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Crypto Had Its Chance
- JohnBrookz 3y agoWithout crypto we wouldn’t have regulation that protect normal people from magical internet money.
- whacko_quacko 3y agoAnd without cocaine, we'd have fewer addicts. Cat's out of the bag, now we have to deal with it.
- fch42 3y agoWhat a strange response. When it first got discovered/was first produced, Cocaine was perfectly "legal" (that is, unregulated). Only was made illegal (for general trade and use) around 1920 or so. Remember, the British State once fought China over Opium. Not, as "these days" one might think, to stop production there or imports/smuggling to Britain - but to force China to drop the legal ban on the stuff they had introduced. Imagine a drug cartel with a superpower's army. And welcome to history lessons.
- epolanski 3y agoAt this point it is clear it's a failed experiment as a medium of payment and it has turned instead into a speculative one.
- mrb 3y agoAnd yet usage stats point the other way. The number of daily transactions, and the lightning network capacity are steadily increasing year after year. https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/n-transactions https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/n-transactions https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity Edit: another very concrete metric showing Bitcoin adoption is the daily global transactions fees paid to miners (in USD). This isn't the block reward, it is just the real costs (fees) that users are willing to pay to transact on the blockchain. The fact they are increasing implies increasing adoption/utility of Bitcoin: https://ibb.co/PgBm0t8 https://ibb.co/PgBm0t8 (note the log scale!) I like this metric as it's a 100% market-based valuation of Bitcoin's utility that is independent of the value of 1 BTC.
- tokai 3y agoBut your graph is showing a collapse of transactions in 2024.
- mrb 3y agoA fluctuation in the last 80 days means nothing. Zoom out to 15 years.
- tokai 3y agoAh sorry I see I should have disregarded all data that doesn't align with the into space narrative. I did zoom out. Transactions are on 2019 levels, so no year for year increase.
- mrb 3y agoI honestly think you don't know how to read the chart. Click on 30-day average. Then observe how the transactions volume in the last 12 months is clearly higher than any preceding 12-month period.
- tokai 3y ago[flagged]
- senordevnyc 3y agoThey're completely right. The transaction volume the last 12 months has been significantly higher than any previous 12 month period. Yes, it's lower the last couple months, and maybe this is the start of a collapse in activity the way you're implying, but they're still correct about the historical activity.
- mrb 3y agoI just verified the data: 2019 averaged 331k transactions/day, while 2023 averaged 418k transactions/day, a +26% increase. Like I said, you made a mistake reading the chart!
- cryptosadge 3y ago[dead]
- dmichulke 3y agoI'm only speaking about bitcoin and not about "crypto": Printing fiat money causes speculation. Easy fiat money is also literally the reason for launching bitcoin (just search for the Genesis block). So I see your comment as blaming the solution for the problem.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- epolanski 3y agoMoney needs to have inflation or the incentive is to hoard rather than spend. Why buy a Tesla today for a bitcoin if you can buy it for 0.6 bitcoins in an year or something? Whereas with fiat you have incentives to either invest or spend, but not sit on cash. Money has no value, none of it, not dollars not bitcoins. Unless you like staring at images of Benjamin Franklin or the Queen of UK, it's worthless. The entire proposition of imaginary money that is deflative because there will always be less in circulation is ridiculous, and Bitcoin clearly shows that it doesn't work. Every single time one of my clients added crypto as a mean of payments very few people were interested and we had seen only few transactions till they dropped to 0. And my experience isn't unique, even huge players reported the same happening. People hoard bitcoin to sell it to the next fool at higher price, there is no convenience or point into using it as a payment tool if you have alternatives, it's just gonna cost you more in fees and transactions and be more inconvenient than credit card/apple-google pay.
- Ekaros 3y agoAlso who would loan bitcoin? At least not without significant premium. Thus if you are not rich, anything you cannot immediately buy would have both deflation and interest working against you... And good luck getting even the increases in pay that we now get...
- neglesaks 3y agoThis is a cogent and very true point.
- beginnings 3y agoI wouldnt say its a failed experiment, nano delivered a good product for instant, feeless transactions, but nobody is interested because its not really a first world problem, money already works for payment and it works everywhere.
- Ekaros 3y agoI would call lack of adoption a failure. And it seems only issue we currently have with payments is the international one. And even there solutions exists inside certain blocks like Europe. So in the end it seems there is just lack of political willpower to force global standard for bank transfers.
- Yizahi 3y agoNano is only fast because it is centralized. Just like all other "fast" token systems are centralized. And regarding instant, feeless transactions - do you believe that electrons carrying current bank transfer messages are slower or more expensive than the ones carrying tokens (physicists, please forgive me)? The only reason token systems are temporary cheaper or faster is if they operate outside of law. Hardly a compliment in my opinion.
- neglesaks 3y agoI tend to agree for the base BTC case but the development and use trajectory of the Lightning protocol says otherwise.
- nojvek 3y agoGot sources to back up your claim? I’m interested why you think so? The fees on crypto are absurd. I thought credit cards were looting in daylight but crypto is on a whole new level.
- mattdesl 3y agoHave you seen the fees on Ethereum rollups lately? It can be very low compared to trad payment processors. https://www.gasfees.io/ https://www.gasfees.io/
- earnesti 3y agoRipple is just a centralized shitcoin. Not much to do with real decentralized cryptocurrency like Bitcoin.
- ArtTimeInvestor 3y agoStrange, that these shallow anti-crypto posts keep hitting the HN frontpage. What are the main drivers of the crypto hate here on HN? There is so much amazing technology being developed at the moment, which one would think is a main topic on a site for hackers. As a random example, take arweave. Which is a really clever tweak to make a bitcoinlike blockchain store huge amounts of data. The top post about it here on HN has 8 comments, which do ot even touch on the tech. While the current top post on the frontpage is "Radios, how do they work?".
- speedgoose 3y ago> What are the main drivers of the crypto hate here on HN? Expertise and excellence.
- loveparade 3y agoBecause all the pro-crypto posts are being flagged and removed, so these are the only ones left. Often see them in my RSS feed before they're removed. In general I recommend subscribing to HN via RSS feed only. Unrelated to crypto, it's absolutely crazy what kind of other stuff gets flagged and removed and how politically biased it is in certain topics. Echo chamber is an understatement.
- ArtTimeInvestor 3y ago"pro-crypto posts" sounds just as shallow as "anti-crypto posts". There is so much interesting stiff going on in crypto, but the HN crowd seems to be more interested in retro-computing than in how the world will work tomorrow.
- loveparade 3y agoThis post here is as shallow as it gets. But surprisingly it hasn't been flagged and removed yet. It may eventually, but the opposite political side is usually removed/flagged within minutes or at most an hour.
- RicoElectrico 3y ago
- thepangolino 3y ago[dead]
- makach 3y agoIt is a shame that we associate crypto with currency. The underlying technology is very useful for many things, especially with AI/ML creating so much unverifiable content. Haters going to hate.
- bayindirh 3y agoIt's important to understand that the term "crypto" has moved from cryptography to non-mutable ledgers to payment systems built on top of such ledgers. Ledgers got the "blockchain" name, and cryptography got back to "cryptography". Blockchains might be useful for verification of things, but today's "crypto" is not that technology. It's the name of the "GPU Accelerated Pump and Dump Engine" for today.
- Stranger43 3y agoThe blockchain might not be the best solution for most of those problems especially those that cannot be solved by traditional pgp/gpg signatures and certificates, and for those where traditional signatures work the blockchain add mostly complexity. The obvious real world use case of using blockchain to track shipping containers across modes of transport(and companies) failed late 2022 when the tradelens project was terminated(https://www.maersk.com/news/articles/2022/11/29/maersk-and-ibm-to-discontinue-tradelens https://www.maersk.com/news/articles/2022/11/29/maersk-and-i...) after at least 4 years of work by the shipping industry's largest players. And that's essentially the case everywhere people are trying to get real value from blockchain based solutions.
- Nextgrid 3y agoIt’s actually the other way around. “Currency” use-cases for blockchain actually work. It’s just that adoption has plateaued because most people don’t actually have the problems that cryptocurrencies solve and are perfectly happy with fiat. On the other hand, all the other use-cases of crypto/blockchain are outright scams/frauds because of the oracle problem.
- maxcoder4 3y agoFirst: can we stop calling cryptocurrencies "crypto"? It's short for cryptography. Second: What is the point of this article being on HN? It doesn't really bring anything to the discussion. In fact, this is just an invitation for everyone to repeat the same talking points in the comments. Because of this I won't share my (repeated at nauseaum on HN before) opinion here, in hope this and the future posts like this are removed.
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- trash_cat 3y ago[flagged]
- red_admiral 3y ago> "Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation." (CEO of OceanGate, complaining about regulations for submarines, but also a good summary of the attitude in at least 90% of crypto-space.)
- pearjuice 3y ago>the lack of regulation in crypto has led to any tangible, groundbreaking innovation? Is creating a ~$1T (and that's just BTC) asset class which went from obscure mailing lists to ETFs not innovation? Of this asset class, only 21M (divisible) units will ever exist[0] and to this date the original asset (again, BTC) has had no compromising (security) incidents deviating from its original mission (P2P ledger). This doomsaying "doesn't deserve to survive" just seems mean-spirited without any actual arguments as to why it's not deserved for an asset class to exist which is truly deflationary (as in money supply) and shoving everything under "crypto" hoping for some outright ban because it's not regulated. It being unregulatable is a feature, not a bug. [0] even with forks, the original whitepaper-protocol as we know it today will probably always be "BTC"
- neglesaks 3y agoThis is basically an 8-paragraph opinion peace that says "i don't like crypto". I'm no cryptocurrency worshipper, but this is junk content.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]