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What a crock. By his definitions succeeding is when everything goes perfectly right, 100% to plan, forever, according to every third party observer. By his def

by anm89 5y ago

What a crock. By his definitions succeeding is when everything goes perfectly right, 100% to plan, forever, according to every third party observer. By his definition all of FAANG (or whatever) are total failures. You could poke minor semantic holes in their accomplishments! CNBC lists bitcoin price next to the S&P. It's up infinity percent. There are regulated financial products. If asked at the time he would have unequivocally said those things would not have happened because bitcoin was going to fail because he was dead wrong. It would have been much braver and more respectable to just say "yeah, I really was wrong on that one"

School-Cotton 5y ago
But Bitcoin hasn’t succeeded. It doesn’t allow you to do anything useful except (1) buy drugs on the internet, and (2) move money out of authoritarian countries, both of which he acknowledges in the article. The fact that a lot of people care about blockchains and are willing to make speculative bets on them doesn’t mean that the idea is actually useful for much. The FAANGs at least have made some real products, some of which some people find useful.
- mitchdoogle 5y ago
  You can buy tons of stuff with Bitcoin (not just drugs). You can transfer it around the world basically for free (transaction fees amount to the equivalent of pennies no matter how much you send). It's immutable. Basically it does the things it's supposed to do. It's gained widespread adoption, a whole economy, thousands of businesses. It is, without a doubt, successful.
  - School-Cotton 5y ago
    > You can buy tons of stuff with Bitcoin You can also buy tons of stuff with USD. The only innovation of Bitcoin is that it allows you to do illegal stuff. A more expensive and cumbersome way to do what you could already do with other tools is not “success”. > You can transfer it around the world basically for free (transaction fees amount to the equivalent of pennies no matter how much you send). This is also true of, for example, TransferWise. > It’s immutable This actually makes it worse than the existing financial system, because being able to reverse fraudulent transactions is a feature, not a bug. > It’s gained widespread adoption, a while economy, thousands of businesses. Also true of USD. You still haven’t demonstrated any advantage of Bitcoin other than illegal transactions.
    - Osiris 5y ago
      Much more illegal activity happens with USD than with Bitcoin.
    - yownie 5y ago
      >This is also true of, for example, TransferWise. Not for small to large amounts for less than pennies >A more expensive and cumbersome way to do what you could already do with other tools is not “success”. You're vastly underestimating the amount of people trapped in regimes where they cannot spend their funds abroad or risk having them devalued at whim.
      - wonnage 5y ago
        Bitcoin is the definition of getting devalued at whim
      - crummy 5y ago
        > or risk having them devalued at whim. doesn't that describe a lot of cryptocurrencies? or are you suggesting the people in these regimes use cryptocurrencies as an intermediary to transfer their local currency into more stable foreign currency?
    - errantmind 5y ago
      This reasoning is really strange and reeks of bitterness. Do you have anything backing up your claim BTC is used for mostly illegal activities? Please provide some very clear citations for that claim.
      - School-Cotton 5y ago
        I never claimed that, and have no idea whether it’s true.
  - jjeaff 5y ago
    There are very few things you can buy more easily using Bitcoin. And average fees to send money right now with Bitcoin are 2-3%. Which is not great, considering the current financial system offers lots of much cheaper options for sending money.
    - yownie 5y ago
      take a look at Bitcoins Lightning network sometime, you'd be surprised.
  - akavi 5y ago
    > It's gained widespread adoption, a whole economy, thousands of businesses. What percent of those business denominate their prices in bitcoin? What percent of those businesses do anything but immediately convert the bitcoin back into fiat the moment they take possession?
    - yuuu 5y ago
      So because Bitcoin hasn't overtaken fiat currency as the de facto international standard means it's a failure? All of the critics in this thread sure have some narrow goalposts, don't they?
      - stouset 5y ago
        I think you’re missing the point that Bitcoin is at zero percent for this metric.
- anm89 5y ago
  But Google hasn't succeeded! It was supposed to do something useful but all it does is mine data for ads. They were supposed to not be evil but they are evil. But Facebook hasn't succeeded. It was supposed to do something useful but all it does is mine data for ads. They were supposed to connect everyone but all they did was corrupt our political system. But Apple hasn't succeeded. It was supposed to do something useful but all it does is pump out a new Iphone color every year and remove a port. They were supposed to revolutionize computing but all the did was figure out how to sell shiny junk made by poor people in developing markets to middle class people in developing markets. See how easy it is to play that game? Somehow I'm guessing most people who like bitcoin in 2011 aren't reeling from the failure of bitcoin.
  - School-Cotton 5y ago
    Your analogies miss the mark because in addition to the negative things you’ve pointed out, Google Search, for example, _is_ useful. Comparing the usefulness of Bitcoin to Google Search or the smartphone is asinine. > Somehow I'm guessing most people who like bitcoin in 2011 aren't reeling from the failure of bitcoin. Of course not — they’re all extremely wealthy. That’s irrelevant to the discussion; I’m sure the author of this piece understands that Bitcoin has increased in value, but that’s not at all what the piece is about.
    - anm89 5y ago
      How ridiculous to suggest that there is some objective trait called useful that you have a monopoly on determining. Turns out that various people may find all of these various things either useful or not useful because it is subjective.
      - philosopher1234 5y ago
        What is useful about Bitcoin? I genuinely don’t understand what use people see in it. Do you have a use? It seems to me the main use is “get rich on vetting it will go up” because I haven’t been able to find any other articulation of why i might ever want to use it.
- fastball 5y ago
  Nobody buys drugs on the internet with Bitcoin in 2021.
- corndoge 5y ago
  Maybe Bitcoin doesn't, but as for the rest of the ecosystem, the gentleman author seems to have little idea of what he is taking about.
  - School-Cotton 5y ago
    As far as I know, no blockchain has ever proven useful for any purpose other than illegal money transfers. Do you have any counterexamples?
    - sanxiyn 5y ago
      https://satoshidice.com/fair https://satoshidice.com/fair
      - crooked-v 5y ago
        An unregulated betting platform sounds like illegal money transfers to me.
        sanxiyn 5y ago
        Betting is not just money transfer, it's something more.
        loeg 5y ago
        Illegal gambling?
      - School-Cotton 5y ago
        Online casinos predate Bitcoin.
        ur-whale 5y ago
        > Online casinos predate Bitcoin. You missed the "provably fair" part.
- kneel 5y ago
  It's incredible for long term savings.
  - baq 5y ago
    a) in fiat terms and b) has been up till now
    - ur-whale 5y ago
      > a) in fiat terms It's true that if your measuring stick is toilet paper, the current price of Bitcoin doesn't tell you much. > b) has been up till now Past performance is no guarantee of future ... etc Sure, that's what every traditional investment prospectus says in the first paragraph. They usually then proceed to explain how well they've been doing and why you should therefore invest. There is something called Baye's rule. Ignore it at your own (opportunity cost) risk.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  (2) is enough to say it completely succeeded.
  - sanxiyn 5y ago
    I agree. I personally donated Bitcoins to WikiLeaks.
- stouset 5y ago
  Don’t forget (3) scams and (4) ransomware.
- XorNot 5y ago
  > (2) move money out of authoritarian countries To move money out of an authoritarian country, you have to know someone who wants to move money in. The only reason it works at all is because the total amount of Bitcoin doing this is comparatively very small compared to local corruption and mining which can support this use case. To make this transaction someone else in your local authoritarian country has to have Bitcoin, and be willing to exchange it for local currency. It's no huge surprise a lot of mining power ended up in China, because of course this is a transaction you do not want to do in China: you want to originate Bitcoin and then get some Americans to pay you nice clean USDs into bank accounts outside of China. Which of course works because electricity consumption in China is relatively unsuspect (or was: naturally China has cracked down on this and is having ongoing power shortages to boot). Which of course creates a weird compromise: if Bitcoin is good at getting money out of authoritarian countries, then either you're outsourcing to someone who can move currency around locally, or you are outsourcing an increasing fraction of the Bitcoin mining compute, and thus control of the network.
ausbah 5y ago
>CNBC lists bitcoin price next to the S&P. It's up infinity percent. There are regulated financial products. If asked at the time he would have unequivocally said those things would not have happened because bitcoin was going to fail because he was dead wrong. there is a difference between "succeeding somewhat in the original goal" and "succeeding in a way different from the original goal all together". the former seems to closer to start ups that made it big - they had a product that became successful even if the endproduct isn't 100% as the original product with bitcoin, wasn't (isn't?) the original goal to create an alternative to mainstream financial system? just based off the example you listed, among other things, it seems like Bitcoin has completely 100% has failed in that regard since it's just become another feature of the mainsteam financial system sure bitcoin and crypto are still here, but they're just another asset class at this point. sure it's not "failure" - it certainly is successful by a different set of metrics from the original, but I'm sure this isn't what Satoshi had in mind
- 3np 5y ago
  Who’s to say what “the original goal” was? Satoshi wasn’t that vocal and explicit about their vision in many ways. As for the early community, there may be as many narratives as there were bitcoiners. And even if satoshi would have posted a more explicit manifesto, who’s to say that they are the authority to dictate the goals of a project they abandoned almost a decade ago and that others have picked up? Saying “nobody buys their coffee settled and priced in bitcoin; that was the whole point and should have happened in <10 years” is simply a straw man. Hell, several of the “failures” points the author brings up are considered features by some. The existence of permissionless and liquid cryptocurrency markets have political and economic implications. That you do not agree with them does not make it a failure; you just have a different perspective. All that aside, I think it’s too early still to call Bitcoin’s success or failure.
  - sweetbitter 5y ago
    "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."
croes 5y ago
Is BTC a currency?
- koonsolo 5y ago
  No it's a coin. Bit coin.
gonehome 5y ago
Thankfully people that can’t admit when they’re wrong despite almost absurd evidence of their wrongness just don’t matter that much in economic bets. The people constantly predicting Tesla failure and shorting the stock lost all of their money. This guy won’t matter. You’d think people would learn to change their mind and update when massive economic incentives exist to do so, but often they don’t. Confirmation bias is a powerful thing.
- XorNot 5y ago
  Michael Burry was dead on the money that a crash was imminent in 2008, but he was still in serious danger of going bankrupt before it happened and his short would pay out.[1] "The market can remain irrational longer then you can remain solvent" is a saying for a reason. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry#cite_note-Burry-6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry#cite_note-Burry-...
  - gonehome 5y ago
    He was also wrong about Tesla. There was a crash in 1999, but the underlying economic shift created by the internet was real and major companies survived it. I suspect something similar is likely here.
    - XorNot 5y ago
      You are not addressing the point: having enough capital to support a completely valid short position against an irrational market is staggeringly hard to do, to the point the most reliable short in history was still in danger of wiping out the person who was right about it and ended up making a huge amount of money from it.
      - gonehome 5y ago
        It’s somewhat of a tired point. You’re right of course and Michael Burry made a great trade recognizing the CDO issue and bad incentives around reselling mortgages leading to banks giving mortgages to people that couldn’t afford them and not taking the risk directly. It was also time bounded (he knew when the rates would change and they’d start to fail). That said, people often use the “market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent” line as an excuse - basically to say they’re right about an “impending crash” on an infinite timeline. If you can’t predict it within a bounded timeframe than your prediction is useless and ultimately equivalent to predicting nothing. In the case of the OP he was clearly wrong, and instead of updating is spinning it as he was kinda right anyway. I think that’s dumb.
dclowd9901 5y ago
A minimum threshold of dogmatic people does not a good idea make. Crypto’s value basis versus its fervor is a mirror image of any bubble we’ve ever seen. The smart ones will figure out how the bubble pops. My guess is power outages.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

by anm89 5y ago

School-Cotton 5y ago

But Bitcoin hasn’t succeeded. It doesn’t allow you to do anything useful except (1) buy drugs on the internet, and (2) move money out of authoritarian countries, both of which he acknowledges in the article. The fact that a lot of people care about blockchains and are willing to make speculative bets on them doesn’t mean that the idea is actually useful for much. The FAANGs at least have made some real products, some of which some people find useful.

mitchdoogle 5y ago
You can buy tons of stuff with Bitcoin (not just drugs). You can transfer it around the world basically for free (transaction fees amount to the equivalent of pennies no matter how much you send). It's immutable. Basically it does the things it's supposed to do. It's gained widespread adoption, a whole economy, thousands of businesses. It is, without a doubt, successful.
- School-Cotton 5y ago
  > You can buy tons of stuff with Bitcoin You can also buy tons of stuff with USD. The only innovation of Bitcoin is that it allows you to do illegal stuff. A more expensive and cumbersome way to do what you could already do with other tools is not “success”. > You can transfer it around the world basically for free (transaction fees amount to the equivalent of pennies no matter how much you send). This is also true of, for example, TransferWise. > It’s immutable This actually makes it worse than the existing financial system, because being able to reverse fraudulent transactions is a feature, not a bug. > It’s gained widespread adoption, a while economy, thousands of businesses. Also true of USD. You still haven’t demonstrated any advantage of Bitcoin other than illegal transactions.
  - Osiris 5y ago
    Much more illegal activity happens with USD than with Bitcoin.
  - yownie 5y ago
    >This is also true of, for example, TransferWise. Not for small to large amounts for less than pennies >A more expensive and cumbersome way to do what you could already do with other tools is not “success”. You're vastly underestimating the amount of people trapped in regimes where they cannot spend their funds abroad or risk having them devalued at whim.
    - wonnage 5y ago
      Bitcoin is the definition of getting devalued at whim
    - crummy 5y ago
      > or risk having them devalued at whim. doesn't that describe a lot of cryptocurrencies? or are you suggesting the people in these regimes use cryptocurrencies as an intermediary to transfer their local currency into more stable foreign currency?
  - errantmind 5y ago
    This reasoning is really strange and reeks of bitterness. Do you have anything backing up your claim BTC is used for mostly illegal activities? Please provide some very clear citations for that claim.
    - School-Cotton 5y ago
      I never claimed that, and have no idea whether it’s true.
- jjeaff 5y ago
  There are very few things you can buy more easily using Bitcoin. And average fees to send money right now with Bitcoin are 2-3%. Which is not great, considering the current financial system offers lots of much cheaper options for sending money.
  - yownie 5y ago
    take a look at Bitcoins Lightning network sometime, you'd be surprised.
- akavi 5y ago
  > It's gained widespread adoption, a whole economy, thousands of businesses. What percent of those business denominate their prices in bitcoin? What percent of those businesses do anything but immediately convert the bitcoin back into fiat the moment they take possession?
  - yuuu 5y ago
    So because Bitcoin hasn't overtaken fiat currency as the de facto international standard means it's a failure? All of the critics in this thread sure have some narrow goalposts, don't they?
    - stouset 5y ago
      I think you’re missing the point that Bitcoin is at zero percent for this metric.
anm89 5y ago
But Google hasn't succeeded! It was supposed to do something useful but all it does is mine data for ads. They were supposed to not be evil but they are evil. But Facebook hasn't succeeded. It was supposed to do something useful but all it does is mine data for ads. They were supposed to connect everyone but all they did was corrupt our political system. But Apple hasn't succeeded. It was supposed to do something useful but all it does is pump out a new Iphone color every year and remove a port. They were supposed to revolutionize computing but all the did was figure out how to sell shiny junk made by poor people in developing markets to middle class people in developing markets. See how easy it is to play that game? Somehow I'm guessing most people who like bitcoin in 2011 aren't reeling from the failure of bitcoin.
- School-Cotton 5y ago
  Your analogies miss the mark because in addition to the negative things you’ve pointed out, Google Search, for example, _is_ useful. Comparing the usefulness of Bitcoin to Google Search or the smartphone is asinine. > Somehow I'm guessing most people who like bitcoin in 2011 aren't reeling from the failure of bitcoin. Of course not — they’re all extremely wealthy. That’s irrelevant to the discussion; I’m sure the author of this piece understands that Bitcoin has increased in value, but that’s not at all what the piece is about.
  - anm89 5y ago
    How ridiculous to suggest that there is some objective trait called useful that you have a monopoly on determining. Turns out that various people may find all of these various things either useful or not useful because it is subjective.
    - philosopher1234 5y ago
      What is useful about Bitcoin? I genuinely don’t understand what use people see in it. Do you have a use? It seems to me the main use is “get rich on vetting it will go up” because I haven’t been able to find any other articulation of why i might ever want to use it.
fastball 5y ago
Nobody buys drugs on the internet with Bitcoin in 2021.
corndoge 5y ago
Maybe Bitcoin doesn't, but as for the rest of the ecosystem, the gentleman author seems to have little idea of what he is taking about.
- School-Cotton 5y ago
  As far as I know, no blockchain has ever proven useful for any purpose other than illegal money transfers. Do you have any counterexamples?
  - sanxiyn 5y ago
    https://satoshidice.com/fair https://satoshidice.com/fair
    - crooked-v 5y ago
      An unregulated betting platform sounds like illegal money transfers to me.
      - sanxiyn 5y ago
        Betting is not just money transfer, it's something more.
        loeg 5y ago
        Illegal gambling?
    - School-Cotton 5y ago
      Online casinos predate Bitcoin.
      - ur-whale 5y ago
        > Online casinos predate Bitcoin. You missed the "provably fair" part.
kneel 5y ago
It's incredible for long term savings.
- baq 5y ago
  a) in fiat terms and b) has been up till now
  - ur-whale 5y ago
    > a) in fiat terms It's true that if your measuring stick is toilet paper, the current price of Bitcoin doesn't tell you much. > b) has been up till now Past performance is no guarantee of future ... etc Sure, that's what every traditional investment prospectus says in the first paragraph. They usually then proceed to explain how well they've been doing and why you should therefore invest. There is something called Baye's rule. Ignore it at your own (opportunity cost) risk.
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
(2) is enough to say it completely succeeded.
- sanxiyn 5y ago
  I agree. I personally donated Bitcoins to WikiLeaks.
stouset 5y ago
Don’t forget (3) scams and (4) ransomware.
XorNot 5y ago
> (2) move money out of authoritarian countries To move money out of an authoritarian country, you have to know someone who wants to move money in. The only reason it works at all is because the total amount of Bitcoin doing this is comparatively very small compared to local corruption and mining which can support this use case. To make this transaction someone else in your local authoritarian country has to have Bitcoin, and be willing to exchange it for local currency. It's no huge surprise a lot of mining power ended up in China, because of course this is a transaction you do not want to do in China: you want to originate Bitcoin and then get some Americans to pay you nice clean USDs into bank accounts outside of China. Which of course works because electricity consumption in China is relatively unsuspect (or was: naturally China has cracked down on this and is having ongoing power shortages to boot). Which of course creates a weird compromise: if Bitcoin is good at getting money out of authoritarian countries, then either you're outsourcing to someone who can move currency around locally, or you are outsourcing an increasing fraction of the Bitcoin mining compute, and thus control of the network.

ausbah 5y ago

>CNBC lists bitcoin price next to the S&P. It's up infinity percent. There are regulated financial products. If asked at the time he would have unequivocally said those things would not have happened because bitcoin was going to fail because he was dead wrong. there is a difference between "succeeding somewhat in the original goal" and "succeeding in a way different from the original goal all together". the former seems to closer to start ups that made it big - they had a product that became successful even if the endproduct isn't 100% as the original product with bitcoin, wasn't (isn't?) the original goal to create an alternative to mainstream financial system? just based off the example you listed, among other things, it seems like Bitcoin has completely 100% has failed in that regard since it's just become another feature of the mainsteam financial system sure bitcoin and crypto are still here, but they're just another asset class at this point. sure it's not "failure" - it certainly is successful by a different set of metrics from the original, but I'm sure this isn't what Satoshi had in mind

3np 5y ago
Who’s to say what “the original goal” was? Satoshi wasn’t that vocal and explicit about their vision in many ways. As for the early community, there may be as many narratives as there were bitcoiners. And even if satoshi would have posted a more explicit manifesto, who’s to say that they are the authority to dictate the goals of a project they abandoned almost a decade ago and that others have picked up? Saying “nobody buys their coffee settled and priced in bitcoin; that was the whole point and should have happened in <10 years” is simply a straw man. Hell, several of the “failures” points the author brings up are considered features by some. The existence of permissionless and liquid cryptocurrency markets have political and economic implications. That you do not agree with them does not make it a failure; you just have a different perspective. All that aside, I think it’s too early still to call Bitcoin’s success or failure.
- sweetbitter 5y ago
  "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."

croes 5y ago

Is BTC a currency?

koonsolo 5y ago
No it's a coin. Bit coin.

gonehome 5y ago

Thankfully people that can’t admit when they’re wrong despite almost absurd evidence of their wrongness just don’t matter that much in economic bets. The people constantly predicting Tesla failure and shorting the stock lost all of their money. This guy won’t matter. You’d think people would learn to change their mind and update when massive economic incentives exist to do so, but often they don’t. Confirmation bias is a powerful thing.

XorNot 5y ago
Michael Burry was dead on the money that a crash was imminent in 2008, but he was still in serious danger of going bankrupt before it happened and his short would pay out.[1] "The market can remain irrational longer then you can remain solvent" is a saying for a reason. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry#cite_note-Burry-6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry#cite_note-Burry-...
- gonehome 5y ago
  He was also wrong about Tesla. There was a crash in 1999, but the underlying economic shift created by the internet was real and major companies survived it. I suspect something similar is likely here.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    You are not addressing the point: having enough capital to support a completely valid short position against an irrational market is staggeringly hard to do, to the point the most reliable short in history was still in danger of wiping out the person who was right about it and ended up making a huge amount of money from it.
    - gonehome 5y ago
      It’s somewhat of a tired point. You’re right of course and Michael Burry made a great trade recognizing the CDO issue and bad incentives around reselling mortgages leading to banks giving mortgages to people that couldn’t afford them and not taking the risk directly. It was also time bounded (he knew when the rates would change and they’d start to fail). That said, people often use the “market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent” line as an excuse - basically to say they’re right about an “impending crash” on an infinite timeline. If you can’t predict it within a bounded timeframe than your prediction is useless and ultimately equivalent to predicting nothing. In the case of the OP he was clearly wrong, and instead of updating is spinning it as he was kinda right anyway. I think that’s dumb.

dclowd9901 5y ago

A minimum threshold of dogmatic people does not a good idea make. Crypto’s value basis versus its fervor is a mirror image of any bubble we’ve ever seen. The smart ones will figure out how the bubble pops. My guess is power outages.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]