22 ms·
One of the reasons I'm bullish on Bitcoin over the next decade is precisely because of the anti-BTC sentiment on this board.
by hnrodey 6y ago
One of the reasons I'm bullish on Bitcoin over the next decade is precisely because of the anti-BTC sentiment on this board.
- LAMike 6y agoIt's so funny to watch the "smart kids" from HN miss out on the biggest opportunity in the past decade to create wealth through software. The cope is immense
- rawtxapp 6y agoTo me, it just says that we are still in the early days in the grand scheme of things.
- zionic 6y agoIt’s like slash dot hating the iPod all over again. “Expensive, less TPS than my SQL server. Meh”
- kajumix 6y agoThe anti-BTC sentiment on HN puzzles me. There is no intelligent critique. The doubts that are endlessly repeated here have been addressed in detail, and are available online. Scaling and transaction throughput, energy consumption, state attacks, protocol weakness and lack of backing have all been responded to, to a sufficiently satisfactory degree.
- ipsum2 6y ago> to a sufficiently satisfactory degree That's an opinion, not a fact.
- karpierz 6y agoThe core issue I've seen that goes unanswered is what problem does BTC solve? The answers I've seen so far are: 1. Avoiding Venezuelan hyper-inflation - it is a use-case, but doesn't really apply to the United States for example. 2. Store of value - volatility is way too high and there are much better alternatives (Treasury bonds) 3. Evading capital controls - it is a use-case, but not really applicable to most citizens in the US, and is unlikely to be applicable in the future. 4. Settlement layer for banks - banks already have a settlement layer that works for them. The downsides of a decentralized system vs. a centralized system are an increased cost (in energy, computation, time, money, etc.) of transaction. So what justifies the cost?
- JulianRaphael 6y agoThis is not to refute your comment, but would you have been able to foresee what problems the internet will solve when ARPANET had 15 sites in 1971? I mean if someone would have told you back then that you'd be able to stream a movie in 4K from more or less anywhere in the world, you'd probably have laughed that person out of the room. So look at ARPANET back then and look at the internet today and how much innovation has happened on top of it. And I'm sure there will be a lot more innovation on the good ol' internet for many more years to come. In a similar way, BTC will evolve. It arguable already has. All the money flowing into cryptocurrencies and the crypto tech stack drives more and more competition (and yes - also corruption and bad behaviour) and some of it will be meaningful. Just like some tech startups were/are scams, some are kind of useless but harmless and a few changed the world. I personally don't know what problem(s) crypto will solve, but I can see that the technology summons a lot of creative energy. Creative energy that gets empowered through capital and channeled through competition will eventually produce breakthroughs somewhere. Let mankind's creativity run wild and let yourself surprise by the unexpected outcomes!
- MrMan 6y agoIt solves so far the problem of how do I own an asset that only goes up? That is pretty much it
- thehappypm 6y agoThe main issue with BTC being a store of value is that it's already hyper hoarded. Look it up -- it's far, far more concentrated in a few hands than any real-world currency or any real-world asset.
- foepys 6y agoPlease explain to me how scaling is solved in bitcoin. The lighting network requires an on-chain transaction to create and close a channel both times. Even if the world population were static it would take months to open a channel for everybody. Companies also need multiple channels each. LN also requires a constant observation of the LN network or malicious actors can just take more from a channel than allowed. This eventually leads to entities specialized in monitoring the chain for the average Joe. You could call those payment providers.
- kajumix 6y ago"LN also requires a constant observation of the LN network or malicious actors can just take more from a channel than allowed." Not true. Cite a source.
- foepys 6y agoVery true and often conveniently omitted by LN fans. Lightning Network Whitepaper, section 3.3.4 states very clearly: "For this reason, one should periodically monitor the blockchain to see if one’s counterparty has broadcast an invalidated Commitment Transaction, or delegate a third party to do so. A third party can be delegated by only giving the Breach Remedy transaction to this third party. They can be incentivized to watch the blockchain broadcast such a transaction in the event of counterparty maliciousness by giving these third parties some fee in the output. Since the third party is only able to take action when the counterparty is acting maliciously, this third party does not have any power to force close of the channel."
- rawtxapp 6y ago> Please explain to me how scaling is solved in bitcoin. The lighting network requires an on-chain transaction to create and close a channel both times. Channel factories solve this issue by being able to create and close many channels at once. > LN also requires a constant observation of the LN network or malicious actors can just take more from a channel than allowed. These are called watchtowers, they never have control of your funds, they are simply watching the blockchain for counterparty actions, which if they tried to steal your money, they would end up losing all theirs, so just knowing that you might be using a watchtower is a very strong deterrent to not cheat you.
- Spivak 6y agoI don’t think they have which is why they keep coming up again. BTC genuinely uses a stupid amount of energy and there isn’t a terribly good reason for it since we don’t need a completely trustless financial system outside of some libertarian ideal. It would be necessary if establishing trust was impossible but it isn’t. BTC transaction fees and throughput are still an issue. Off-chain transactions that use the main network as a settlement layer is a non-solution that undermines the whole point of BTC. Might as well just use banks as a settlement later for the lighting network for all it matters at that point. Volatility and the fact that BTC is more of an investment vehicle than anything else matters if you want to actually use it to buy stuff. The fact that there is no form of monetary policy means that the available currency doesn’t expand and contract with growth in economic output which makes prices unstable and naturally deflationary. BTC is fine as a nerdy digital cash and commodity market based on its value as such but a general purpose currency it isn’t.
- matheusmoreira 6y ago> we don’t need a completely trustless financial system outside of some libertarian ideal Who's "we" ? I certainly do need it.
- jayd16 6y agoMost people. Almost no one has it so how can we all need it?
- zadler 6y agoThat’s missing the point. You could have said the same thing about the internet. But we are not collectively making this decision based on politics, the market has decided that crypto is valuable.
- jayd16 6y agoWith the internet its easy to extrapolate value from most tasks. Cheaper, faster, easier, always available, available at a distance etc. Why do I need a fully trustless system that is worse in every other category? Slow, more expensive, less consumer protection, etc. At the very least its not obvious and the market has not spoken. Even people speculating use off chain exchanges, not the chain itself.
- mlcrypto 6y agoThe amount of economics, philosophy, history, & engineering one must understand to grasp Bitcoin is rare. That's why they say we are lucky to make our wealth in it
- ArchD 6y agoWhen people run out of good arguments, they give you tons of weak arguments. What you see and describe is a bullish sign for the thing they are trying to argue against. It's somewhat pointless to argue with random strangers on the Internet who may or may not appreciate your effort at reasonable discussion. If you believe in your own arguments, put your money where your mouth is and be proven right economically and be the one who quietly owns the last laugh.
- FireBeyond 6y ago> The anti-BTC sentiment on HN puzzles me. There is no intelligent critique. That's an ... amazingly blanket ... statement, for the countless thousands of words people here have said on the topic.
- colinmhayes 6y agoBitcoin is incredibly wasteful and has no genuine use case that isn't better served by ethereum2 or monero.
- imtringued 6y agoThe fact that there are competitors to a "store of value" is exactly the problem. When you put your money into funkopops you don't want people to suddenly decide that beanie babies are in again.
- imtringued 6y ago>There is no intelligent critique. Bitcoin "people" hail second layer scaling solutions like lightning which is basically paypal but decentralized. So why on earth would you not expect the people/companies who would participate in lightning to not just build their own scaling layer? What we are seeing is just that Visa and other competitors build a central scaling solution outside Bitcoin. Thus Bitcoin failed to decentralize anything if the vast majority of people using Bitcoin don't even interact with the block chain. The fees are incredibly high, so high that any Venezuelan that is using Bitcoin is already rich and just wants to flee the country with their wealth. It's not private, anyone who knows your address can track your balance, your transactions and can even send tainted Bitcoin to you, to ruin the untainted Bitcoin in your wallet. >lack of backing have all been responded to, to a sufficiently satisfactory degree. They haven't. The only thing I see is that people consider Bitcoin as the perfect Cryptocurrency as it is and nothing has to be changed to make it better, yet they expect the market cap to grow forever without doing anything for it, but still assume that the changes they refuse to implement will be the driving force of that value.
- pjc50 6y agoI've reached the doubly-cynical conclusion: the critics are right, but it will probably keep climbing in value in the medium term. Actual on-chain transaction volume will remain dwarfed by on-exchange volume. Tether will get clobbered in the next few years. This ought to affect the bitcoin price, but won't.
- FridgeSeal 6y agoI think it will continue to increase in value for while, as it continues to plumb the depths of “people who haven’t bought in yet”, but that’s eventually going to cap out, and eventually they’re going to run out of coins to mine, and people will catch on and the value (and interest in it) will fall through the floor.
- Kathula 6y ago>I think it will continue to increase in value for while, as it continues to plumb the depths of “people who haven’t bought in yet” How many people do you think owns Bitcoin? And how many people are there in the world? >and eventually they’re going to run out of coins to mine Perfect example of just how uninformed the crowd at hackernews really isn't. You haven't done zero research. If you actually looked it up, you'd know that the block-reward gets cut in half every four years. So "running out of coins to mine" won't be happening until the year 2140, and even then there's incentives for the miners to continue mining.
- riffraff 6y agoI partially agree with both of you, but I think the depths of "people who haven’t bought in yet" are larger than generally estimated: we're at an inflection point where corporate financials will start to think "well, we should own some bitcoins too" and there will be a bit of domino effect there as people try to emulate their "betters". But I think things will crash way before we run out of coins to mine.
- graeme 6y agoHN isn’t wrong about everything. It was extremely bearing on Groupon in 2011. It was another thing where true believers would say that skeptics “just don’t get it”, but the HN critics had extremely cogent critiques that went without response. Google “Groupon Stock”, HN was very correct. VERY different from the anti-Dropbox sentiment of the famous Dropbox comment. You also have Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Nassim Taleb, Nouriel Roubini, all claiming Bitcoin is worthless. Some of the brightest minds in finance with impeccable and long track records. Bitcoin has had 12 years and still has no real world use cases. By contrast the internet was instantly useful. Bitcoin has a monstrous cost in energy and money to maintain the network. The token backing BTC, Tether, is founded by con artists and was just revealed to not have had the backing they claim. BTC has been subjected to the same money money printing its advocates defy in fiat. —— Check the results for Groupon: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ei=7H1SYMDVJKiYwbkPvqiEgAc&q=groupon+stock&oq=groupon+sto&gs_lcp=ChNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwEAEYADIICAAQsQMQgwEyAggAMgIIADICCAAyAggAMgIIADICCAAyBQgAEMkDOgQIABBHOgUIABCxAzoECAAQQ1CFD1i7FmCZHGgAcAF4AIABqQGIAb8DkgEDMi4ymAEAoAEByAEIwAEB&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ei=7H1SYMDVJKiYwbkPvqiEg...
- hnrodey 6y agoI'm not here to defend Bitcoin nor respond to critiques. Just not what I'm in to. Full disclosure, I have a financial stake in Bitcoin. My observation on all of this is that the most common themes to bear Bitcoin - can all be fixed! People are quite happy to look at the current landscape and proclaim immediate and indefinite failure. Detractors allow no room for growth. Volatility - you could argue that Bitcoin is still so young that the market is trying to determine it's worth. I estimate that Bitcoin is significantly less volatile at some point in the future. Real world use cases - currently I agree, I don't see a great use of it ... yet. I think we'll find something. Energy, sure okay it uses a lot of energy. Is this less problematic is most of the energy is sourced from renewables (now or in the future)? Certainly it's also possible that the protocol is updated to be more energy efficient, or another coin reigns supreme.
- ALittleLight 6y agoI've doubted bitcoin for years, and continue to. Part of me realizes I was wrong, in the sense that I would've made money had I only bought and held - but I can't bring myself to buy something that doesn't work. I can't use it as currency due to transaction fees and times. "Store of value" is basically the same thing as "Ponzi scheme" as far as I can tell. I would've made money, but...
- SigmundA 6y ago“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” -Sagan
- auc 6y agoColumbus also deserved to be laughed at. People in his time period knew the world was round and even had a pretty accurate estimate of its radius, but he (very erroneously) thought it was way smaller. That's why he thought he landed in India.
- drak0n1c 6y agoThe point stands though - projects and ideas that may deserve to be laughed given current knowledge can still be the impetus for unintentional paradigm shifts. Whether it be Columbus' voyage, or early forms of blockchain.
- imtringued 6y agoThis delusion convinced him to make the journey. Everyone who knew the world was round expected a whole lot of nothing in the direction Columbus was going. The problem is that I don't see how Bitcoin will suddenly figure out a way to justify itself. Columbus was clearly looking for land and found it. Where are all the goal oriented Bitcoin owners?
- hnrodey 6y agoReplying to my own comment because an edit felt like cheating... The entire crypto market goes to infinity or zero. I don't readily know which is more likely; only that I'm betting on infinity.
- zadler 6y agoCrypto is well beyond escape velocity by now. That ship has sailed. It’s a shame that here on HN, people who might be useful in making some estimations of where it might take us are all tied up arguing over whether or not it’a the right solution. People find it distasteful, and energy usage is not the only reason.
- screye 6y agoWhat sold me on Bitcoin wasn't the strength of bitcoin itself, but the weakness of gold. Bitcoin is an incredible store of value (albeit volatile). Being able to store a huge amount of assets in an inflation resilient trust-free resource that can't be faked is incredibly useful. The other thing that sells me on it is the institutional buy in. At this point, nough rich people are going to lose big if bitcoin doesn't succeed. So, I find it unlikely that politicians and bureaucracy will purposely limit it. That being said, I wouldn't invest more than 20% of my portfolio into crypto. It is far too volatile to put in anymore than that.