a middleman or anyone being able to block that transfer. That's it. If you don't want that, you don't want that. Some of us do.
  • acdha 6y ago
    That’s ignoring the middlemen who run the mining network, who you pay for every transaction, and the middlemen on both ends who convert to and from the real current which you use to buy and sell the things you actually use. Similarly, any government which wants to can block the network entirely or require everyone exchanging into real currency to avoid transactions involving people who’ve violated local laws. Since Bitcoin by design helpfully gives them a full list of your past activities anyone considering ignoring those demands has to consider the risk of consequences for their participation at any point in the future.
    • esotericn 6y ago
      Ah yeah, you're right, all of those legally sounding words invalidate actual use. Yes, I buy things with bitcoin, and no, you can't find it on the blockchain. (Or do I? :))
      • acdha 6y ago
        I’m not doubting that you use it, only pointing out that it’s not free to do so. Similarly, maybe you haven’t hit a transaction yet which a government made an effort to block but … are you certain that nobody will ever try to do so or be interested in your past history? If you’re trying to obscure your identity, consider how that would look under existing money laundering if any party led to your real identity being associated with those transactions. If you aren’t confident that no government with jurisdiction will ever care, that’s a factor to weigh on every transaction since you’re leaving an immutable public record.
        • ric2b 6y ago
          > Similarly, maybe you haven’t hit a transaction yet which a government made an effort to block but … They wouldn't be able to unless they had over 51% of the mining power, and it would be easily noticed.
• DavidPeiffer 6y ago
  >Ok, I have to admit that I am one of those people who knew about BTC very, very early but never bought any. I was too. I told a friend who owns a data center about it, and mentioned maybe he could stress test servers by mining bitcoin (this was before 2011, mining was very reasonable on consumer hardware). He never did to my knowledge. December of 2019 I ran into him and he thanked me for telling him about bitcoin all those years ago. He sold one for around $16,000, and still had 11 more. He literally didn't care if they dropped to $0, he considered it a win. I should reach out and see if he has sold another one this week. He could buy a new SUV outright.
• px43 6y ago
  Hey there. I'm one of those people who read Schneier's Applied Cryptography in highschool in the 90s, and immediately recognized the groundbreaking potential of using asymmetric cryptography for currency. I work in information security, and have seen first hand how our existing financial infrastructure is held together with string and scotch tape. For 10 years or so, every time I heard about some big credit card theft, or wire fraud, or SWIFT hack, I would go see if anyone had figured out how to do cryptocurrencies yet. Then 2009 rolled around and I got an email forwarded to me from someone named Satoshi who had apparently figured out a really solid mitigation for the double spend problem, and had actually released some working PoC code in the form of Bitcoin. Yes, there are a ton of problems with Bitcoin. I've been extremely critical even since that first email, but those problems are nothing compared to the existing systemic problems plaguing traditional finance. Getting rich was never a draw for me. I'm not quite retired (though this year has been pretty good) but I have spent 10s of thousands of Bitcoins over the years building up various aspects of the economy in order to maximize the utility of the network. I could easily be living on my own private island if I had held onto the coins I CPU mined in the early days, but I have no regrets at all about how I spent those coins. I'm more passionate about this than most, I know, but I 100% believe that legacy finance is a massive hindrance to the sustainability of our species, and crypto-economics will be a key aspect in building healthy incentives for a technologically driven society.
  • zadler 6y ago
    Why only healthy incentives? Could they not equally be unhealthy ones?
    • px43 6y ago
      First off, "healthy" is subjective, and open to the interpretation of the builder. Second, why would someone work to build unhealthy incentives? Seems counterproductive.
  • ced 6y ago
    I 100% believe that legacy finance is a massive hindrance to the sustainability of our species, Could you please expand on that? Why?
• onyb 6y ago
  Once you understand Bitcoin, there's no way why you'd go back to the legacy system. It's not Bitcoiners getting freaking rich; it's them adopting a superior store of value that is being selected as the winner in a free market. Most people are perfectly happy entrusting their (fiat) money with the banks, and asking permission for accessing their funds. Bitcoiners, on the other hand, have tasted the freedom of self-custody and a permissionless payment system. Whether it has value or not depends on how important it is to have a monetary good that is not issued by a nation state, and cannot be controlled/stopped/inflated/modified.
  • 542458 6y ago
    > there's no way why you'd go back to the legacy system I can think of lots of reasons. * Deflationary currencies are dangerous. Inflation is a feature, not a bug. * If I screw up a bank transfer or have my credit card details stolen, I can have those transactions reversed. No such luck with Bitcoin. The idea of losing my life’s savings to a zero day or sophisticated hacker doesn’t sounds great to me. * I can’t remember the last time my bank got DoSed. * Bitcoin’s value fluctuates wildly, making it a poor medium of exchange. * I like that my country can adjust monetary policy in response to world events like pandemics. That’s a feature, not a bug.
    • onyb 6y ago
      Fortunately, no one is forcing anyone to adopt Bitcoin, if the features are undesirable. > Deflationary currencies are dangerous. Inflation is a feature, not a bug. You may be right, but we can't stop a community from choosing something deflationary as their preferred currency. > I can have those transactions reversed. No such luck with Bitcoin I'd argue this is a feature in Bitcoin for many people. > I can’t remember the last time my bank got DoSed. You're fortunate. Last time I went to a bank (right after COVID hit), I was denied cash withdrawals due to liquidity issues. That's what happens when your money is in custody of someone else. Once you look outside first world countries, you'll see the demerits of centralised systems handling critical resources like money. > Bitcoin’s value fluctuates wildly, making it a poor medium of exchange. I'll agree with this point. Perhaps it's because of the nature of the market itself. Bitcoin trades globally, 24x7 and 365 days a year, without circuit breakers when there's extreme volatility. It's not appropriate for buying candies from a store, but maybe a good option for a Tesla? > I like that my country can adjust monetary policy in response to world events like pandemics. On the contrary, people holding Bitcoin during the pandemic were relatively well off in 2020. The stimulus package had negative impacts too, like asset inflation. But more concretely, Bitcoin is the first true alternative to central banking, and many people are happy to adopt it because it solves important problems for them.
• galfarragem 6y ago
  > I simply can't answer what BTCs and other crypto coins are actually good for. Getting rich quickly. It might be the largest Ponzi scheme ever. I hope it's not..
• acesubido 6y ago
  > I simply can't answer what BTCs and other crypto coins are actually good for. Everybody here is missing out why Bitcoin was made in the first place: the 2008 crash. The benefits of a globally liquid asset (not USD) will only be appreciated if you're living from a country that has a weak Central Bank. - Nigerians use it to import goods from China. This guy can't source USD to purchase imports for his mobile phone business, so he uses BTC [0] - Venezuela remote workers getting paid in BTC, because their central bank clamped down on USD inflow. They also didn't want to be paid in the worthless local currency. [1] - Remittance shops in Hongkong are using BTC to settle remittances by batch. Buy and sell to the last mile instantly, no exposure to volatility. This gives them way better FX fees and faster settlement (30mins vs. 1-3 business days). They pass the savings down to their customers as marketing spend, or they pocket the change to increase profit [2] - Argentina Central Bank is hoarding USD due to dwindling reserves. So they imposed a $200USD/month cap on individuals transacting with USD. People are flocking to BTC for remote settlement. [3] - Iran hit with sanctions cant use USD. So they're working on laws to use BTC for settling imports with China. They even issued BTC mining licenses for private companies. [4] I come from a country, where if you remit more than $10K outbound you'd have to: pay big fees ($200+), suffer bad FX rates, wait for 2-3 days, do a physical appearance at the branch for and pay documents/notarial stamps, sign forms, present and print out government ID's, just to say: "This is my money, I just want to send money to my dad overseas for medical purposes". December 2020, my mom had received USD in her dollar account. She wanted to withdraw and convert it to help build float for the family business, the local bank didn't have enough USD. They told her it was a 6-week wait, lots of people lined up. Lol. People from first-world countries have it good. [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-crypto-currencies-africa-insight-idUSKBN25Z0Q8 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-crypto-currencies-africa-... [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47553048 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47553048 [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-crypto-currencies-remittances-idUSKCN1GP117 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-crypto-currencies-remitta... [3] https://www.coindesk.com/crypto-is-booming-in-economically-challenged-argentina https://www.coindesk.com/crypto-is-booming-in-economically-c... [4] https://asiatimes.com/2020/10/iran-to-use-bitcoin-to-fund-imports/ https://asiatimes.com/2020/10/iran-to-use-bitcoin-to-fund-im...
• scottLobster 6y ago
  In terms of getting rich, that was luck. Some people with perhaps more money than sense played the lottery and won. Bitcoin could have, and might still fail with governments giving it more scrutiny as it grows, or this may be its peak, so anyone buying now is screwed. No way to know. It's also easy to look back at Amazon and say you should have invested back when they were an online bookstore that talked a big game. With the information available at the time it arguably would have been a stupid decision. For everyone who won big on Amazon and everyone who's winning big on Bitcoin, there are thousands if not millions of investors who bet on something with legitimate confidence and lost it all or under-performed. As for what it is, as far as I'm concerned it's just another commodity. The value of said commodity can be debated, the same way people can talk about how silver is not only a precious metal but has substantial industrial demand driving it, unlike gold. They're still all commodities. Now plenty of people have played the commodity lottery and gotten crazy rich in crazy circumstances that are hard if not impossible to repeat. If you want to try and be one of them by speculating on bitcoin, don't use any money you can't lose. For my perspective, my financial goals for my family haven't been met yet and probably won't be for a couple of decades given that we've yet to buy a house and the wife and I are hoping to give our future kids a full ride through college. I can invest the money I make in cheap, diversified funds based on Fama/French factors and have nobel-winning math and statistics saying I have a positive expected return over time given 100 years of stock market history, or I can gamble it in the various single-stock/commodity/sector lotteries with large amounts of uncompensated risk and hope I win big, but more likely lose and never meet my goals. My current solution to "more money" is I'm seriously looking into trying to get some sort of lifestyle business going on top of my day job. Worst case scenario it sharpens my technical skills and makes me even more employable. I like sets of outcomes that don't include (or at least minimize the likelihood of) "zero".
• wickoff 6y ago
  Can you really not find a single use for bitcoin? Here is the most obvious one - true sovereignty over your capital. When you have bitcoin, you have have physical ownership of a digitally transferable asset. Not legal ownership where a custodian ultimately decides whether you can access it. In theory nothing prevents individuals from carrying entire national budgets as seed words in their heads. You can argue ethics, legality but surely you have to acknowledge the power it gives individuals.
  • nmfisher 6y ago
    > Here is the most obvious one - true sovereignty over your capital. When you have bitcoin, you have have physical ownership of a digitally transferable asset. Not legal ownership where a custodian ultimately decides whether you can access it. This isn't really true though. At the end of the day, you're always subject to the powers that be who will come knocking on your door with guns if you stop paying your taxes. If they criminalize BTC, stick you in jail, it won't really matter that you have "physical ownership of a digitally transferable asset". Ultimately there's always a custodian who decides whether you can access it. It might currently have some small benefits over traditional currency (in terms of not needing to operate via the banking system) but that doesn't mean it's somehow outside the boundaries of traditional society.
  • kungito 6y ago
    Well, the owner of 51% of processing decides. It also has no use if both parties aren't connected to the internet. Also, you are in the truest sense not the owner of the bitcoins. You are using the "ownership service" of the network. If the network goes down, you lose access to the network (goverment internet filtering) or the network gets taken over, you lose everything. It's strictly worse than gold. The only downside of gold compared to this is that gold has to be physically stored somewhere
    • wickoff 6y ago
      If the owner of Bitcoin's 51% hashrate decides to take anyone's coins, then Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general is over. They all go to 0. If that happens, then all of the critics will be proven right. Hasn't happened so far though because Bitcoin disincentivizes this sort of behavior.
• csomar 6y ago
  Sure, let me help you: Apple, Amazon, Tesla and some third-world real-estate have made x100+ gains in the last 20-30 years. It's not the fact that you are getting old, but that speculating about future yield is a business. There is no reason to speculate about Bitcoin, the same as there is no reason to speculate about real-estate land going up in Antarctica .
• castlecrasher2 6y ago
  I'm in the same boat. The more I think about it the more it seems any cryptocurrency is essentially Monopoly money obfuscated by complexity.
• rednerrus 6y ago
  I've been in since very early on as well. There isn't anything, other than black market transactions, that BTC is good for. The idea that it has some kind of inherent value is completely insane. People are willing to pay for it now because Tether is artificially keeping the price high. Sooner or later someone (US government, Russian mobsters) are going to nab those Tether dudes and the game is going to be up.
• siculars 6y ago
  This is the classic trap of "failure of imagination". Failure of imagination can be fatal in that it obscures your vision of the future due to your own biases, perspective and lack of knowledge. It is critical for people to seek out knowledge they do not possess and perspectives they do not have.
• sanderjd 6y ago
  My answer to this is that back in the early '10s I massively underestimated how successful it would be as a pyramid scheme that I could get in on early, but that I massively overestimated how useful it would be as a currency, despite having an extremely low estimation of that. So I guess you and I should have had better foresight to see how good it would be for unhinged speculation, but frankly I never really have any regrets about this: I'm fundamentally not a gambler or a speculator. (However I might not like it if my wife were to gain a full understanding of how much wealthier and easier our lives could be right now if that hadn't been the case.)
• bilbobike 6y ago
  I think they're very useful, if your a guy like Musk, who needs to move billions of USD, anonymously. You can't carry gold around, nor diamonds anymore with full body scanners. BTC is the only way to move massive wealth, ergo why NK is using it to buy WMD material's & know-how. USD is backed by guns ( nukes ), what is BTC back's by? Large numbers, 10E77 (2E256), greater than the number of sub-atomic particles in the universe. You more likely to find a nickle lost in our galaxy, than to find a specific BTC private-key. The problem with the question here, is nobody thinks like a rich guy, let's fall back to JP-Morgans famous "Only gold is money, all else is credit". I hate to admit it but BTC in most recent decade has largely vacuumed up all the paranoid money that would normally be in gold. I don't even want to touch on the fact that SHA256 & ECDSA SECP256k1 are both NSA algos that are backbone of BTC. In my day the NSA didn't release an algo that they didnt' have a backdoor key. IMHO BTC is a great way to move massive wealth, but only the rich can play this game. From a GUV point of view BTC has kept the paranoid money out of gold, let's remember the original Satoshi white-paper came out of IMF-NSA, in 1997. I myself have played BTC since 2011, and have hacked it since then, as its always been more fun to hack Secp256k1 ( big prime numbers and such ) than thinking about 'money' of which I have no use. The problem that I see is like Alfred H Proofrock in the famous TS-ELIOT 'women come&go speaking of Michelangelo', IMHO BTC requires a total classic knowledge of math, physics, computation, and economic history to 'get-it', and thus given that most are not masters of these four, they're not unlike the wisemen holding different parts of the elephant. In summary BTC is a toy of rich men, and it will go away when the NSA-IMF decides open the backdoors of sha-256&secp256k1. Even then newer coins will come out using sha-512, and secp512k-n, and the game will continue, as the crypto-currency model has been proven, and road-tested. My advice for little people is to diversify, say have a little of everything, some gold, some farm-land, some stock, some cash, and most important of all to hold a passport is 'good country' when the SHTF in the USA. Today, I think it much better to play ETH and/or ZEN, which have had better gains, and still are profitable to mine, which allows you to accumulate with privacy, as the coinbase (or any 'exchange') purhcase of crypto is just an IRS database. I would say like gold, 5% crypto, and as along as its a good crypto, it doesn't really matter. By good I mean backed by good-teams, which is why I like ETH and/or ZEN; BTC is a barometer that's why my #1 hobby is cracking BTC ( factoring ECDSA primes using GPU farms ) its field-medal level math, that you will never get public recognition for solving.