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Ask HN: What would it take for you to accept Bitcoin as useful?

Over a decade since Bitcoin was invented. Meanwhile, it amassed a market cap of half a trillion. Volatility is steadily going down. If this continues, Bitcoin will surpass gold in stability and market cap. And if it continues further, it will surpass bonds. Let's make a Gedankenspiel and imagine that this happens. Then, at what point would the hostility on Hacker News towards Bitcoin subside? Or will it be seen as an evil scam forever? Even when everybody here holds their life savings in it?

Zekio 3y ago
no transaction costs, fast transactions, low energy use to do so.
superchroma 3y ago
Hell freezing over: for it to discard its nature and thus cease to be what it is. Proof of work is unacceptable. The transaction cost (monetary and emissions) is unacceptable. The transaction time is unacceptable. The behavior of exchanges is unacceptable. The lack of regulation is unacceptable. The shadow manipulation of the market by conventional financial players attracted by the lack of regulation is unacceptable. Need I go on? Fix as much of that as you can and it becomes regular finance with extra steps, and thus, pointless.
mnky9800n 3y ago
I think it will take a generation gap. Bitcoin people have done everything but try and build confidence in bitcoin. There's no consensus on what bitcoin is, is it a currency? Is it an asset class? Is it a scam? There's no ownership over the fact that it's essentially an operation that turns pollution into money. There's no trust or oversight in whales who own large amounts anonymously who can make large market shifts. Nothing about bitcoin even has any value except that people claim it does. At least with magic cards I can go play a game or a piece of art I can look at or actual money I can spend anywhere to get things. Bitcoin does none of those things. All bitcoin seems to be good for is let weirdos live in the Bahamas in their weird sex cults stealing money from their currency exchanges.
- warrenm 3y ago
  >At least with magic cards I can go play a game or a piece of art I can look at or actual money I can spend anywhere to get things. Bitcoin does none of those things. All bitcoin seems to be good for is let weirdos live in the Bahamas in their weird sex cults stealing money from their currency exchanges. Definitely! Until/unless bitcoin (or insert name of any other cryptocurrency) allows normal, day-to-day transactions (groceries, cars, gas, hair cuts, etc) ... it is all just fun and games I have seen precisely one business in the last decade+ that would accept bitcoin for payment (a little Thai restaurant in downtown Lexington KY (at the time I saw the sing, it was 1 btc for a bowl of pho)) BTC (and every other coattails-hanger-on cryptocurrency) is merely a source of speculation on the future right now MAYBE (with a lot of airquotes and caveats) cryptocurrencies will truly be 'worth' something someday Right now? They are all just Monopoly money waiting to be believed in the way nation-state currency is
  - mnky9800n 3y ago
    As an asset it sucks because it doesn't represent anything unlike stocks, index funds, real estate, art, magic cards, anime girl statues, antique junk. As a currency it sucks because there's no reason to keep it stable because people treat it like an asset class so why would you want stability instead of growth? As a technology it's literally a captain planet episode with bitcoin miners being literal villains turning pollution into money. Like there was that one guy who ordered a pizza with it and that was cool because it was like dominos so a big company was like let's try this new technology blah blah blah. But there's simply not been a reason since to care unless you are trying to make a buck on a new hype train. And that's the problem. Even if people pump it up to a million dollars a coin or whatever, it still doesn't represent anything. The only reason anyone cares about it is because they think it will make them money. That's it. There's nothing about it that connects what a cryptocurrency is to anything other then it being a cryptocurrency. Even national currencies have a connection to nation states. You believe in the United States ability to keep the dollar stable so you sell your oil in dollars. You believe in Norwegian economic growth so you sell your natural gas in kroner.
johndunne 3y ago
The transaction (tx) rate is too low and tx cost can fluctuate wildly in addition to costing far too much. Some sort of side chain (like the lightning network) could help boost tx rate but there’s nothing currently anywhere near what could be regarded as near peer in regard to visa or other financial network tx rates. And, above all, the immorally high energy consumption required by mining needs addressing. Again, lightning offered solutions but it’s not enough to satisfy larger scale adoption. I keep hoping though.
- warrenm 3y ago
  Transaction costs are definitely a major drawback to adoption ... when you can 'only' do a few hundreds of transactions per second worldwide ... you are destined to fail
theGeatZhopa 3y ago
As long there is no regulation and safety, I won't accept that. The reason is the volatility. I don't care, if it's used for criminal things nor for legal. It's just the volatility. I don't want to risk my wealth just because some guys say Bitcoin is the future.
- ArtTimeInvestor 3y ago
  How low would volatility have to be and for how long?
  - theGeatZhopa 3y ago
    Just corresponding to the actual fiat money .. I also can lose my investment with fiat, but it's not that possible. With fiat, I can put it under my pillow and have just the inflation. With Bitcoin I always have to keep an eye on. That's my problem. Otherwise, money is money. No matter if it's in paper or bits and bytes - as long I can pay my things with that, I will use.
viraptor 3y ago
Reasonable transaction cost, higher speed, possibility to revert transactions to a scammer, dropping proof-of-work. So practically never.
anenefan 3y ago
Stability, possibly backed by gold or some other stable product. Also the way wallets work would have to be more robust such that there are means to recover after hard drive failures, and revert if an exchanged is hacked. Without that, there's not going to be (or should be) any serious thoughts of more general global adoption of it. It has its uses though. I recall early days nearly buying 10 or more bitcoin ... but it's value was fluctuating even then, such that the service I eventually decided after half a year I'd pay via bitcoin for a discount, still had their bitcoin price from two or so months prior. Instead I went the way of a near useless virtual credit card - some VC business obviously could do what they promised, I just made the mistake of picking a fly-by-night toolshop which had worked out the right things to say to drum up business.
- ArtTimeInvestor 3y ago
  People are not concerned with hard drive failures anymore. These days, wallets are only signing devices into which you put your 12-word phrase and sign transactions. You can throw away the hardware wallet or format your hard drive afterwards. The only thing that counts is the 12-word phrase.
  - warrenm 3y ago
    That's nice ... today No benefit for those of us who lost coins early on when it looked like a goofy fad
  - anenefan 3y ago
    Thanks for the info, it's been a long while since I looked at bitcoin, and it's good to see something introduced to safe guard typical hardware snafu which makes owning bitcoin a little bit safer - for those who have to little to rely on as a means to work around certain people / authorities who are determined to set what is safe and good for mere public - services they would like to use and products they'd like have which might be legit in the US, but not in their country. Still though a 12 word phrase in a couple years might be a reality to crack by determined and interested third parties who access to processing well past the average norm.
tromp 3y ago
> Volatility is steadily going down. If this continues, Bitcoin will surpass gold in stability Also steadily going down is the block subsidy. In 21 years it will be 64x less than what it is now, and some decades later it will be negligible, leaving only fees to incentivize miners to secure Bitcoin. Research suggests that Bitcoin might become somewhat lacking in stability then [1]. [1] https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/mining_CCS.pdf https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/mining_CC...
- ArtTimeInvestor 3y ago
  Visa alone is generating over $2B per month in revenue. If we see $2B in fees per month on the Bitcoin network, that would mean an "attacker" could do 100% of the mining by spending $2B per month on electricity. They first would have to buy enough mining hardware, build mining facilities and find enough power sources though. That would probably cost another couple of billions. Then they have the power to ignore legit transactions and freeze funds of whichever addresses they like. For as long as they are willing to pay $2B/month for that. How would they make back this gigantic investment? To me, it seems the financial incentive is just not there to "destabilize" Bitcoin. Even when we are in "fees only" territory.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jqpabc123 3y ago
Volatility is steadily going down. The only "stability" crypto has is due to stable coins --- unaudited, unregulated and likely fictitious ties (can you prove otherwise?) to fiat -- the very thing it is designed to replace. In other words, any stability is an illusion --- it's built on circular logic. Fix stablecoins --- either eliminate them or audit/regulate them --- not some BS, non-binding attestation that can evaporate the next day. Make redemption a legally binding contract --- not subject to the whims of con artists. Do this and then we can talk about stability and putting our life savings in crypto.
- johndunne 3y ago
  Agreed, mostly. Bitcoin is still in a proof-of-concept state, and as a concept, it has its significant flaws (transaction rate and proof of work's carbon footprint). The concept isn't near being proven yet and that hasn't stopped all the other crypto coins coming into being, the vast majority are pure scam/money printing scams. There is no crypto market; just Bitcoin and blockchain bullshitters. Over time, Bitcoin is slowly building up a base of people who are buying in and not selling (hence the long-term slow gradual price rise). There's a danger that as the more liquid coins dry up, whales can manipulate the price by selling but market forces (via slowly steadily buying in) should, bit by bit, eat those attempts up. If Bitcoin's proof of work model doesn't work and Bitcoin eventually fails, nothing exists at the moment that would replace that failure. A proof of work model and fully (and entirely) decentralised replacement might not be possible.
  - jqpabc123 3y ago
    Bitcoin as currency is dead --- simply not practical. The only thing left is speculation and manipulation by unregulated insiders and market makers (aka "exchanges") who are free to collude and trade against their own customers.
    - johndunne 3y ago
      Bitcoin as a currency is DOA, agreed. But as a technology, it still needs to prove itself. It’s unfortunate the coin’s value is being used as play tokens to pilfer money from naive ‘investors’ but that’s to be expected when greed and naivety meet. There is value in Bitcoin’s potential, it’s greed that creates the ridiculous volatility.
warrenm 3y ago
Awful big "ifs" in that second sentence ... "if this continues" ... "if it continues further" "Volatility is steadily going down" ... it IS?! Everything I see shows it as volatile as ever Gold is continually minable (to some indefinite future point when it's not ... but that is an awful long way in the future) Bitcoin will max-out at 21m coins (a notable number of which are gone forever (including 5 or 6 I had when it was only "worth" fractions of a cent)) Building an economic base/standard on something that is not fixed in nature is, IMHO, a far better system than basing it on something that is either fixed or quasi-fixed (eg gold/silver)
- ArtTimeInvestor 3y ago
  > Everything I see shows it as volatile as ever What do you see? When I look at highest month over month changes, I see: 2017: 95% 2018: 31% 2019: 41% 2020: 40% 2021: 58% 2022: 23% 2023: 19% > something that is not fixed in nature is, IMHO, a far better system Why?
  - warrenm 3y ago
    20% per month swings is incredibly volatile
    - ArtTimeInvestor 3y ago
      But not "as volatile as ever".
      - warrenm 3y ago
        It is "as volatile as ever" - the swings may not be as high, but they're of more "value" ... 20% of $35k is more than 90% of $5k :)
        ArtTimeInvestor 3y ago
        No. A 20% swing is a 20% swing, no matter the current BTC/USD exchange rate. If you hold 10% of your portfolio in Bitcoin and Bitcoin goes up 20%, your portfolio gained 2%. No matter what the BTC/USD exchange rate was before the 20% increase. If you agree to pay 1 BTC for something and the BTC/USD exchange rate goes up by 20%, the price you pay in Dollar went up 20%. No matter what the BTC/USD exchange rate was before the 20% increase.

Zekio 3y ago

no transaction costs, fast transactions, low energy use to do so.

superchroma 3y ago

Hell freezing over: for it to discard its nature and thus cease to be what it is. Proof of work is unacceptable. The transaction cost (monetary and emissions) is unacceptable. The transaction time is unacceptable. The behavior of exchanges is unacceptable. The lack of regulation is unacceptable. The shadow manipulation of the market by conventional financial players attracted by the lack of regulation is unacceptable. Need I go on? Fix as much of that as you can and it becomes regular finance with extra steps, and thus, pointless.

mnky9800n 3y ago

I think it will take a generation gap. Bitcoin people have done everything but try and build confidence in bitcoin. There's no consensus on what bitcoin is, is it a currency? Is it an asset class? Is it a scam? There's no ownership over the fact that it's essentially an operation that turns pollution into money. There's no trust or oversight in whales who own large amounts anonymously who can make large market shifts. Nothing about bitcoin even has any value except that people claim it does. At least with magic cards I can go play a game or a piece of art I can look at or actual money I can spend anywhere to get things. Bitcoin does none of those things. All bitcoin seems to be good for is let weirdos live in the Bahamas in their weird sex cults stealing money from their currency exchanges.

warrenm 3y ago
>At least with magic cards I can go play a game or a piece of art I can look at or actual money I can spend anywhere to get things. Bitcoin does none of those things. All bitcoin seems to be good for is let weirdos live in the Bahamas in their weird sex cults stealing money from their currency exchanges. Definitely! Until/unless bitcoin (or insert name of any other cryptocurrency) allows normal, day-to-day transactions (groceries, cars, gas, hair cuts, etc) ... it is all just fun and games I have seen precisely one business in the last decade+ that would accept bitcoin for payment (a little Thai restaurant in downtown Lexington KY (at the time I saw the sing, it was 1 btc for a bowl of pho)) BTC (and every other coattails-hanger-on cryptocurrency) is merely a source of speculation on the future right now MAYBE (with a lot of airquotes and caveats) cryptocurrencies will truly be 'worth' something someday Right now? They are all just Monopoly money waiting to be believed in the way nation-state currency is
- mnky9800n 3y ago
  As an asset it sucks because it doesn't represent anything unlike stocks, index funds, real estate, art, magic cards, anime girl statues, antique junk. As a currency it sucks because there's no reason to keep it stable because people treat it like an asset class so why would you want stability instead of growth? As a technology it's literally a captain planet episode with bitcoin miners being literal villains turning pollution into money. Like there was that one guy who ordered a pizza with it and that was cool because it was like dominos so a big company was like let's try this new technology blah blah blah. But there's simply not been a reason since to care unless you are trying to make a buck on a new hype train. And that's the problem. Even if people pump it up to a million dollars a coin or whatever, it still doesn't represent anything. The only reason anyone cares about it is because they think it will make them money. That's it. There's nothing about it that connects what a cryptocurrency is to anything other then it being a cryptocurrency. Even national currencies have a connection to nation states. You believe in the United States ability to keep the dollar stable so you sell your oil in dollars. You believe in Norwegian economic growth so you sell your natural gas in kroner.

johndunne 3y ago

The transaction (tx) rate is too low and tx cost can fluctuate wildly in addition to costing far too much. Some sort of side chain (like the lightning network) could help boost tx rate but there’s nothing currently anywhere near what could be regarded as near peer in regard to visa or other financial network tx rates. And, above all, the immorally high energy consumption required by mining needs addressing. Again, lightning offered solutions but it’s not enough to satisfy larger scale adoption. I keep hoping though.

warrenm 3y ago
Transaction costs are definitely a major drawback to adoption ... when you can 'only' do a few hundreds of transactions per second worldwide ... you are destined to fail

theGeatZhopa 3y ago

As long there is no regulation and safety, I won't accept that. The reason is the volatility. I don't care, if it's used for criminal things nor for legal. It's just the volatility. I don't want to risk my wealth just because some guys say Bitcoin is the future.

ArtTimeInvestor 3y ago
How low would volatility have to be and for how long?
- theGeatZhopa 3y ago
  Just corresponding to the actual fiat money .. I also can lose my investment with fiat, but it's not that possible. With fiat, I can put it under my pillow and have just the inflation. With Bitcoin I always have to keep an eye on. That's my problem. Otherwise, money is money. No matter if it's in paper or bits and bytes - as long I can pay my things with that, I will use.

viraptor 3y ago

Reasonable transaction cost, higher speed, possibility to revert transactions to a scammer, dropping proof-of-work. So practically never.

anenefan 3y ago

Stability, possibly backed by gold or some other stable product. Also the way wallets work would have to be more robust such that there are means to recover after hard drive failures, and revert if an exchanged is hacked. Without that, there's not going to be (or should be) any serious thoughts of more general global adoption of it. It has its uses though. I recall early days nearly buying 10 or more bitcoin ... but it's value was fluctuating even then, such that the service I eventually decided after half a year I'd pay via bitcoin for a discount, still had their bitcoin price from two or so months prior. Instead I went the way of a near useless virtual credit card - some VC business obviously could do what they promised, I just made the mistake of picking a fly-by-night toolshop which had worked out the right things to say to drum up business.

ArtTimeInvestor 3y ago
People are not concerned with hard drive failures anymore. These days, wallets are only signing devices into which you put your 12-word phrase and sign transactions. You can throw away the hardware wallet or format your hard drive afterwards. The only thing that counts is the 12-word phrase.
- warrenm 3y ago
  That's nice ... today No benefit for those of us who lost coins early on when it looked like a goofy fad
- anenefan 3y ago
  Thanks for the info, it's been a long while since I looked at bitcoin, and it's good to see something introduced to safe guard typical hardware snafu which makes owning bitcoin a little bit safer - for those who have to little to rely on as a means to work around certain people / authorities who are determined to set what is safe and good for mere public - services they would like to use and products they'd like have which might be legit in the US, but not in their country. Still though a 12 word phrase in a couple years might be a reality to crack by determined and interested third parties who access to processing well past the average norm.

tromp 3y ago

> Volatility is steadily going down. If this continues, Bitcoin will surpass gold in stability Also steadily going down is the block subsidy. In 21 years it will be 64x less than what it is now, and some decades later it will be negligible, leaving only fees to incentivize miners to secure Bitcoin. Research suggests that Bitcoin might become somewhat lacking in stability then [1]. [1] https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/mining_CCS.pdf https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/mining_CC...

ArtTimeInvestor 3y ago
Visa alone is generating over $2B per month in revenue. If we see $2B in fees per month on the Bitcoin network, that would mean an "attacker" could do 100% of the mining by spending $2B per month on electricity. They first would have to buy enough mining hardware, build mining facilities and find enough power sources though. That would probably cost another couple of billions. Then they have the power to ignore legit transactions and freeze funds of whichever addresses they like. For as long as they are willing to pay $2B/month for that. How would they make back this gigantic investment? To me, it seems the financial incentive is just not there to "destabilize" Bitcoin. Even when we are in "fees only" territory.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jqpabc123 3y ago

Volatility is steadily going down. The only "stability" crypto has is due to stable coins --- unaudited, unregulated and likely fictitious ties (can you prove otherwise?) to fiat -- the very thing it is designed to replace. In other words, any stability is an illusion --- it's built on circular logic. Fix stablecoins --- either eliminate them or audit/regulate them --- not some BS, non-binding attestation that can evaporate the next day. Make redemption a legally binding contract --- not subject to the whims of con artists. Do this and then we can talk about stability and putting our life savings in crypto.

johndunne 3y ago
Agreed, mostly. Bitcoin is still in a proof-of-concept state, and as a concept, it has its significant flaws (transaction rate and proof of work's carbon footprint). The concept isn't near being proven yet and that hasn't stopped all the other crypto coins coming into being, the vast majority are pure scam/money printing scams. There is no crypto market; just Bitcoin and blockchain bullshitters. Over time, Bitcoin is slowly building up a base of people who are buying in and not selling (hence the long-term slow gradual price rise). There's a danger that as the more liquid coins dry up, whales can manipulate the price by selling but market forces (via slowly steadily buying in) should, bit by bit, eat those attempts up. If Bitcoin's proof of work model doesn't work and Bitcoin eventually fails, nothing exists at the moment that would replace that failure. A proof of work model and fully (and entirely) decentralised replacement might not be possible.
- jqpabc123 3y ago
  Bitcoin as currency is dead --- simply not practical. The only thing left is speculation and manipulation by unregulated insiders and market makers (aka "exchanges") who are free to collude and trade against their own customers.
  - johndunne 3y ago
    Bitcoin as a currency is DOA, agreed. But as a technology, it still needs to prove itself. It’s unfortunate the coin’s value is being used as play tokens to pilfer money from naive ‘investors’ but that’s to be expected when greed and naivety meet. There is value in Bitcoin’s potential, it’s greed that creates the ridiculous volatility.

warrenm 3y ago

Awful big "ifs" in that second sentence ... "if this continues" ... "if it continues further" "Volatility is steadily going down" ... it IS?! Everything I see shows it as volatile as ever Gold is continually minable (to some indefinite future point when it's not ... but that is an awful long way in the future) Bitcoin will max-out at 21m coins (a notable number of which are gone forever (including 5 or 6 I had when it was only "worth" fractions of a cent)) Building an economic base/standard on something that is not fixed in nature is, IMHO, a far better system than basing it on something that is either fixed or quasi-fixed (eg gold/silver)

ArtTimeInvestor 3y ago
> Everything I see shows it as volatile as ever What do you see? When I look at highest month over month changes, I see: 2017: 95% 2018: 31% 2019: 41% 2020: 40% 2021: 58% 2022: 23% 2023: 19% > something that is not fixed in nature is, IMHO, a far better system Why?
- warrenm 3y ago
  20% per month swings is incredibly volatile
  - ArtTimeInvestor 3y ago
    But not "as volatile as ever".
    - warrenm 3y ago
      It is "as volatile as ever" - the swings may not be as high, but they're of more "value" ... 20% of $35k is more than 90% of $5k :)
      - ArtTimeInvestor 3y ago
        No. A 20% swing is a 20% swing, no matter the current BTC/USD exchange rate. If you hold 10% of your portfolio in Bitcoin and Bitcoin goes up 20%, your portfolio gained 2%. No matter what the BTC/USD exchange rate was before the 20% increase. If you agree to pay 1 BTC for something and the BTC/USD exchange rate goes up by 20%, the price you pay in Dollar went up 20%. No matter what the BTC/USD exchange rate was before the 20% increase.