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Let's be real. The vast majority of pro-cryptocurrency arguments break down to something like this: "I have Bitcoin, I want it to become the currency of the fut

Let's be real. The vast majority of pro-cryptocurrency arguments break down to something like this: "I have Bitcoin, I want it to become the currency of the future so that the price will go up an I will become rich. Here are $reasons why that should become true, which all my fellow Bitcoin hodlers agree are very good reasons". We are now many years past not only the creation of Bitcoin but also past it going "mainstream". Everyone who is going to hear about it has hear about it and yet in real terms it is a joke. It's a digital beanie baby, it being is used as described by BTC boosters as something resembling a currency only in a tiny fractional handful of edge cases. All the interest in Bitcoin is in the price going up. Even people who "accept Bitcoin payments" denominate their prices in US dollars and merely run the transactions using Bitcoin.

conanbatt 5y ago
If the only thing that makes BTC "break" USD is that users want it to succeed more than USD users want USD to succeed, it is a wonderful story of adoption!
kybernetikos 5y ago
> All the interest in Bitcoin is in the price going up. For years I have been interested in blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies for what they are technically and what they could enable, not what profit I can make. There are certainly others like me. There's some really fascinating stuff being worked on in the cryptocurrency community, things like ZK-SNARKS or automated market makers. The original bitcoin paper is at the very least an interesting and novel solution to the double spend problem. I think I could make a similar argument to yours about how the vast majority of people in the hackernews community are just there because they want to become rich. Or perhaps how the vast majority of anti-cryptocurrency arguments break down to soemthing like "I didn't buy bitcoin, so I don't want it to become the currency of the future since I will have missed out on being rich". There are elements of truth to both of those, but they're both pretty uninteresting takes on an interesting topic.
- ramoz 5y ago
  Fascinating cryptology work exists without cryptocurrencies, the reverse is not true.
  - teekert 5y ago
    Since fascination is subjective you should never make that statement. Edit: Scrap that, you are right, cryptography is a necessary building block of crypto-currencies. What you are actually saying is: Fascinating bricks exist without brick-houses, the reverse is not true. Which is logical.
    - kybernetikos 5y ago
      Sure, some fascinating bricks would be created even without brick houses, but having brick houses means that many more people are thinking about and creating fascinating bricks, and using those bricks for more purposes. It's like saying we shouldn't be pleased that pharmaceutical research is giving us greater insights into genetics because genetic science would exist even without pharmaceutical research. It's true that genetic science would exist, it's false that therefore pharmaceutical research adds no value to it.
      - teekert 5y ago
        So we agree then ;)
teekert 5y ago
Let's be real, the anti-cryptocurrency arguments are something like this: It eats to much energy so we should ban it (just like gaming! Oh wait...) Meanwhile we suffer from a hugely incompetent global payment network that is horrible to deal with and makes some creators actually opt out of receiving donations because of the sheer annoyance and complexity of the system. Yeah, we all want it to use less energy and perhaps we'll get there. But not by banning blockchain tech. The fact that Venmo is free, is the problem, how can you deliver value for free... Because it's not free, the value is extracted elsewhere. I thought we were past this.
- thr0wawayf00 5y ago
  > Meanwhile we suffer from a hugely incompetent global payment network Incompetence is a cop-out argument because you could argue any organization or community suffers from it given a sufficient amount of time in existence. Plus, it's not like crypto companies have a perfect record either. Look at mt gox, or more currently, the accusations against Tether. If it comes out that they've been lying about their capitalization, which many have argued that they are, it could cause major problems for the crypto industry. True decentralization has not been achieved by the crypto industry, it's merely shifting the rent-seeking from one set of parties to another.
- etripe 5y ago
  > global payment network that is horrible to deal with With proper regulation, banks can have maximum terms on holding money mid-transfer, limits (or even abolition!) of transfer and withdrawal fees, etc. It is possible to designate a product as an essential service or utility. It's just that the US government has chosen to not apply that kind of regulation to a lot of essential products like banking and telecoms, much like it hasn't chosen to enforce anti-trust laws, remove tax avoidance provisions, deal with corporate capture or reform the healthcare, education and electoral systems. In essence, it's a people problem all the way down. Technology is incapable of solving those, which is why blockchain is a solution looking for a problem.
- rocgf 5y ago
  You're strawmanning heavily. The energy argument is a big one, but it's not THE argument against crypto.
bodge5000 5y ago
Ironically though the best chance bitcoin has at being the currency of the future is if it stops being an investors plaything, which would involve btc being severly devauled over what it is now and therefore making the people that hold it "poorer" in a sense (unless they seriously believe that the currency of the future will deal in denominations of 0.000001 for everday transactions)
achenatx 5y ago
one of the best use cases is that it reduces the control state actors have using the banking system. Crypto can bypass arbitrary governmental walls for moving money across country borders. It can allow transactions that are banned or heavily discouraged (taxed) by govts. This will be illegal behavior, but not all things that are illegal are immoral. International wire transfers and even stock purchases require days to clear between entities. With blockchain those transactions are essentially instantaneous.
- crispyambulance 5y ago
  > but not all things that are illegal are immoral. It's fine to believe that but at this point the scams, tax-evasion, social-darwinism, techno-libertarian grift, and criminal enterprises are NOT the exception. They're very much the rule and dominate the way crypto works. Of course, somewhere buried deep in all that funny-money, there's genuine innovation begging to be used for a legit purpose. It doesn't look good for the future. I fear that the worst thing that could happen would be for crypto to continue along its current path and actually "replace" real currency retaining all it numerous dysfunctional and unethical properties. All it would take is for enough people to "get-rich" so they could F the rest.
thr0wawayf00 5y ago
Crypto is essentially the modern equivalent of the pre-Federal Reserve era of US banking, commonly known as the "Free Banking" era or "Wildcat banking". Back then, states chartered their own banks, there was little cooperation between banking outfits and banks could issue their own currency. Financial crime targeting consumers was everywhere and currency stability was a major problem, two major issues that crypto faces today. Historians largely attribute the failure of the Free Banking era as a catalyst of the creation of the Federal Reserve. We need to be able to at least have a nuanced conversation about how we've seen these patterns in history, it didn't go well then, and there's not a lot of evidence that these age-old problems have gone away with this new technology.
- ramoz 5y ago
  I feel like this argument isn’t stated enough. I’m not financially savvy and can’t determine if crypto is just re-inventing abstractions in which we’ll ultimately see the same societal patterns develop.
- aww_dang 5y ago
  Yet this era was also known as the "Gilded Age". Literally covered in gold. I'm not detecting nuance in this take. The Fed has created boom bust cycles and is hardly a bastion of price stability. The great depression and the continued interventions which prolonged it come to mind.
  - thr0wawayf00 5y ago
    Boom and bust cycles are inherent to capitalist markets, you can't have capitalism without it. Blaming it all on the Fed isn't accurate. Markets boomed and busted long before the Fed existed. > hardly a bastion of price stability Relative to BTC, USD is much, much more stable. This is what I don't get about these kinds of arguments. What are you comparing the Fed to in this case?
    - aww_dang 5y ago
      I'd go even further than that. The mismanagement of markets by central planners set the stage for cryptocurrencies. We're living in an era of speculative mania. Savings accounts have a negative real interest rate. This currency must go somewhere. Centralized payment services are vulnerable to regulators, see eGold and Liberty Reserve. Note that BTC emerged shortly after these services were destroyed. Anti-terror legislation was used. Of course there are always price fluctuations, but attempting to fix prices (i.e. interest rates) results in greater imbalances. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_Great_Depression#:~:text=The%20central%20bank's%20policy%20was,and%20bonds)%20and%20capital%20goods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_Great_Depression....
mjdesa 5y ago
I owned a pretty decent amount of crypto back in 2012, but sold all of it and own essentially none now. I think what you’re missing here is that there is actually potential in the space and that there are a decent amount of people trying to solve real problems that exist today. The two big ones I can think of are payments and ownership. Payments has always been a difficult part of the web. Multi billion dollar companies have been created around this difficulty. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a native, protocol level way to handle payment? Similarly, digital ownership is totally fragmented. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way that I could take my digital things with me between different services? I own a number of videos on Amazon, but why can’t I take that ownership right with me to view them on Hulu, or some other service.
- hiq 5y ago
  I've been commenting a few times about this already, but you're just arguing for interoperability, and blockchains don't help in that regard.
  - mjdesa 5y ago
    Why has interoperability failed in the past? Why don’t we have it today?
    - hiq 5y ago
      Why would we get it thanks to blockchains?
      - mjdesa 5y ago
        Because they’re open ledgers. I think of blockchain like I do JavaScript / JSON. Are the perfect? No. But there’s a lot of time and energy being put into them and sometimes that’s all you really need to get things going.
        hiq 5y ago
        > Because they’re open ledgers. As I explained in another comment in the same thread, it's a far cry from ensuring interoperability. The term "open ledger" is also misguiding since it's just an open ledger of whatever you want to put there, it doesn't necessarily reflect even a representative part of a whole system that would provide some kind of financial service. As another commenter explained regarding video ownership, there's also no incentive to move any old and non-interoperable system there to begin with.
K0balt 5y ago
The way that blockchain tech is implemented, in many cases, does suck. But an immutable, distributed, permissionless public ledger system enables technology that can eliminate the need for many frictions and cost centers, reducing a host of parasitic costs is worth perusing. Blockchain can reduce or eliminate costs associated with enforcement, state sponsored violence and more, replacing them with a monetary system that can automatically enact taxation, insurance, social welfare and more without extraction of value, and without the possibility of corruption.
strgcmc 5y ago
Whether or not Bitcoin is going to become the "currency of the future" is certainly highly debatable (debatable in the sense that, is it likely to happen, or is it even a good idea for society), but the argument against it, is not going to boil down to "digital beanie babies"... Retail and retail adoption is not going to shape the future of Bitcoin, not past this point in history. Do you remember seeing institutional-grade analysts and advisers issuing guidance about beanie babies? Pointing out that corporate treasuries or sovereign nations might consider a small allocation to beanie babies as a hedge against future-whatever? This is hardly the only such report, though it's a recent one looking at 2021 trends in review: https://www.fidelitydigitalassets.com/articles/2021-trends-impact https://www.fidelitydigitalassets.com/articles/2021-trends-i... I am not saying Bitcoin is destined to win or to make anyone rich, but clearly this has moved far beyond the realm of beanie baby speculation. I mean, good or bad, it's at least reached the level of institutional speculation (see exhibits: dot-com crash, 2008 financial crisis, etc.), and at least it should be taken proportionally as seriously as other institutional financial instruments (i.e. do you take bonds seriously? gold as a financial commodity to be traded? well Bitcoin is X% of those by marketcap, so maybe deserves X% of your attention).

conanbatt 5y ago

If the only thing that makes BTC "break" USD is that users want it to succeed more than USD users want USD to succeed, it is a wonderful story of adoption!

kybernetikos 5y ago

> All the interest in Bitcoin is in the price going up. For years I have been interested in blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies for what they are technically and what they could enable, not what profit I can make. There are certainly others like me. There's some really fascinating stuff being worked on in the cryptocurrency community, things like ZK-SNARKS or automated market makers. The original bitcoin paper is at the very least an interesting and novel solution to the double spend problem. I think I could make a similar argument to yours about how the vast majority of people in the hackernews community are just there because they want to become rich. Or perhaps how the vast majority of anti-cryptocurrency arguments break down to soemthing like "I didn't buy bitcoin, so I don't want it to become the currency of the future since I will have missed out on being rich". There are elements of truth to both of those, but they're both pretty uninteresting takes on an interesting topic.

ramoz 5y ago
Fascinating cryptology work exists without cryptocurrencies, the reverse is not true.
- teekert 5y ago
  Since fascination is subjective you should never make that statement. Edit: Scrap that, you are right, cryptography is a necessary building block of crypto-currencies. What you are actually saying is: Fascinating bricks exist without brick-houses, the reverse is not true. Which is logical.
  - kybernetikos 5y ago
    Sure, some fascinating bricks would be created even without brick houses, but having brick houses means that many more people are thinking about and creating fascinating bricks, and using those bricks for more purposes. It's like saying we shouldn't be pleased that pharmaceutical research is giving us greater insights into genetics because genetic science would exist even without pharmaceutical research. It's true that genetic science would exist, it's false that therefore pharmaceutical research adds no value to it.
    - teekert 5y ago
      So we agree then ;)

teekert 5y ago

Let's be real, the anti-cryptocurrency arguments are something like this: It eats to much energy so we should ban it (just like gaming! Oh wait...) Meanwhile we suffer from a hugely incompetent global payment network that is horrible to deal with and makes some creators actually opt out of receiving donations because of the sheer annoyance and complexity of the system. Yeah, we all want it to use less energy and perhaps we'll get there. But not by banning blockchain tech. The fact that Venmo is free, is the problem, how can you deliver value for free... Because it's not free, the value is extracted elsewhere. I thought we were past this.

thr0wawayf00 5y ago
> Meanwhile we suffer from a hugely incompetent global payment network Incompetence is a cop-out argument because you could argue any organization or community suffers from it given a sufficient amount of time in existence. Plus, it's not like crypto companies have a perfect record either. Look at mt gox, or more currently, the accusations against Tether. If it comes out that they've been lying about their capitalization, which many have argued that they are, it could cause major problems for the crypto industry. True decentralization has not been achieved by the crypto industry, it's merely shifting the rent-seeking from one set of parties to another.
etripe 5y ago
> global payment network that is horrible to deal with With proper regulation, banks can have maximum terms on holding money mid-transfer, limits (or even abolition!) of transfer and withdrawal fees, etc. It is possible to designate a product as an essential service or utility. It's just that the US government has chosen to not apply that kind of regulation to a lot of essential products like banking and telecoms, much like it hasn't chosen to enforce anti-trust laws, remove tax avoidance provisions, deal with corporate capture or reform the healthcare, education and electoral systems. In essence, it's a people problem all the way down. Technology is incapable of solving those, which is why blockchain is a solution looking for a problem.
rocgf 5y ago
You're strawmanning heavily. The energy argument is a big one, but it's not THE argument against crypto.

bodge5000 5y ago

Ironically though the best chance bitcoin has at being the currency of the future is if it stops being an investors plaything, which would involve btc being severly devauled over what it is now and therefore making the people that hold it "poorer" in a sense (unless they seriously believe that the currency of the future will deal in denominations of 0.000001 for everday transactions)

achenatx 5y ago

one of the best use cases is that it reduces the control state actors have using the banking system. Crypto can bypass arbitrary governmental walls for moving money across country borders. It can allow transactions that are banned or heavily discouraged (taxed) by govts. This will be illegal behavior, but not all things that are illegal are immoral. International wire transfers and even stock purchases require days to clear between entities. With blockchain those transactions are essentially instantaneous.

crispyambulance 5y ago
> but not all things that are illegal are immoral. It's fine to believe that but at this point the scams, tax-evasion, social-darwinism, techno-libertarian grift, and criminal enterprises are NOT the exception. They're very much the rule and dominate the way crypto works. Of course, somewhere buried deep in all that funny-money, there's genuine innovation begging to be used for a legit purpose. It doesn't look good for the future. I fear that the worst thing that could happen would be for crypto to continue along its current path and actually "replace" real currency retaining all it numerous dysfunctional and unethical properties. All it would take is for enough people to "get-rich" so they could F the rest.

thr0wawayf00 5y ago

Crypto is essentially the modern equivalent of the pre-Federal Reserve era of US banking, commonly known as the "Free Banking" era or "Wildcat banking". Back then, states chartered their own banks, there was little cooperation between banking outfits and banks could issue their own currency. Financial crime targeting consumers was everywhere and currency stability was a major problem, two major issues that crypto faces today. Historians largely attribute the failure of the Free Banking era as a catalyst of the creation of the Federal Reserve. We need to be able to at least have a nuanced conversation about how we've seen these patterns in history, it didn't go well then, and there's not a lot of evidence that these age-old problems have gone away with this new technology.

ramoz 5y ago
I feel like this argument isn’t stated enough. I’m not financially savvy and can’t determine if crypto is just re-inventing abstractions in which we’ll ultimately see the same societal patterns develop.
aww_dang 5y ago
Yet this era was also known as the "Gilded Age". Literally covered in gold. I'm not detecting nuance in this take. The Fed has created boom bust cycles and is hardly a bastion of price stability. The great depression and the continued interventions which prolonged it come to mind.
- thr0wawayf00 5y ago
  Boom and bust cycles are inherent to capitalist markets, you can't have capitalism without it. Blaming it all on the Fed isn't accurate. Markets boomed and busted long before the Fed existed. > hardly a bastion of price stability Relative to BTC, USD is much, much more stable. This is what I don't get about these kinds of arguments. What are you comparing the Fed to in this case?
  - aww_dang 5y ago
    I'd go even further than that. The mismanagement of markets by central planners set the stage for cryptocurrencies. We're living in an era of speculative mania. Savings accounts have a negative real interest rate. This currency must go somewhere. Centralized payment services are vulnerable to regulators, see eGold and Liberty Reserve. Note that BTC emerged shortly after these services were destroyed. Anti-terror legislation was used. Of course there are always price fluctuations, but attempting to fix prices (i.e. interest rates) results in greater imbalances. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_Great_Depression#:~:text=The%20central%20bank's%20policy%20was,and%20bonds)%20and%20capital%20goods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_Great_Depression....

mjdesa 5y ago

I owned a pretty decent amount of crypto back in 2012, but sold all of it and own essentially none now. I think what you’re missing here is that there is actually potential in the space and that there are a decent amount of people trying to solve real problems that exist today. The two big ones I can think of are payments and ownership. Payments has always been a difficult part of the web. Multi billion dollar companies have been created around this difficulty. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a native, protocol level way to handle payment? Similarly, digital ownership is totally fragmented. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way that I could take my digital things with me between different services? I own a number of videos on Amazon, but why can’t I take that ownership right with me to view them on Hulu, or some other service.

hiq 5y ago
I've been commenting a few times about this already, but you're just arguing for interoperability, and blockchains don't help in that regard.
- mjdesa 5y ago
  Why has interoperability failed in the past? Why don’t we have it today?
  - hiq 5y ago
    Why would we get it thanks to blockchains?
    - mjdesa 5y ago
      Because they’re open ledgers. I think of blockchain like I do JavaScript / JSON. Are the perfect? No. But there’s a lot of time and energy being put into them and sometimes that’s all you really need to get things going.
      - hiq 5y ago
        > Because they’re open ledgers. As I explained in another comment in the same thread, it's a far cry from ensuring interoperability. The term "open ledger" is also misguiding since it's just an open ledger of whatever you want to put there, it doesn't necessarily reflect even a representative part of a whole system that would provide some kind of financial service. As another commenter explained regarding video ownership, there's also no incentive to move any old and non-interoperable system there to begin with.

K0balt 5y ago

The way that blockchain tech is implemented, in many cases, does suck. But an immutable, distributed, permissionless public ledger system enables technology that can eliminate the need for many frictions and cost centers, reducing a host of parasitic costs is worth perusing. Blockchain can reduce or eliminate costs associated with enforcement, state sponsored violence and more, replacing them with a monetary system that can automatically enact taxation, insurance, social welfare and more without extraction of value, and without the possibility of corruption.

strgcmc 5y ago

Whether or not Bitcoin is going to become the "currency of the future" is certainly highly debatable (debatable in the sense that, is it likely to happen, or is it even a good idea for society), but the argument against it, is not going to boil down to "digital beanie babies"... Retail and retail adoption is not going to shape the future of Bitcoin, not past this point in history. Do you remember seeing institutional-grade analysts and advisers issuing guidance about beanie babies? Pointing out that corporate treasuries or sovereign nations might consider a small allocation to beanie babies as a hedge against future-whatever? This is hardly the only such report, though it's a recent one looking at 2021 trends in review: https://www.fidelitydigitalassets.com/articles/2021-trends-impact https://www.fidelitydigitalassets.com/articles/2021-trends-i... I am not saying Bitcoin is destined to win or to make anyone rich, but clearly this has moved far beyond the realm of beanie baby speculation. I mean, good or bad, it's at least reached the level of institutional speculation (see exhibits: dot-com crash, 2008 financial crisis, etc.), and at least it should be taken proportionally as seriously as other institutional financial instruments (i.e. do you take bonds seriously? gold as a financial commodity to be traded? well Bitcoin is X% of those by marketcap, so maybe deserves X% of your attention).