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There’s an important point hidden in your comment: Bitcoin won despite better forks and alternatives, and all its issues, because it managed to achieve the main

There’s an important point hidden in your comment: Bitcoin won despite better forks and alternatives, and all its issues, because it managed to achieve the main thing that is required for something to become money: enough people have to think it’s money. When enough people come to think of something as money, it becomes money. If a fork or alternative to Bitcoin doesn’t get enough people to think of it as money, then it doesn’t really matter if it is ‘superior’. It won’t win against the thing that a very large number of people think is money. Edit: punctuation.

ethanbond 3y ago
Better explanation: people didn’t care about how shitty of a currency it was because they loved how good of a speculative instrument it was. A good speculative instrument is also definitionally a bad currency, even aside from the technical “barriers” BTC faces.
- heresie-dabord 3y ago
  Yours is the important hidden point in the direct parent comment: As an instrument of enthusiastic speculation with rapid gains and fungibility, cryptocurrency became concentrated holdings of wealthy and unscrupulous speculators. Oh, and of some governments.
bhaak 3y ago
People think of it as money but mostly as unusable money. Even Bitcoin proponents now longer propose "using Bitcoin" but "holding Bitcoin" and cashing out to fiat if they have to use money.
- apantel 3y ago
  My philosophy on holding Bitcoin is: hold it until cryptocurrency has matured to the point where you are no longer interested in converting back into government-issued money. Once cryptocurrency has the type of optionality that government-issued money has, the “speculative investment” phase will be over and you’ll just have… money.
  - bhaak 3y ago
    This argument is the Neo/Morpheus matrix meme. It's a powerful image but it doesn't change the properties of Bitcoin. You are actually holding digital gold, not digital money which also needs constant maintenance to keep functioning (gold, for all its disadvantages at least doesn't need miners that keep mining just for gold to keep existing). Like with gold the currency properties just aren't there. You would need to create the same financial constructs as with gold to add those properties. But would you want let entrust your Bitcoin to a custodian so you could use a Bitcoin backed currency? Not your keys, not your coins.
wolverine876 3y ago
> it managed to achieve the main thing that is required for something to become money: enough people have to think it’s money. When enough people come to think of something as money, it becomes money. Perhaps they thought it was an asset that others would pay money for, like a pyramid scheme. They were buying shares of Bitcoin, essentially. People were buying financial instruments linked to worthless real estate in the 2000s; they thought they were (sufficiently liquid) assets, not money. What evidence do we have that people thought Bitcoin was currency and not an investment instrument? I know there's some Bitcoin-as-cash going on, but how much, and how much today?
- apantel 3y ago
  Bitcoin made a unique imprint in the collective consciousness by painting a believable picture of a world where a decentralized currency is viable. It wasn’t just a white paper. It was a working protocol and an actual network. Think about what it was like to become aware of that and participate in it as an early adopter — to go from not being able to conceive of how such a system could work to participating in an actual working system. It was (and still is) a working peer-to-peer monetary transaction system. If you have Bitcoin, you have units of account in that monetary system. Whether the system is slow or not, it’s money. I don’t think Bitcoin will be a cash-type unit of account. It’s like gold: it is divisible and fungible, but a pain to actually use as cash. Hundreds of years ago gold became a store of value used to back paper currencies. Bitcoin has value in that owning Bitcoin means owning a unit of account in a tamper-proof, global, decentralized ledger. To the extent many many people think that the Bitcoin ledger is worth holding units in (and not a fork or alternative), the units of the ledger become valuable. When people treat Bitcoin as a speculative investment, what they’re really doing is expecting even more people in the future to consider Bitcoin THE ledger to want to own units in, which would make the units in the ledger even more valuable. But the type of value they’re expecting to see more of is already there: a huge number of people think the Bitcoin ledger is the ledger to own units in, and comparatively very few care about owning units in the forks or alternatives.
  - shkkmo 3y ago
    Right, people predominantly buy bitcoin to speculate on it's future value, not to use as a medium of value exchange.
knowsuchagency 3y ago
I see what you’re saying about social contract, but by that logic any speculative investment vehicle becomes money.
- apantel 3y ago
  That’s not right. Not every speculative investment vehicle can function as money. To function as money something has to be divisible (e.g. cut a dollar into cents, cut a kg of gold into grams, cut a Bitcoin into bits), it has to be fungible (any unit of it is the same as all other units, i.e. a dollar is a dollar), it has to be portable (you can put a gold coin in your pocket), it has to be easily-transferable, it has to walk the razor’s edge between plentiful and scarce, etc. The other big one is wide acceptance, meaning many different people being willing to accept it as payment for goods and services. You can argue that Bitcoin has achieved this as well, though maybe not as much as one might wish or dream. Bitcoin was designed to be money, so it has the properties of money. That’s not true of pretty much any other type of speculative investment. Edit: added more to first paragraph.
wmf 3y ago
Bitcoin is more like gold. There are multiple precious metals and many cryptocurrencies but only one "main" one.
- wizzwizz4 3y ago
  > There are multiple precious metals […] but only one "main" one. Yeah: silver.
  - worik 3y ago
    Nah: Etherium
worik 3y ago
> When enough people come to think of something as money, it becomes money There are many more requirements than that for an artefact to become money Bitcoin misses out on most
- apantel 3y ago
  Not really. It is possessible (you possess the key that enables transfer), fungible, divisible, scarce, easily transferred. It has all of the basic qualities of money.
  - hakfoo 3y ago
    "Has a clear core of acceptance" might be another big qualifier. For all meaningful fiat currencies, there's at least a moderately sized, easily definable, reasonably contiguous market that will accept the currency without a hassle. Even a stack of 5000KPW notes, you could take them to a shopping centre somewhere and spend them, although that shopping centre is in Pyongyang. Conversely, Bitcoin acceptance tends to be a few random scattered vendors, and technical obstacles (poor connectivity) make it harder still. Even in El Salvador, despite their attempts to make it a legal tender, you're not going to be able to reliably and seamlessly spend Bitcoin.
dale_glass 3y ago
> If a fork or alternative to Bitcoin doesn’t get enough people to think of it as money, then it doesn’t really matter if it is ‘superior’. It won’t win against the thing that a very large number of people think is money. And that's a huge problem, because the whole point of Bitcoin was decentralization and lack of need to trust anyone. And yet it seems the winner is simply whoever plays the PR game best and has the most inertia.

ethanbond 3y ago

Better explanation: people didn’t care about how shitty of a currency it was because they loved how good of a speculative instrument it was. A good speculative instrument is also definitionally a bad currency, even aside from the technical “barriers” BTC faces.

heresie-dabord 3y ago
Yours is the important hidden point in the direct parent comment: As an instrument of enthusiastic speculation with rapid gains and fungibility, cryptocurrency became concentrated holdings of wealthy and unscrupulous speculators. Oh, and of some governments.

bhaak 3y ago

People think of it as money but mostly as unusable money. Even Bitcoin proponents now longer propose "using Bitcoin" but "holding Bitcoin" and cashing out to fiat if they have to use money.

apantel 3y ago
My philosophy on holding Bitcoin is: hold it until cryptocurrency has matured to the point where you are no longer interested in converting back into government-issued money. Once cryptocurrency has the type of optionality that government-issued money has, the “speculative investment” phase will be over and you’ll just have… money.
- bhaak 3y ago
  This argument is the Neo/Morpheus matrix meme. It's a powerful image but it doesn't change the properties of Bitcoin. You are actually holding digital gold, not digital money which also needs constant maintenance to keep functioning (gold, for all its disadvantages at least doesn't need miners that keep mining just for gold to keep existing). Like with gold the currency properties just aren't there. You would need to create the same financial constructs as with gold to add those properties. But would you want let entrust your Bitcoin to a custodian so you could use a Bitcoin backed currency? Not your keys, not your coins.

wolverine876 3y ago

> it managed to achieve the main thing that is required for something to become money: enough people have to think it’s money. When enough people come to think of something as money, it becomes money. Perhaps they thought it was an asset that others would pay money for, like a pyramid scheme. They were buying shares of Bitcoin, essentially. People were buying financial instruments linked to worthless real estate in the 2000s; they thought they were (sufficiently liquid) assets, not money. What evidence do we have that people thought Bitcoin was currency and not an investment instrument? I know there's some Bitcoin-as-cash going on, but how much, and how much today?

apantel 3y ago
Bitcoin made a unique imprint in the collective consciousness by painting a believable picture of a world where a decentralized currency is viable. It wasn’t just a white paper. It was a working protocol and an actual network. Think about what it was like to become aware of that and participate in it as an early adopter — to go from not being able to conceive of how such a system could work to participating in an actual working system. It was (and still is) a working peer-to-peer monetary transaction system. If you have Bitcoin, you have units of account in that monetary system. Whether the system is slow or not, it’s money. I don’t think Bitcoin will be a cash-type unit of account. It’s like gold: it is divisible and fungible, but a pain to actually use as cash. Hundreds of years ago gold became a store of value used to back paper currencies. Bitcoin has value in that owning Bitcoin means owning a unit of account in a tamper-proof, global, decentralized ledger. To the extent many many people think that the Bitcoin ledger is worth holding units in (and not a fork or alternative), the units of the ledger become valuable. When people treat Bitcoin as a speculative investment, what they’re really doing is expecting even more people in the future to consider Bitcoin THE ledger to want to own units in, which would make the units in the ledger even more valuable. But the type of value they’re expecting to see more of is already there: a huge number of people think the Bitcoin ledger is the ledger to own units in, and comparatively very few care about owning units in the forks or alternatives.
- shkkmo 3y ago
  Right, people predominantly buy bitcoin to speculate on it's future value, not to use as a medium of value exchange.

knowsuchagency 3y ago

I see what you’re saying about social contract, but by that logic any speculative investment vehicle becomes money.

apantel 3y ago
That’s not right. Not every speculative investment vehicle can function as money. To function as money something has to be divisible (e.g. cut a dollar into cents, cut a kg of gold into grams, cut a Bitcoin into bits), it has to be fungible (any unit of it is the same as all other units, i.e. a dollar is a dollar), it has to be portable (you can put a gold coin in your pocket), it has to be easily-transferable, it has to walk the razor’s edge between plentiful and scarce, etc. The other big one is wide acceptance, meaning many different people being willing to accept it as payment for goods and services. You can argue that Bitcoin has achieved this as well, though maybe not as much as one might wish or dream. Bitcoin was designed to be money, so it has the properties of money. That’s not true of pretty much any other type of speculative investment. Edit: added more to first paragraph.

wmf 3y ago

Bitcoin is more like gold. There are multiple precious metals and many cryptocurrencies but only one "main" one.

wizzwizz4 3y ago
> There are multiple precious metals […] but only one "main" one. Yeah: silver.
- worik 3y ago
  Nah: Etherium

worik 3y ago

> When enough people come to think of something as money, it becomes money There are many more requirements than that for an artefact to become money Bitcoin misses out on most

apantel 3y ago
Not really. It is possessible (you possess the key that enables transfer), fungible, divisible, scarce, easily transferred. It has all of the basic qualities of money.
- hakfoo 3y ago
  "Has a clear core of acceptance" might be another big qualifier. For all meaningful fiat currencies, there's at least a moderately sized, easily definable, reasonably contiguous market that will accept the currency without a hassle. Even a stack of 5000KPW notes, you could take them to a shopping centre somewhere and spend them, although that shopping centre is in Pyongyang. Conversely, Bitcoin acceptance tends to be a few random scattered vendors, and technical obstacles (poor connectivity) make it harder still. Even in El Salvador, despite their attempts to make it a legal tender, you're not going to be able to reliably and seamlessly spend Bitcoin.

dale_glass 3y ago

> If a fork or alternative to Bitcoin doesn’t get enough people to think of it as money, then it doesn’t really matter if it is ‘superior’. It won’t win against the thing that a very large number of people think is money. And that's a huge problem, because the whole point of Bitcoin was decentralization and lack of need to trust anyone. And yet it seems the winner is simply whoever plays the PR game best and has the most inertia.