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Don’t speak for everyone there, “we” don’t all have the same reason. I like Bitcoin as a diversification for being a “better version of gold” - it has the scarc

by cactus2093 6y ago

Don’t speak for everyone there, “we” don’t all have the same reason. I like Bitcoin as a diversification for being a “better version of gold” - it has the scarcity and you can physically own it but it is much easier to store and send anywhere in the world if needed. These properties also mean that in a pinch, if you live in an unstable society or one facing high inflation it can work as an alternative financial system. But I’ll never understand the westerners that seem to be almost rooting for their own society to collapse just to have another reason to use Bitcoin. I don’t have any real need to be independent from banks, and I am lucky that I live in a pretty stable society where that’s true.

arnaudsm 6y ago
I agree, edited "We" as "Many".
levosmetalo 6y ago
> I like Bitcoin as a diversification for being a “better version of gold” - it has the scarcity ... Why do we repeat the claim of Bitcoin scarcity when we all know it's just a promise and nothing more, there is no technical limitation? All it takes to "print" more Bitcoins is for the majority of miners to agree to make a fork that will allow for more. And that will happen at one point. As for Gold, good luck trying to mine an infinite amount of it.
- Fjolsvith 6y ago
  > All it takes to "print" more Bitcoins is for the majority of miners to agree to make a fork that will allow for more. And that will happen at one point. Why is this a bad thing? America's founders believed that the people could mint their own coins.
  - josephwegner 6y ago
    It's not intrinsically a bad thing (some may hold that opinion, though). However, if you are investing in Bitcoin because it is similar to gold in that scarcity is a primary attribute, then the ability to mint new bitcoins is dangerous. I'd also posit that "because America does it" is a fairly weak argument for many of the claimed benefits of Bitcoin. Much of Bitcoin's charter is that it helps move away from government-controlled currency. If you think America's monetary system is the best option available, then Bitcoin likely is not your thing.
- rawtxapp 6y ago
  Nothing stops you from changing the 21M cap in the code, but you need majority of the network nodes to agree to the new rules (aka a hard fork), the miners can't willy nilly change the rules of the network. What you would have at that point isn't Bitcoin, it would be probably be called "Bitcoin infinite" or something, similar to "Bitcoin cash".
  - user-the-name 6y ago
    You don't need the nodes to agree on anything. If they don't agree, they drop off the network, and form their own chain with little to no hashing power, that will stagnate and die in short order.
    - Spivak 6y ago
      You need a majority of computing power on the network to agree to actually do this which is what the parent means.
      - user-the-name 6y ago
        No, that was the original claim. That you need the miners to agree. They are the ones that hold the computing power. The claim I responded to says that in addition to this, you also need the majority of the "nodes", which are just computers that do no work and just forward transactions. This is incorrect, you do not need their help. It is easier if you have it, but you do not need it.
        PKop 6y ago
        >They are the ones that hold the computing power If they hold this power to dictate value to the market, why don't they do this right now and print infinite money for themselves? It's because they don't actually have this power.
        user-the-name 6y ago
- zulln 6y ago
  > And that will happen at one point. Why?
  - user-the-name 6y ago
    Probably because the fee market will turn out to be non-viable, and bitcoin would collapse without mining rewards.
  - mindcandy 6y ago
    It has already happened dozens of times and no one noticed. Probably the only such fork that anyone here has heard of is Dogecoin. And, that one only took off as a collective running joke.
- blhack 6y ago
  And all it takes to "print" more gold is for a majority of people using gold to decide that lead painted yellow is, in actual fact, gold.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    I got some pyrite for sale, great deal at $1600/oz! don't miss your chance to get in on the ground floor.
- PKop 6y ago
  >All it takes Oh just that huh? The market wouldn't value that new fork on par with finite BTC, so those miners would be hurting themselves, and burning energy for a worth-less coin. This action is trivial to consider, so what makes you think it has bearing on BTC value? When these miners leave old network, hash power & difficulty go down so other miners who prefer finite protocol can come in to mine. What's the actual threat then?
  - thedudeabides5 6y ago
    Actually this isn’t the only way. If financial intermediaries like Coinbase start extending credit or engaging in fractional reserve banking, then yes, you can “create more Bitcoin.” Just like how in the gold standard, you could still create more gold backed dollars by making a mortgage loan... Kind of funny how all these new monetary wizards miss out on this simple fact.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Aunche 6y ago
      This is a really dangerous way to create more Bitcoin. If the credit markets freeze, then the entire system collapses.
    - G3rn0ti 6y ago
      That’s nonsense. Only miners can create new Bitcoin. What Coinbase could do is to issue a financial derivative backed by Bitcoin e.g. a “Coinbase Penny” representing a 1/1000th of Bitcoins. And then could go on issue more of those pennies than actually backed by Bitcoins. But it wouldn’t be cryptocurrency if it wouldn’t run on a blockchain. Of course, the “Coinbase Penny” could collapse if we people stopped trusting Coinbase. Bitcoin wouldn’t notice like the gold price does not care whether a single US dollar is still backed by 24.057 grams of silver like it originally did.
      - arcticbull 6y ago
        It would work just fine unless there's a run on it. So long as HODLers HODL, nobody would ever notice. That's the premise of the whole proof of keys business. (https://www.proofofkeys.com/ https://www.proofofkeys.com/)
- cactus2093 6y ago
  Honestly maybe it will fork, and maybe that will be a good change. We don’t exactly know how the dynamics of mining will play out in a post-block reward world, maybe it’s actually better to keep mining at the current block reward size indefinitely rather than decrease all the way to zero. Very slow fixed inflation is not necessarily that different than having a hard cap on supply. Gold is still being mined too. If it forked in a way that completely defeated the limited supply and led to rapid inflation then it would massively tank in value and miners would lose a lot of money. That’s a pretty good incentive for them not to destroy it. As far as bitcoin existential threats go, there are many of them - the energy cost, a 51% attack, so much concentration of mining in China, etc. Miners mutually colluding to destroy their own investments is not at the top of my list of worries.
- elif 6y ago
  Your theory is fantasy, and your conclusion that it is inevitable is hilarious. Please do a 2 minute read of the BCH wikipedia page and correct your comment.
  - uncletammy 6y ago
    Just read the BCH wikipedia page. What does BCH have to do with increasing the total number of coins?
- dools 6y ago
  Bitcoin is nothing more than a blockchain ledger of who owns Bitcoin
  - bdamm 6y ago
    Bitcoin definitely includes more than just the ledger. Without the miners, there would be no transactions, and without the intermediate processors, there would be no transaction intake. Without exchanges, there would be no value. Bitcoin is clearly a lot more than just the ledger.
    - dools 6y ago
      What you described is just a blockchain implementation.
- spamizbad 6y ago
  > As for Gold, good luck trying to mine an infinite amount of it. Biggest barrier to more gold is technology. There's a ton of it in space.
  - sdbrown 6y ago
    I hadn't thought about that before! Very slick incentive structure there...like, build the tech to go to space and mine it and become enormously wealthy on Earth (ignoring the amount of wealth required to accomplish this).
  - kgwgk 6y ago
    You don't need to go to space. Gold can be created from other elements. It's just a question of tweaking atoms after all.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  The core Bitcoin holders don’t want more coins, so it won’t happen. Simple as that. The real elephant in the room is that new crypto currencies are being printed left and right. We may have a finite number of Bitcoin (in a couple decades) but one look at the list of crypto currencies will show that the number of crypto coins in general continues to explode at a phenomenal rate.
  - isoskeles 6y ago
    Why do the core Bitcoin holders have much to do with the decision? The decision here would be made by the miners, right? They have a different set of incentives from people who hold BTC. Maybe I’m missing something, I don’t see how holders and miners have the same interests.
    - px43 6y ago
      First off, miners need to ensure that the coin they're mining retains value, so they need the network effect of the entire economy. No miner is going to make a decision that makes the underlying thing that they are mining worthless. Even if 80% of miners wanted something, if it was egregious enough, like a change in supply, then no one would go along with it. Ecommerce companies like Coinbase etc would just ignore the fork and keep going with the remaining 20% of miners whose heads are screwed on straight. Those 80% of rebel miners who are burning all that energy, and have all that sunk cost in hardware, would be stuck mining a nothing coin that no one wants, and would lose everything almost immediately. Remember, miners have sunk costs. They, more than anyone, need the coin to retain value. Their incentives are incredibly aligned with everyone else in the ecosystem.
    - entropea 6y ago
      Miners have never had any reason to change anything in Bitcoin and will not change anything to this day. They make profit just by doing nothing and have been for a decade. They've held Bitcoin back from being much better than it is almost solely.
lottin 6y ago
Gold is commodity. The financial system is an industry that provides goods and services. Gold is not an alternative to the financial system. How could it be? It's a completely different thing.
- throwaway_kufu 6y ago
  >Gold is not an alternative to the financial system. The modern financial system itself is in fact an alternative to gold
  - xadhominemx 6y ago
    No it is not
  - boh 6y ago
    We're going to need some more detail on that argument.
    - arrosenberg 6y ago
      Not sure what OP was specifically referring to, but the argument is true in the sense that pre-1971, gold was money and currency was backed by gold. Now money is whatever the Fed says it is, and currency is backed by faith.
      - boh 6y ago
        Otherwise known as credit, which has been the prevailing valuation since the Stone Age.
        arrosenberg 6y ago
        The difference between relying on credit backed by a physical item (gold bricks) versus credit backed by "the Full Faith and Credit" clause of the Constitution is what happens in the event of default by the issuer of the credit. If the wheels stop turning at some point, there is no recoverable asset.
jmcqk6 6y ago
> an unstable society or one facing high inflation What are the chances that in an environment where the USD is not usable, there is an available network and electricity that makes bitcoin usable?
- temp8964 6y ago
  I don't think cactus2093 meant US / western world.
  - jmcqk6 6y ago
    I get that I said USD, but the fundamental premise doesn't get that altered. Bitcoin is heavily resource intensive. In an environment that is already resource pressed either due to political instability/natural disaster/inflation/whatever, what are the chances that the resources are going to be found that can actually operate bitcoin, and won't be better utilizied elsewhere?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - malaya_zemlya 6y ago
      You don't need to do mining in the disaster affected area. You need _someone_ to mine and to confirm transactions, but that can happen anywhere the world.
- pvarangot 6y ago
  What about usable but inconvenient? Most of the world is like that, Africa, China, India, for large transactions gold or the USD is inconvenient and dangerous. Venezuela, Argentina, are other examples closer to the US.
- thinkmassive 6y ago
  Like yesterday, when Fedwire and ACH were offline for hours? https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/government/federal-reserve-nationwide-outage-impacts-us-banking-system/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/government/federal-res...
dgellow 6y ago
Why not buy gold if that's what you want? What is better than gold about bitcoin? I never really understood this argument. I see some value in bitcoin but it doesn't have the same properties as precious metals: bitcoin value is only based on faith (so from this point of view it's not too different from so-called fiat currencies), there is no natural demand. If you have gold, silver, platinum, you will always have at least some demand from the industry. Even if the majority of the current market price is due to speculation you still have an actual need for the metal. That's not the case for bitcoin. You could have the market losing faith tomorrow and it's done, your coins have zero value. Crypto assets are their own things, it's not helpful to associate them to something that has different properties such as gold.
- gruez 6y ago
  >If you have gold, silver, platinum, you will always have at least some demand from the industry. Even if the majority of the current market price is due to speculation you still have an actual need for the metal. That's not the case for bitcoin. You could have the market losing faith tomorrow and it's done, your coins have zero value. Is there a difference between investing in gold (30% "real" value, 70% "speculated" value) and investing 30% in copper (100% "real" value) plus 70% in bitcoin (100% "speculated" value)?
  - miglmj 6y ago
    Only that it would have been way more profitable
  - hungryhobo 6y ago
    Volatility?
- dannyw 6y ago
  The industry demand of gold is minuscule. It's a rounding error. Buying a $1000 asset with $10 in "intrinsic value" is really no different to bitcoin. Bitcoin can be transferred electronically, and can move across borders without being hassled at customs.
temp8964 6y ago
Can you "physically own" Bitcoin? Or what does "physically own" mean exactly? I kind of understand what "physically own" gold means, but not sure it means the same as "physically own" Bitcoin. Getting downvoted on this. I am not complaining about the downvotes, but seriously, please enlighten me...
- felixfbecker 6y ago
  All you need is a wallet address, which you can put on a USB stick or even print out on a card and store at home.
  - codehalo 6y ago
    You dont need the wallet address, you need the private key. They are not the same.
- WD-42 6y ago
  If you use a local wallet to store your BTC, let’s say on a HDD, the the magnetic pattern on the disk that makes up the bits that represent your coins would be physically owning then. They can’t be retrieved any other way.
  - temp8964 6y ago
    Do I still own the BTC if the whole BTC network shuts down?
    - G3rn0ti 6y ago
      You own your Bitcoin as long as there is at least a single node out there storing its Blockchain. But it would be the only instance left that could confirm your ownership in that doomsday vision of yours. You can think of Bitcoin as a kind of identity management system. The blockchain stores transactions mapping public keys to each other and monetary values. As long as you remember the private key matching your public key you can issue transactions on the blockchain. Contrary to common belief Bitcoin is not stored on your hard drive, they contain only your private keys. The monetary units themselves, “UTXOs”, are stored on the network of Bitcoin nodes distributed all over the world.
Justin_K 6y ago
So when the power goes out or someone looses a hard drive, how easy is your bitcoin to transact?
- high_priest 6y ago
  Losing a bitcoin is like losing gold. Just that no one will be able to find it later, so with lower supply, price should rise.
- yazaddaruvala 6y ago
  Disclaimer: I have no BTC. I just want to point out the current transaction UX is not reliable at all. I rarely hold any cash on my person and typically pay for everything with my iPhone, otherwise with a physical CC. If the merchant has no power or a broken machine, I cannot make the purchase. This literally happened to me a few weeks ago while buying a slice of pizza ($5 or less). My phone had power so I offered to Venmo the owner instead but they said no.
pontus 6y ago
This is my thought as well. There's too much crypto-purity going around in these discussions and not enough bitcoin-pragmatism, I think. Reminds me a lot of the purity games that are being played elsewhere online, just instantiated in a different context.
statstutor 6y ago
> rooting for their own society to collapse just to have another reason to use Bitcoin. I view the main value of Bitcoin (or gold, especially paper gold) is as a gamble or hedge against currencies collapsing, in a situation which leaves Bitcoin (or gold) relatively unaffected. Without doing the formal calculation, I'd guess that Kelly criterion will suggest that an average person with an average risk profile should hedge 0 on this basis (exactly what the vast majority of people have done). If you've invested more than that, it becomes in your personal interest that currencies collapse in precisely that way.
RandomLensman 6y ago
An "unstable society" and "high inflation" or two very different things. Bitcoin could easily help (and does in some parts of the world) in the latter case. In an unstable or even collapsed society things are different. While true that historically gold could be used to buy things it might be at a very depressed buying power or it can be used when dealing with a stable outside society. A hedge for a unstable society is something that actually has "need", for example, antibiotics. Even then, once violence is a standard part of life and interactions the usual calculus of interactions changes. History provides examples for societies that kind of collapse but sort of kept going on money surrogates that could get daily necessities at a high price; history also has examples for the violent kind of collapse/instability and there I would not count on bitcoin or gold to help absent access to violence.
- jariel 6y ago
  BTC would be a bad choice in any unstable economy or high inflation. A much better choice in the case of high inflation, would be the currency of the nearest large country i.e. USD, Euros, Pound. Possibly RMB. You get a free financial system, just without the monetary policy until the country can get moving again. BTC doesn't provide any value whatsoever as it's by design a terrible medium for exchange, and not a very good store of value. There is no situation where BTC is useful whereupon there are not already many better solutions.
hammock 6y ago
> “we” don’t all have the same reason. I like Bitcoin as a diversification for being a “better version of gold” - it has the scarcity and you can physically own it but it is much easier to store and send anywhere in the world if needed. Most people are using bitcoin for this reason today (store of value). What OP was talking about was the original purpose, which seems to have been mostly lost.
uncletammy 6y ago
> These properties also mean that in a pinch, if you live in an unstable society or one facing high inflation it can work as an alternative financial system. At the time of writing this comment, if you want your BTC transaction confirmed in the next hour it would cost you ~ 10USD ( https://bitcoiner.live/ https://bitcoiner.live/ ) . What planet do you live on where you think a non-negligible percentage of people in ANY country, let alone a developing one, can afford 10 dollars for each transaction they make? That's not even considering the price effect that global demand would have on fees. Bitcoin can't even meet the demand of the relatively small cult of people worldwide that buy it, few of which even move their "assets" off the exchange. Parasitic investors have strangled cryptocurrency. If you think Bitcoin can currently serve any purpose other than making rich people more rich, you're a fool. Wake me when Tether is dead and people start using crypto as it was intended, peer to peer digital cash. EDIT: I apologize for coming off so harsh. My anger is (mostly) not at you. I'm angry at seeing the enormous potential bitcoin had to do good in the world go completely to waste.
- UShouldBWorking 6y ago
  I make payments almost everyday with Peer to Peer Digital Cash. Real users and devs moved to other projects like Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum and Monero soon after Blockstream hijacked the Bitcoin Core GitHub repo. Bitcoin Core is broken beyond repair but Bitcoin Cash has taken its place and the project and community are doing great.
- varajelle 6y ago
  With the lightning network, the cost of a transaction is negligible.
  - uncletammy 6y ago
    You can't use lightning network without opening a channel. Opening a channel requires making an on-chain transaction which most of the world can't afford. Lightning network is absolutely useless on BTC. Add lightning network to a chain that isn't crippled then let's talk.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
fullshark 6y ago
I like bitcoin cause the price keeps going up. When that stops I won't like it so much.
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure this is 99% of the value of bitcoin for 99% of people that hold bitcoin.
  - jacurtis 6y ago
    I was watching CNBC the other day and they were doing a roundtable thing like the sports channels do. Each host was shitting on bitcoin about how terrible it is, and how millennials are stupid for liking it, and it'll go to zero one day, etc. You know the drill. Then the main host asks who has a position in Bitcoin. EVERY SINGLE ONE of the investors that was just shitting on Bitcoin 5 seconds earlier admitted that they all have substantial stakes in it. The first guy tried to come up with a technical justification for why he is doing it. The next guy blamed his wife for wanting to get into it because all her friends were supposedly talking about it, so they bought 10 bitcoin back when it was $9k a share. The third guy simple said "It keeps going up, so I keep putting money in it. As soon as it stops going up I will stop putting money in it". The other 3 people after it basically just said "yeah, exactly what the third guy said." I personally get nervous with Bitcoin. It isn't stable which makes it far from a currency. You can't have a currency that goes up and down 10% throughout the day. Transferring $100 could be $90 or $110 over the course of a few hours. That's significant and cannot be ignored. I understand the idealistic portion of it too and how it gets us closer to a perfect money system, but truthfully the only reason we continue to talk about Bitcoin is that it continues to go up. I don't have very much faith in Bitcoin. But I'll admit I have some and I have been riding it up. It makes no sense to me. I am just along for the ride.
realradicalwash 6y ago
Bitcoin was created with the use case currency in mind and it was used like that by the earlier adopters. I think this is what OP was pointing at with "Many have forgotten why we used cryptocurrencies in the first place" and certainly with the qualifier "many", I think OP is correct: That's how we initially used Bitcoin and other cryptos. _Now_ many (most?) people use bitcoin as a store of value. But I think this is more out of necessity: Bitcoin as a currency is semi-dysfunctional. > the westerners that seem to be almost rooting for their own society to collapse just to have another reason to use Bitcoin I have not met a single person in my life with that motivation. However, I have met people who want to see the current system collapse, but mainly because it's not working for them.
- jacurtis 6y ago
  I don't think any westerners want the current money system to collapse either. So it is interesting to hear the perspective we give to other countries that think we want that. Trust me, no one in the US wants to see the current economic system collapse. We have already seen it. We know how it goes. We saw it in the 1920s. It was horrible. It permanently scarred many of our great grandparents, and even left scars on our grandparents (because they grew up learning vivid horror stories of it). Seriously it was so bad that it took multiple generations to recover from. Then we saw it again to a portion of our financial system just a decade ago. Luckily we learned from our mistakes and prevented total collapse, but we still saw how vulnerable the system is. Everyone here remembers that, it was only a decade ago. No one wants to see the system collapse. I think what people are really thinking is they want to create a system that theoretically can't collapse. We are aware of how fragile our current banking system is. Crypto originally sought to create a system that removed the two main wildcards in the financial system (the Fed and the Banks). Now we replaced Wells Fargo with Coinbase. So we aren't much closer to our goal. We replaced NASDAQ with Bittrex. We replaced the Fed with unregulated ICOs and Miners (if that's even a thing anymore).
qyv 6y ago
Scarcity itself does not imply value, something can be scarce but if no one wants it it still has no value. So the question needs to be what really drives the value of something like Bitcoin? In my opinion, I think that Bitcoin derives its value from the idea that one day it will become a widely used currency that can be exchanged universally for real-world goods and services. This has what has driven it to become a speculation tool; because at the end of the day when Bitcoin finally becomes a "universal" currency, everyone wants to be left holding a lot of it. But what if Bitcoin never becomes a currency, what happens to it's value then?
- hilbertseries 6y ago
  This doesn’t really make any sense. Bitcoins wild fluctuations make it terrible for a currency and its fluctuations have only gotten worse over time. It’s just a speculators game. If it became a universal currency, you would just convert whatever you have to it. There’s really no path for bitcoin to become a universal currency, because that would require stability. And there’s no path to stability with the current speculation interest. If the speculation interest dries up it would plummet, but that would just continue the cycle. It won’t ever stabilize unless it crashes and people stop caring about it.
- jariel 6y ago
  What drives the valuation is pure speculation, partly by massive vested interests, and then of course by the masses of cultish believers who own a couple coins and are in on the Ponzi mania. The same things that excites people in Amway.
Melting_Harps 6y ago
> But I’ll never understand the westerners that seem to be almost rooting for their own society to collapse just to have another reason to use Bitcoin. I don’t have any real need to be independent from banks, and I am lucky that I live in a pretty stable society where that’s true. I can write a book on why this is, but since 2008 we have seen economic collapse after economic collapse starting in the very cradle of Western Civilization (Greece) and has gone from their. I despise the doom porn side of Bitcoin, especially because I actually focused and even lived in some of these collapsed societies, and have seen the misery, violence and overall worst of Humanity first hand. Whereas those guys are often people with small holdings that have a very detached view of the World. It's like asking a trophy wife of a celebrity to understand the plight of a factory worker at Amazon during the Pandemic when her trinket is late... it's impossible understand what goes in tier mind, but I'd argue a lot of it is borne of some type of mental illness and is only possible due to such wealth disparity. BUt the haves and have nots is nothing new so I won't delve into that. With that said, I'd say you also have a version of that (detachment from reality given your statement) and if you live in the Valley and in tech and cannot see the reason why a World run of fiat has led to the homelessness problem, and over all misery, and what it is, then you are in for a very real awakening as this is happening with or without you understanding. The Chinese central bank just started woring with several countries testing its digital currency transfers, JP morgan tried doing payments via satelites using 'blockchain' tech, and has the most patents utilizing 'Bitcoin-like' technology. In short: Satoshi created this technology with the intended purpose of giving people an option to opt-out of the predictable and inevitable central bank destruction, it's coded into the very genesis block; those of us from the early days were from all walks of life and various networth, but one thing we all noticed was a stark dissatisfaction for the status quo and what the limited options we had to really do about it from within, so it was worth dedicating our time, labour skill set if we even had the slightest chance at reforming the World for the better. It's hard to explain, but in 2010 (when I saw the community go against satoshi in order to support Wikileaks) I dor the first time wanted all those guys in that thread who donated to Julian Assange and made Satoshi say regarding the NSA 'we kicked the hornet's nest' to have the resources necessary to disrupt our Industries and our countries for the betterment of Humanity, getting rich wasn't the goal it was the means of making a better World we wanted to live in... A guy like Elon makes perfect sense to me, and he has never been the eccentric billionaire in my eyes, he should be the standard: instead we get the worst like Bezos, Gates, Zuck etc... Now those tables have turned and Musk is the darling of the masses and anything he does makes people take notice--for good or for bad. I hope we usher in a new era of people like this and Bitcoin will have played a significant role in making that happen. Look up /u/Pineapplefund if you want to see more, try Sean's Outpost and Satoshi Forest. Our History and our culture is rich, and best of all it's not race/gender based which was so damn refreshing given how absurd things have gotten this last decade alone. Silicon Valley being the parody of all the worst things in tech which lung on to this maxim--making the world a better place--because it sounded good to say during a pitch for the most pointless, non-sensical app/project, but I still recall a tech article from like 2013 I had saved on my old laptop that died in some event and the reporter concluded with 'unlike most people in technology, when Bitcoiners say they 'want to make the World a better place' they actually mean it and go out and do it,' I consider myself from that generation of Bitcoiners, which was common pre-2013's bubble. My entire career reflects that, and I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have had it, even if I have trauma and bad memories that induce anxiety at times. I left a career as a (miserable cog) university trained lab scientist after working 60+ hour weeks to pay down crippling student debt wasting away my best years but I sought to try and make my suffering mean something and try tackle the 1-2 killers in the West at the time which are both diet based illness: diabetes and heart disease. And when I left that phase of my life I got to make environmentalism profitable in the process, and have many adventures that made me love Life itself, the good and the bad, and while this wasn't monetarily lucartive (the exact opposite actually) and quite honestly had I just held on to the coins I had I'd probably have a net-worth in the xx of millions in USD had I continued to passively buy, but that wasn't the goal: our vision and our impact mattered more than promise of wealth. And that's why I don't think you will ever understand the best of us, and why the latter 'moonboi' 'when lambo?' meme guys are what you could at best be able to relate to and cling on to. We lived completely different lives, and no amount of money you have would make me even exchange my darkest year for your entire Life. I don't expect you to understand, I really can't see how you could, but that is one reason and I probably shouldn't have shared as much as I did.
dheera 6y ago
Let's be honest -- the real reason a lot of people like Bitcoin is because they want to get rich quick. Nobody wants to say that here, but most people who own Bitcoin don't take a flying crap about a store of value or decentralization.
ascorbic 6y ago
The main point of gold is to be a store of value. Anything as volatile as Bitcoin is a terrible choice for a store of value.

arnaudsm 6y ago

I agree, edited "We" as "Many".

levosmetalo 6y ago

> I like Bitcoin as a diversification for being a “better version of gold” - it has the scarcity ... Why do we repeat the claim of Bitcoin scarcity when we all know it's just a promise and nothing more, there is no technical limitation? All it takes to "print" more Bitcoins is for the majority of miners to agree to make a fork that will allow for more. And that will happen at one point. As for Gold, good luck trying to mine an infinite amount of it.

Fjolsvith 6y ago
> All it takes to "print" more Bitcoins is for the majority of miners to agree to make a fork that will allow for more. And that will happen at one point. Why is this a bad thing? America's founders believed that the people could mint their own coins.
- josephwegner 6y ago
  It's not intrinsically a bad thing (some may hold that opinion, though). However, if you are investing in Bitcoin because it is similar to gold in that scarcity is a primary attribute, then the ability to mint new bitcoins is dangerous. I'd also posit that "because America does it" is a fairly weak argument for many of the claimed benefits of Bitcoin. Much of Bitcoin's charter is that it helps move away from government-controlled currency. If you think America's monetary system is the best option available, then Bitcoin likely is not your thing.
rawtxapp 6y ago
Nothing stops you from changing the 21M cap in the code, but you need majority of the network nodes to agree to the new rules (aka a hard fork), the miners can't willy nilly change the rules of the network. What you would have at that point isn't Bitcoin, it would be probably be called "Bitcoin infinite" or something, similar to "Bitcoin cash".
- user-the-name 6y ago
  You don't need the nodes to agree on anything. If they don't agree, they drop off the network, and form their own chain with little to no hashing power, that will stagnate and die in short order.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    You need a majority of computing power on the network to agree to actually do this which is what the parent means.
    - user-the-name 6y ago
      No, that was the original claim. That you need the miners to agree. They are the ones that hold the computing power. The claim I responded to says that in addition to this, you also need the majority of the "nodes", which are just computers that do no work and just forward transactions. This is incorrect, you do not need their help. It is easier if you have it, but you do not need it.
      - PKop 6y ago
        >They are the ones that hold the computing power If they hold this power to dictate value to the market, why don't they do this right now and print infinite money for themselves? It's because they don't actually have this power.
        user-the-name 6y ago
zulln 6y ago
> And that will happen at one point. Why?
- user-the-name 6y ago
  Probably because the fee market will turn out to be non-viable, and bitcoin would collapse without mining rewards.
- mindcandy 6y ago
  It has already happened dozens of times and no one noticed. Probably the only such fork that anyone here has heard of is Dogecoin. And, that one only took off as a collective running joke.
blhack 6y ago
And all it takes to "print" more gold is for a majority of people using gold to decide that lead painted yellow is, in actual fact, gold.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  I got some pyrite for sale, great deal at $1600/oz! don't miss your chance to get in on the ground floor.
PKop 6y ago
>All it takes Oh just that huh? The market wouldn't value that new fork on par with finite BTC, so those miners would be hurting themselves, and burning energy for a worth-less coin. This action is trivial to consider, so what makes you think it has bearing on BTC value? When these miners leave old network, hash power & difficulty go down so other miners who prefer finite protocol can come in to mine. What's the actual threat then?
- thedudeabides5 6y ago
  Actually this isn’t the only way. If financial intermediaries like Coinbase start extending credit or engaging in fractional reserve banking, then yes, you can “create more Bitcoin.” Just like how in the gold standard, you could still create more gold backed dollars by making a mortgage loan... Kind of funny how all these new monetary wizards miss out on this simple fact.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Aunche 6y ago
    This is a really dangerous way to create more Bitcoin. If the credit markets freeze, then the entire system collapses.
  - G3rn0ti 6y ago
    That’s nonsense. Only miners can create new Bitcoin. What Coinbase could do is to issue a financial derivative backed by Bitcoin e.g. a “Coinbase Penny” representing a 1/1000th of Bitcoins. And then could go on issue more of those pennies than actually backed by Bitcoins. But it wouldn’t be cryptocurrency if it wouldn’t run on a blockchain. Of course, the “Coinbase Penny” could collapse if we people stopped trusting Coinbase. Bitcoin wouldn’t notice like the gold price does not care whether a single US dollar is still backed by 24.057 grams of silver like it originally did.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      It would work just fine unless there's a run on it. So long as HODLers HODL, nobody would ever notice. That's the premise of the whole proof of keys business. (https://www.proofofkeys.com/ https://www.proofofkeys.com/)
cactus2093 6y ago
Honestly maybe it will fork, and maybe that will be a good change. We don’t exactly know how the dynamics of mining will play out in a post-block reward world, maybe it’s actually better to keep mining at the current block reward size indefinitely rather than decrease all the way to zero. Very slow fixed inflation is not necessarily that different than having a hard cap on supply. Gold is still being mined too. If it forked in a way that completely defeated the limited supply and led to rapid inflation then it would massively tank in value and miners would lose a lot of money. That’s a pretty good incentive for them not to destroy it. As far as bitcoin existential threats go, there are many of them - the energy cost, a 51% attack, so much concentration of mining in China, etc. Miners mutually colluding to destroy their own investments is not at the top of my list of worries.
elif 6y ago
Your theory is fantasy, and your conclusion that it is inevitable is hilarious. Please do a 2 minute read of the BCH wikipedia page and correct your comment.
- uncletammy 6y ago
  Just read the BCH wikipedia page. What does BCH have to do with increasing the total number of coins?
dools 6y ago
Bitcoin is nothing more than a blockchain ledger of who owns Bitcoin
- bdamm 6y ago
  Bitcoin definitely includes more than just the ledger. Without the miners, there would be no transactions, and without the intermediate processors, there would be no transaction intake. Without exchanges, there would be no value. Bitcoin is clearly a lot more than just the ledger.
  - dools 6y ago
    What you described is just a blockchain implementation.
spamizbad 6y ago
> As for Gold, good luck trying to mine an infinite amount of it. Biggest barrier to more gold is technology. There's a ton of it in space.
- sdbrown 6y ago
  I hadn't thought about that before! Very slick incentive structure there...like, build the tech to go to space and mine it and become enormously wealthy on Earth (ignoring the amount of wealth required to accomplish this).
- kgwgk 6y ago
  You don't need to go to space. Gold can be created from other elements. It's just a question of tweaking atoms after all.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
The core Bitcoin holders don’t want more coins, so it won’t happen. Simple as that. The real elephant in the room is that new crypto currencies are being printed left and right. We may have a finite number of Bitcoin (in a couple decades) but one look at the list of crypto currencies will show that the number of crypto coins in general continues to explode at a phenomenal rate.
- isoskeles 6y ago
  Why do the core Bitcoin holders have much to do with the decision? The decision here would be made by the miners, right? They have a different set of incentives from people who hold BTC. Maybe I’m missing something, I don’t see how holders and miners have the same interests.
  - px43 6y ago
    First off, miners need to ensure that the coin they're mining retains value, so they need the network effect of the entire economy. No miner is going to make a decision that makes the underlying thing that they are mining worthless. Even if 80% of miners wanted something, if it was egregious enough, like a change in supply, then no one would go along with it. Ecommerce companies like Coinbase etc would just ignore the fork and keep going with the remaining 20% of miners whose heads are screwed on straight. Those 80% of rebel miners who are burning all that energy, and have all that sunk cost in hardware, would be stuck mining a nothing coin that no one wants, and would lose everything almost immediately. Remember, miners have sunk costs. They, more than anyone, need the coin to retain value. Their incentives are incredibly aligned with everyone else in the ecosystem.
  - entropea 6y ago
    Miners have never had any reason to change anything in Bitcoin and will not change anything to this day. They make profit just by doing nothing and have been for a decade. They've held Bitcoin back from being much better than it is almost solely.

lottin 6y ago

Gold is commodity. The financial system is an industry that provides goods and services. Gold is not an alternative to the financial system. How could it be? It's a completely different thing.

throwaway_kufu 6y ago
>Gold is not an alternative to the financial system. The modern financial system itself is in fact an alternative to gold
- xadhominemx 6y ago
  No it is not
- boh 6y ago
  We're going to need some more detail on that argument.
  - arrosenberg 6y ago
    Not sure what OP was specifically referring to, but the argument is true in the sense that pre-1971, gold was money and currency was backed by gold. Now money is whatever the Fed says it is, and currency is backed by faith.
    - boh 6y ago
      Otherwise known as credit, which has been the prevailing valuation since the Stone Age.
      - arrosenberg 6y ago
        The difference between relying on credit backed by a physical item (gold bricks) versus credit backed by "the Full Faith and Credit" clause of the Constitution is what happens in the event of default by the issuer of the credit. If the wheels stop turning at some point, there is no recoverable asset.

jmcqk6 6y ago

> an unstable society or one facing high inflation What are the chances that in an environment where the USD is not usable, there is an available network and electricity that makes bitcoin usable?

temp8964 6y ago
I don't think cactus2093 meant US / western world.
- jmcqk6 6y ago
  I get that I said USD, but the fundamental premise doesn't get that altered. Bitcoin is heavily resource intensive. In an environment that is already resource pressed either due to political instability/natural disaster/inflation/whatever, what are the chances that the resources are going to be found that can actually operate bitcoin, and won't be better utilizied elsewhere?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - malaya_zemlya 6y ago
    You don't need to do mining in the disaster affected area. You need _someone_ to mine and to confirm transactions, but that can happen anywhere the world.
pvarangot 6y ago
What about usable but inconvenient? Most of the world is like that, Africa, China, India, for large transactions gold or the USD is inconvenient and dangerous. Venezuela, Argentina, are other examples closer to the US.
thinkmassive 6y ago
Like yesterday, when Fedwire and ACH were offline for hours? https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/government/federal-reserve-nationwide-outage-impacts-us-banking-system/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/government/federal-res...

dgellow 6y ago

Why not buy gold if that's what you want? What is better than gold about bitcoin? I never really understood this argument. I see some value in bitcoin but it doesn't have the same properties as precious metals: bitcoin value is only based on faith (so from this point of view it's not too different from so-called fiat currencies), there is no natural demand. If you have gold, silver, platinum, you will always have at least some demand from the industry. Even if the majority of the current market price is due to speculation you still have an actual need for the metal. That's not the case for bitcoin. You could have the market losing faith tomorrow and it's done, your coins have zero value. Crypto assets are their own things, it's not helpful to associate them to something that has different properties such as gold.

gruez 6y ago
>If you have gold, silver, platinum, you will always have at least some demand from the industry. Even if the majority of the current market price is due to speculation you still have an actual need for the metal. That's not the case for bitcoin. You could have the market losing faith tomorrow and it's done, your coins have zero value. Is there a difference between investing in gold (30% "real" value, 70% "speculated" value) and investing 30% in copper (100% "real" value) plus 70% in bitcoin (100% "speculated" value)?
- miglmj 6y ago
  Only that it would have been way more profitable
- hungryhobo 6y ago
  Volatility?
dannyw 6y ago
The industry demand of gold is minuscule. It's a rounding error. Buying a $1000 asset with $10 in "intrinsic value" is really no different to bitcoin. Bitcoin can be transferred electronically, and can move across borders without being hassled at customs.

temp8964 6y ago

Can you "physically own" Bitcoin? Or what does "physically own" mean exactly? I kind of understand what "physically own" gold means, but not sure it means the same as "physically own" Bitcoin. Getting downvoted on this. I am not complaining about the downvotes, but seriously, please enlighten me...

felixfbecker 6y ago
All you need is a wallet address, which you can put on a USB stick or even print out on a card and store at home.
- codehalo 6y ago
  You dont need the wallet address, you need the private key. They are not the same.
WD-42 6y ago
If you use a local wallet to store your BTC, let’s say on a HDD, the the magnetic pattern on the disk that makes up the bits that represent your coins would be physically owning then. They can’t be retrieved any other way.
- temp8964 6y ago
  Do I still own the BTC if the whole BTC network shuts down?
  - G3rn0ti 6y ago
    You own your Bitcoin as long as there is at least a single node out there storing its Blockchain. But it would be the only instance left that could confirm your ownership in that doomsday vision of yours. You can think of Bitcoin as a kind of identity management system. The blockchain stores transactions mapping public keys to each other and monetary values. As long as you remember the private key matching your public key you can issue transactions on the blockchain. Contrary to common belief Bitcoin is not stored on your hard drive, they contain only your private keys. The monetary units themselves, “UTXOs”, are stored on the network of Bitcoin nodes distributed all over the world.

Justin_K 6y ago

So when the power goes out or someone looses a hard drive, how easy is your bitcoin to transact?

high_priest 6y ago
Losing a bitcoin is like losing gold. Just that no one will be able to find it later, so with lower supply, price should rise.
yazaddaruvala 6y ago
Disclaimer: I have no BTC. I just want to point out the current transaction UX is not reliable at all. I rarely hold any cash on my person and typically pay for everything with my iPhone, otherwise with a physical CC. If the merchant has no power or a broken machine, I cannot make the purchase. This literally happened to me a few weeks ago while buying a slice of pizza ($5 or less). My phone had power so I offered to Venmo the owner instead but they said no.

pontus 6y ago

This is my thought as well. There's too much crypto-purity going around in these discussions and not enough bitcoin-pragmatism, I think. Reminds me a lot of the purity games that are being played elsewhere online, just instantiated in a different context.

statstutor 6y ago

> rooting for their own society to collapse just to have another reason to use Bitcoin. I view the main value of Bitcoin (or gold, especially paper gold) is as a gamble or hedge against currencies collapsing, in a situation which leaves Bitcoin (or gold) relatively unaffected. Without doing the formal calculation, I'd guess that Kelly criterion will suggest that an average person with an average risk profile should hedge 0 on this basis (exactly what the vast majority of people have done). If you've invested more than that, it becomes in your personal interest that currencies collapse in precisely that way.

RandomLensman 6y ago

An "unstable society" and "high inflation" or two very different things. Bitcoin could easily help (and does in some parts of the world) in the latter case. In an unstable or even collapsed society things are different. While true that historically gold could be used to buy things it might be at a very depressed buying power or it can be used when dealing with a stable outside society. A hedge for a unstable society is something that actually has "need", for example, antibiotics. Even then, once violence is a standard part of life and interactions the usual calculus of interactions changes. History provides examples for societies that kind of collapse but sort of kept going on money surrogates that could get daily necessities at a high price; history also has examples for the violent kind of collapse/instability and there I would not count on bitcoin or gold to help absent access to violence.

jariel 6y ago
BTC would be a bad choice in any unstable economy or high inflation. A much better choice in the case of high inflation, would be the currency of the nearest large country i.e. USD, Euros, Pound. Possibly RMB. You get a free financial system, just without the monetary policy until the country can get moving again. BTC doesn't provide any value whatsoever as it's by design a terrible medium for exchange, and not a very good store of value. There is no situation where BTC is useful whereupon there are not already many better solutions.

hammock 6y ago

> “we” don’t all have the same reason. I like Bitcoin as a diversification for being a “better version of gold” - it has the scarcity and you can physically own it but it is much easier to store and send anywhere in the world if needed. Most people are using bitcoin for this reason today (store of value). What OP was talking about was the original purpose, which seems to have been mostly lost.

uncletammy 6y ago

> These properties also mean that in a pinch, if you live in an unstable society or one facing high inflation it can work as an alternative financial system. At the time of writing this comment, if you want your BTC transaction confirmed in the next hour it would cost you ~ 10USD ( https://bitcoiner.live/ https://bitcoiner.live/ ) . What planet do you live on where you think a non-negligible percentage of people in ANY country, let alone a developing one, can afford 10 dollars for each transaction they make? That's not even considering the price effect that global demand would have on fees. Bitcoin can't even meet the demand of the relatively small cult of people worldwide that buy it, few of which even move their "assets" off the exchange. Parasitic investors have strangled cryptocurrency. If you think Bitcoin can currently serve any purpose other than making rich people more rich, you're a fool. Wake me when Tether is dead and people start using crypto as it was intended, peer to peer digital cash. EDIT: I apologize for coming off so harsh. My anger is (mostly) not at you. I'm angry at seeing the enormous potential bitcoin had to do good in the world go completely to waste.

UShouldBWorking 6y ago
I make payments almost everyday with Peer to Peer Digital Cash. Real users and devs moved to other projects like Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum and Monero soon after Blockstream hijacked the Bitcoin Core GitHub repo. Bitcoin Core is broken beyond repair but Bitcoin Cash has taken its place and the project and community are doing great.
varajelle 6y ago
With the lightning network, the cost of a transaction is negligible.
- uncletammy 6y ago
  You can't use lightning network without opening a channel. Opening a channel requires making an on-chain transaction which most of the world can't afford. Lightning network is absolutely useless on BTC. Add lightning network to a chain that isn't crippled then let's talk.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

fullshark 6y ago

I like bitcoin cause the price keeps going up. When that stops I won't like it so much.

Judgmentality 6y ago
I'm pretty sure this is 99% of the value of bitcoin for 99% of people that hold bitcoin.
- jacurtis 6y ago
  I was watching CNBC the other day and they were doing a roundtable thing like the sports channels do. Each host was shitting on bitcoin about how terrible it is, and how millennials are stupid for liking it, and it'll go to zero one day, etc. You know the drill. Then the main host asks who has a position in Bitcoin. EVERY SINGLE ONE of the investors that was just shitting on Bitcoin 5 seconds earlier admitted that they all have substantial stakes in it. The first guy tried to come up with a technical justification for why he is doing it. The next guy blamed his wife for wanting to get into it because all her friends were supposedly talking about it, so they bought 10 bitcoin back when it was $9k a share. The third guy simple said "It keeps going up, so I keep putting money in it. As soon as it stops going up I will stop putting money in it". The other 3 people after it basically just said "yeah, exactly what the third guy said." I personally get nervous with Bitcoin. It isn't stable which makes it far from a currency. You can't have a currency that goes up and down 10% throughout the day. Transferring $100 could be $90 or $110 over the course of a few hours. That's significant and cannot be ignored. I understand the idealistic portion of it too and how it gets us closer to a perfect money system, but truthfully the only reason we continue to talk about Bitcoin is that it continues to go up. I don't have very much faith in Bitcoin. But I'll admit I have some and I have been riding it up. It makes no sense to me. I am just along for the ride.

realradicalwash 6y ago

Bitcoin was created with the use case currency in mind and it was used like that by the earlier adopters. I think this is what OP was pointing at with "Many have forgotten why we used cryptocurrencies in the first place" and certainly with the qualifier "many", I think OP is correct: That's how we initially used Bitcoin and other cryptos. _Now_ many (most?) people use bitcoin as a store of value. But I think this is more out of necessity: Bitcoin as a currency is semi-dysfunctional. > the westerners that seem to be almost rooting for their own society to collapse just to have another reason to use Bitcoin I have not met a single person in my life with that motivation. However, I have met people who want to see the current system collapse, but mainly because it's not working for them.

jacurtis 6y ago
I don't think any westerners want the current money system to collapse either. So it is interesting to hear the perspective we give to other countries that think we want that. Trust me, no one in the US wants to see the current economic system collapse. We have already seen it. We know how it goes. We saw it in the 1920s. It was horrible. It permanently scarred many of our great grandparents, and even left scars on our grandparents (because they grew up learning vivid horror stories of it). Seriously it was so bad that it took multiple generations to recover from. Then we saw it again to a portion of our financial system just a decade ago. Luckily we learned from our mistakes and prevented total collapse, but we still saw how vulnerable the system is. Everyone here remembers that, it was only a decade ago. No one wants to see the system collapse. I think what people are really thinking is they want to create a system that theoretically can't collapse. We are aware of how fragile our current banking system is. Crypto originally sought to create a system that removed the two main wildcards in the financial system (the Fed and the Banks). Now we replaced Wells Fargo with Coinbase. So we aren't much closer to our goal. We replaced NASDAQ with Bittrex. We replaced the Fed with unregulated ICOs and Miners (if that's even a thing anymore).

qyv 6y ago

Scarcity itself does not imply value, something can be scarce but if no one wants it it still has no value. So the question needs to be what really drives the value of something like Bitcoin? In my opinion, I think that Bitcoin derives its value from the idea that one day it will become a widely used currency that can be exchanged universally for real-world goods and services. This has what has driven it to become a speculation tool; because at the end of the day when Bitcoin finally becomes a "universal" currency, everyone wants to be left holding a lot of it. But what if Bitcoin never becomes a currency, what happens to it's value then?

hilbertseries 6y ago
This doesn’t really make any sense. Bitcoins wild fluctuations make it terrible for a currency and its fluctuations have only gotten worse over time. It’s just a speculators game. If it became a universal currency, you would just convert whatever you have to it. There’s really no path for bitcoin to become a universal currency, because that would require stability. And there’s no path to stability with the current speculation interest. If the speculation interest dries up it would plummet, but that would just continue the cycle. It won’t ever stabilize unless it crashes and people stop caring about it.
jariel 6y ago
What drives the valuation is pure speculation, partly by massive vested interests, and then of course by the masses of cultish believers who own a couple coins and are in on the Ponzi mania. The same things that excites people in Amway.

Melting_Harps 6y ago

> But I’ll never understand the westerners that seem to be almost rooting for their own society to collapse just to have another reason to use Bitcoin. I don’t have any real need to be independent from banks, and I am lucky that I live in a pretty stable society where that’s true. I can write a book on why this is, but since 2008 we have seen economic collapse after economic collapse starting in the very cradle of Western Civilization (Greece) and has gone from their. I despise the doom porn side of Bitcoin, especially because I actually focused and even lived in some of these collapsed societies, and have seen the misery, violence and overall worst of Humanity first hand. Whereas those guys are often people with small holdings that have a very detached view of the World. It's like asking a trophy wife of a celebrity to understand the plight of a factory worker at Amazon during the Pandemic when her trinket is late... it's impossible understand what goes in tier mind, but I'd argue a lot of it is borne of some type of mental illness and is only possible due to such wealth disparity. BUt the haves and have nots is nothing new so I won't delve into that. With that said, I'd say you also have a version of that (detachment from reality given your statement) and if you live in the Valley and in tech and cannot see the reason why a World run of fiat has led to the homelessness problem, and over all misery, and what it is, then you are in for a very real awakening as this is happening with or without you understanding. The Chinese central bank just started woring with several countries testing its digital currency transfers, JP morgan tried doing payments via satelites using 'blockchain' tech, and has the most patents utilizing 'Bitcoin-like' technology. In short: Satoshi created this technology with the intended purpose of giving people an option to opt-out of the predictable and inevitable central bank destruction, it's coded into the very genesis block; those of us from the early days were from all walks of life and various networth, but one thing we all noticed was a stark dissatisfaction for the status quo and what the limited options we had to really do about it from within, so it was worth dedicating our time, labour skill set if we even had the slightest chance at reforming the World for the better. It's hard to explain, but in 2010 (when I saw the community go against satoshi in order to support Wikileaks) I dor the first time wanted all those guys in that thread who donated to Julian Assange and made Satoshi say regarding the NSA 'we kicked the hornet's nest' to have the resources necessary to disrupt our Industries and our countries for the betterment of Humanity, getting rich wasn't the goal it was the means of making a better World we wanted to live in... A guy like Elon makes perfect sense to me, and he has never been the eccentric billionaire in my eyes, he should be the standard: instead we get the worst like Bezos, Gates, Zuck etc... Now those tables have turned and Musk is the darling of the masses and anything he does makes people take notice--for good or for bad. I hope we usher in a new era of people like this and Bitcoin will have played a significant role in making that happen. Look up /u/Pineapplefund if you want to see more, try Sean's Outpost and Satoshi Forest. Our History and our culture is rich, and best of all it's not race/gender based which was so damn refreshing given how absurd things have gotten this last decade alone. Silicon Valley being the parody of all the worst things in tech which lung on to this maxim--making the world a better place--because it sounded good to say during a pitch for the most pointless, non-sensical app/project, but I still recall a tech article from like 2013 I had saved on my old laptop that died in some event and the reporter concluded with 'unlike most people in technology, when Bitcoiners say they 'want to make the World a better place' they actually mean it and go out and do it,' I consider myself from that generation of Bitcoiners, which was common pre-2013's bubble. My entire career reflects that, and I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have had it, even if I have trauma and bad memories that induce anxiety at times. I left a career as a (miserable cog) university trained lab scientist after working 60+ hour weeks to pay down crippling student debt wasting away my best years but I sought to try and make my suffering mean something and try tackle the 1-2 killers in the West at the time which are both diet based illness: diabetes and heart disease. And when I left that phase of my life I got to make environmentalism profitable in the process, and have many adventures that made me love Life itself, the good and the bad, and while this wasn't monetarily lucartive (the exact opposite actually) and quite honestly had I just held on to the coins I had I'd probably have a net-worth in the xx of millions in USD had I continued to passively buy, but that wasn't the goal: our vision and our impact mattered more than promise of wealth. And that's why I don't think you will ever understand the best of us, and why the latter 'moonboi' 'when lambo?' meme guys are what you could at best be able to relate to and cling on to. We lived completely different lives, and no amount of money you have would make me even exchange my darkest year for your entire Life. I don't expect you to understand, I really can't see how you could, but that is one reason and I probably shouldn't have shared as much as I did.

dheera 6y ago

Let's be honest -- the real reason a lot of people like Bitcoin is because they want to get rich quick. Nobody wants to say that here, but most people who own Bitcoin don't take a flying crap about a store of value or decentralization.

ascorbic 6y ago

The main point of gold is to be a store of value. Anything as volatile as Bitcoin is a terrible choice for a store of value.