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I was also around when bitcoin just started out. Many people wanted it to be a global revolution in finance. But instead it turned into a game of "hodl" to get

I was also around when bitcoin just started out. Many people wanted it to be a global revolution in finance. But instead it turned into a game of "hodl" to get rich. Scams were openly perpetrated in the forums. I became completely disillusioned. What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today?

la_fayette 1y ago
> What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today? It is a highly reliable, global-scale P2P software system, we can analyse, experiment with and learn from.
- edhelas 1y ago
  .torrent be like: hold my beer
- FabHK 1y ago
  Global scale using 1% of world electricity that can do 7 transactions per second, because the thousands and thousands of nodes don't trust each other and all do the same work.
dovys 1y ago
Speculation, get rich quick schemes and scams. They will exist no matter what. At least the barrier to entry to get scammed is higher with crypto than just online payments
- Synaesthesia 1y ago
  No, scamming people is much easier with crypto. The transactions are irreversible, for one.
  - akritrime 1y ago
    As it is with cash.
    - superjan 1y ago
      And crypto scamming is anonymous, low risk and can be automated. Scamming people for cash requires you to get close to each of your victims.
    - PartiallyTyped 1y ago
      Cash is backed by a government, which can coerce parties into following the law.
  - FabHK 1y ago
    Indeed. The Economist estimates the modern scam industry to be as large as the illicit drug trade by now, around $500 bn annually in revenue. Enabled in large part by crypto (pig butchering, ransomware, rug pulls were not a huge thing before crypto).
- t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago
  > They will exist no matter what Ok, so then they're not a bitcoin thing then right?
lifty 1y ago
A fixed supply, digital bearer asset. It’s nobody’s debt. Not that many of those. And US debt, even though it’s still the predominant reserve asset, things are slowly changing. And yeah, btc is still not a proper currency.
- wqaatwt 1y ago
  A hyper deflationary asset cannot ever be a proper currency.
  - samrus 1y ago
    exactly this. these people dont understand that their own speculatory practices are what makes this a terrible store of value. its unstable, they even have to rely on literal stable-coins but they still dont see the problem for the sake of argument, is there any way to introduce monetary policy into crypto currency so as to correct for unwanted inflation/deflation? without compromising on its decentralization promise
    - qqqult 1y ago
      > for the sake of argument, is there any way to introduce monetary policy into crypto currency so as to correct for unwanted inflation/deflation yeah and you don't even need to change bitcoin - just use a stablecoin over-collateralized by BTC built on the bticoin network. In essence these systems work with $1 of the stablecoin backed by $N dollars (N > 1.6) of the the backing asset (BTC). Then they use a smart contract system of price oracles, liquidations & interest rate curves to balance supply, demand and risk parameters. It's pretty much an over-collateralized lending protocol that issues its own asset that is pegged to $1 This has worked well for the past 11 years with MakerDAO on Ethereum and it's stablecoin DAI. I think at its peak the DAI stablecoin had around $7 billion in circulation and was about 5-10% the size of USDT, now it's about half that. However, high treasury interest rates and low interest in decentralized stablecoins have made more "traditional" stablecoins like USDT, USDC vastly more profitable and successful. In recent times even DAI has been trying to become more like USDC and USDT with treasuries held in intermediaries
checksum256 1y ago
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adultorata 1y ago
You can move $2 billion worth of capital PERMISSIONLESS with a click of a button, the only thing you need is the private key, are you being disingenuous on purpose or what?
- Synaesthesia 1y ago
  Yeah that is awesome, it's great technology but it's still not anywhere close to a revolution.
hx8 1y ago
> What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today? Aside from perhaps gold, bitcoin is the most successful currency in the world not associated with a central bank and state. It's the most liquid asset that is not issued by a central bank. At any point you can issue a transaction to anyone else in the world, without the possibility of a third party intervention. I've had issues pulling cash out of banks, or limited sizes available for money orders, or having debt/credit card transactions incorrectly flagged as fraudulent and blocked.
- wqaatwt 1y ago
  > successful currency Calling it a currency is a huge stretch. It’s an extremely successful token/“asset” but it’s about as much as a currency as gold is these days if not less (based on what most people use it for).
  - kragen 1y ago
    Last week I happened to visit a grocery store that accepts Bitcoin payments.
    - MangoToupe 1y ago
      Huh. Were you in El Salvador by any chance?
      - kragen 1y ago
        Argentina. I didn't try it because I don't have Lightning set up.
        MangoToupe 1y ago
        Argentina also makes sense. Solidarity.
        Lerc 1y ago
        That's the case where I think it will pick up. If the reason for its lack of use is perception based, then instances where its utility outweighs perception will gain ground. There are numerous places and times around the world that you can look at the situation that occurred and see that Bitcoin would have been a boon had it been established at that time. Future instances will exist like that, and perhaps that's a good enough role for it to exist on it's own. It can be the candle that provides light when the power goes out. The irony of course that it doesn't work if the power goes out, but that's another degree of infrastructure damage entirely. It might even be sufficient to ensure the power doesn't go out during some crisis.
karel-3d 1y ago
You can get rich by... having it Sort of like gold I guess. I have never figured out "lightning network", their "solution" for payments. (bitcoin payments are so impractical that they have a different, separate system to use for actual payments, that works completely differently.) Seems very convoluted. I need to pay a huge fee just to make a channel so I can receive anything? And there is something about liquidity? I implemented bitcoin stuff and still cannot figure lightning out. bitcoin is mainly for buying it and looking at a chart.
- omnee 1y ago
  You can't get rich with gold. And haven't been able to for a long long time. It usually preserves wealth due to its long term real rate of return of around zero. But as BTC is new enough, the early owners have indeed become very rich.
- p2detar 1y ago
  > bitcoin is mainly for buying it and looking at a chart That’s what my broker and many others do. They buy a pool of crypto and resell to investors. You don’t get a wallet, you can’t transfer your crypto at all. It just sits there until you sell it. The most distilled Hodl practice ever. edit: typo
- LikesPwsh 1y ago
  In the long term everything goes to zero, so an asset that pays no dividends but has significant storage costs isn't much good for investment. Bitcoin holders as a group are constantly losing money by definition. Some of them cash out at a profit, I suppose.
  - FabHK 1y ago
    > Bitcoin holders as a group are constantly losing money by definition Modulo market cap representing unrealized PnL, but yes otherwise. Miners and exchanges take a good cut.
    - LikesPwsh 1y ago
sipsi 1y ago
it's not made in rust
Quarrelsome 1y ago
they laugh at the guy who spent 10 bitcoin to buy pizza back in the early days, but you can't directly buy pizza today with bitcoin.
- cinntaile 1y ago
  10000 bitcoin
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  10 bitcoin? It was 10,000 bitcoin.
Lerc 1y ago
Perhaps another way to think of it, is what would it take to be less disillusioned? What was about it that made you think it might be a good thing? Have those aspects gone now or is the problem that there are new factors that put you off it? Most importantly, what could be done to get you back onboard with the idea? I'm not really a fan of "Bad thing is bad" and like to think in terms of "This thing has a bad aspect, what could be done to fix it" To my mind, I was not expecting Bitcoin to increase in value this quickly. Few people probably were. On the other hand if the end point of Bitcoin was to replace money, then I can see how it would have a high value at that endpoint. That presupposes that it reaches that endpoint. The perceived value (barring the mood based fluctuations of speculation) depends on the proportion of people who believe in that outcome and when they think it will occur. When Bitcoin came out I thought that it was indeed like email for money, and that it would take a similar amount of time for it to be used by people in general. I figured it would be 20 or 30 years before the average person had even heard about it. Turns out I was quite wrong there. I don't think Bitcoin is particularly impressive as an investment today, the risk when it comes to retaining value is some unknowable but probably quite high. The risk of holding and retaining your balance adds another layer to that. For the value of the mining reward to stay level with an external currency there has to be around a 20% increase per year to keep up with the halving. Exceeding that rate is what lead to the increase in energy expenditure. While it has increased more than that so far, the one rule of exponential growth is that it cannot continue forever. It might have a few doublings left in it, but it is slowing down and with a risk level where you could probably find a lower risk way to double your money in a similar timeframe. Maybe it hits a million, but when? If it takes long enough you're better off with an index fund. Bitcoin sits around $100,000 today, that's way higher than its current utility. I feel like the value should represent the aggregate impression of where Bitcoin will be in the long term. I mostly think this is true and bubbles represent the flow and ebb of the faith that has no logical support. I used to think that nobody could sustain the delusion of value when it is not apparent for many years on end. House prices have led me to think that maybe people can pretend that their thing is worth more than it actually is for many years without faltering. I guess the world is in a funny place now. For even an index fund to be long term stable, some counties have to continue to exist, and people are beginning to have doubts about even that.
_trampeltier 1y ago
When Bitcoin started, a banc transaction was still like 3 days, 5 if there was a weekend in between. Also global transaction. Still a lot of countrys have different and strange systems.
sharperguy 1y ago
Explaining bitcoin to someone who has no interest in it is like trying to explain to your mother in law that she should remove windows and switch to linux. From their perspective it just seems unneccesarry and overcomplicated.
- globular-toast 1y ago
  Unnecessary and overcomplicated? Compared to what? Have you ever taken out a mortgage? Ever tried to send funds overseas? Ever wondered how entire cities are built by the people who run the money? Does your mother in law know what fractional reserve banking is? A bank run? Can they explain what happened in the 2008 financial crisis? No? They why would they need to know how Bitcoin works beyond just "trust me, it does"?
  - sharperguy 1y ago
    It's not the how but the why. If you know you need bitcoin you know. If everything seems fine without it why would you bother?
  - FabHK 1y ago
    No mortgages or funding of productive enterprises in crypto land anyway. I have sent money overseas, fast, cheap, securely, with fiat. The externalities of the bad US retail banking system are enormous. First we got PayPal with Thiel and Elon, then crypto. :-/
ducksinhats 1y ago
>What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today? I can tell you down to the day how many bitcoin there will be decades from now. Can you do the same for any fiat currency for next week? It offers stability and a mathematical escape from very fallible humans controlling monetary systems.
- user_7832 1y ago
  But what's the (inherent, or even otherwise) benefit of this?
  - torbid 1y ago
    If the goal is to hoard a currency itself instead of use it as the exchange between real investments then this makes perfect sense, but those people shouldn't be upset when we tell them we don't directly accept their "currency". This sentiment models a correction to a complaint I first heard with people who tell us everything fell apart since we ended the gold standard. They ignore that we raised all boats rapidly when we didn't pin everything to governments ability to fight gold hoarders for small amounts of gold entering the market. Even gold hoarders are better off in terms of what the market has created to exchange for their gold because that exchange ceased to be limiting on market expansion. One could say the US economy was exponential both before and after the currency change, but as with Moore's Law, it gets harder to remain exponential if as few as one limiting factor is emerging.
- josephg 1y ago
  > It offers stability Hahaha what? Bitcoin has insane volatility.
- lolc 1y ago
  Funny thing is, we don't know how many keys are lost. They say it's deflationary, and I say it's deflating to zero through key attrition. And people pay for burning electricity meanwhile. Weird game.
  - kragen 1y ago
ur-whale 1y ago
> What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today? I fully agree that Bitcoin did not become what it was originally built for (a currency system for the internet), and as a matter of fact, for very valid reasons: - custody is really hard, and damn near impossible for most people, including people who like to think of themselves techies and who all end up getting caught with their pants down when exchanges get hacked because they forgot the number one tenet of Bitcoin. Please repeat the mantra after me: Not Your Keys, Not Your coins. - the 10mn confirm thing is a pain for small, casual transactions - scalability (it won't and was never designed do what eg VISA can do in terms of TX/second) - most people are downright horrified when they realize the non-reversibility aspect - most people don't understand what money actually is and hot it works in the first place, so seeing the advantage of BTC is damn near impossible - etc... HOWEVER: that absolutely does not mean that Bitcoin isn't amazing and useful. Bitcoin has simply become something else entirely, a kind of financial instrument that had no equivalent up until now and which has turned out to be profoundly useful to a very large class of people (go ask USA - one of the country with the worse divorce laws on the planet - men in the middle of divorce proceeding for their opinion on the topic of assets that can't be confiscated). Oh and yes, I already hear the shouts from the back of the room: skirting the law!drug dealers! criminals! cyber-ransoms! Won't you think of the children!. One single word to counter this argument: there is thing called the USD which is used for the exact same thing as all the above "use cases" (and worse, like toppling foreign governments) and has never been considered evil for some reason. I do understand and feel for folks who looked forward o Bitcoin as a replacement for the dollar, lubricating internet commerce and why they are disappointed. I was one of them and it took me a long time to understand what Bitcoin actually was. However, if you fall in the category of the disillusioned, please consider: something else will come around to solve the problem of internet currency. It won't be Bitcoin. It maybe layer two stuff, who knows. But on the other hand, Bitcoin has become something extremely useful (and even without trying to analyze the why, the price is an inescapably clear proof of that). Its singular properties as a financial instrument make it something that no other thing in tradfi can boast having: - demonstrable finite supply, and therefore a rather predictable outcome on a long term timeline. - first mover advantage (aka network effect). Other cryptos might be better and get better all the time technically, might better for the environment, but at this point, displacing BTC in terms of mindset and allocated capital ... good luck - demonstrated long term hedge against inflation (it's been 15 years, and if you can afford to ignore volatility at the one year scale, it's undeniable). On that topic, I can't NOT post this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg - transactions are impossible to censor, be it by corps or sovereign entities (for me personally, the number one attractive trait, a basic unbreakable defensive guarantor of individual freedom). This goes from simply giving you a ton of actual leverage in e.g. a divorce, to being able to work your way around tyrannical governments (see the Canadian truckers who got all their bank accounts frozen for daring to disagree with the thugs in charge). - operates 24/7 trustlessly and outside any jurisdiction - quasi-instantaneous transmission of value across borders, geographies, distances, etc ... - pseudonymity and privacy. While not perfect in this regard, you neighbor could be a freaking multi-billionaire and you wouldn't have the first clue. - you can physically disappear and travel with *ALL* of your wealth at an instant notice. - it cannot be confiscated short of physically torturing the relevant information out of you. And even then, you can protect yourself by not knowing the full secret to accessing your BTC. And this assume people know you have them. - etc ... the list is long TL;DR: Bitcoin won't replace Paypal, and that's actually a good thing. It has become an entirely different beast, probably as, if not more, useful than what it was designed for originally, specifically when it comes to being a tool that protects individual freedom against the excesses of the group.
gexla 1y ago
This! I was around looking for alternative "currencies" before Bitcoin even existed. But they were flawed,because they (such as Libertycoin) were shady centralized systems. Each of them were shut down by the US government. Bitcoin would have been the answer, but I lost interest before it became a thing (or it was already a thing and I somehow never come across it, because I never saw it as an accepted option.) This would have appealed to my geek nature. But I think I would have still lost interest in it after finding that Bitcoin also wasn't the answer due to difficulty in spending it. I likely would have cashed out at like $5 per coin to buy a bunch of pizzas.
Spacecosmonaut 1y ago
Bitcoin is the only immutable peer to peer system ever created (barring advances in quantum computing, and even then the protocol can be updated). In a world headed toward web 3.0, generative AI content & virtual reality, I think there is tremendous value in a trustless and immutable peer to peer system. In fact, I think we NEED it, and should as a society happily bear the power consumption that underpins the security of the network. Controversial, I know. However, already we cannot trust that a digital picture is genuine. There is currently no solution to this problem. In the near future, I imagine that the raw data of your camera will be associated with a token on a blockchain (not bitcoin, but a dedicated high-capacity blockchain). Such a system would allow us to determine that a picture was indeed taken with a physical device, and thus that the events depicted have a bearing in the real world. My bet is that we are headed toward a future where blockchain is ubiquitous. Where everything of value is underpinned by a specialized blockchain. When you order groceries, the origin of the produce and raw ingredients are all embedded in blockchain. In virtual reality, every digital product has a specialized blockchain. Every kind of transaction; compute, assets, AI, will all be underpinned by trustless peer to peer systems. All these specialized blockchains trade security for throughput. My bet is that Bitcoin will act as a security guarantor in our future digital society, where the state of every blockchain is periodically validated on the Bitcoin network. Thus, I bet that every transaction in the future will have an associated Bitcoin cost. Thats why I own a small amount of Bitcoin.
- PartiallyTyped 1y ago
  Bitcoin is not trustless. It has as much value as the collective trust in it. Once that trust disappears, the value tanks. Reality is that you can’t bootstrap trust.
  - FabHK 1y ago
    Not to mention the fact that you can hold Bitcoin trustlessly, and you can transfer it to someone else trustlessly, but then you have to trust that they send to you in return what they promised. See Goharshady, Amir Kafshdar: Irrationality, Extortion, or Trusted Third-Parties: Why It Is Impossible to Buy and Sell Physical Goods Securely on the Blockchain. arXiv:2110.09857, arXiv, 19 Oct. 2021. arXiv.org, http://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09857 http://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09857.
p3rls 1y ago
Facilitates scams and has set consumer web tech back a few years, but other than that not much.
sarbanharble 1y ago
The only answer that makes sense to me is this: BitCoin is a scam started by the oil industry as a way to tie currency to exponentially hungry power consumption.
mancerayder 1y ago
Potential? I am trying to buy a property, and I've been moving money around to prepare for a down payment. It's July 4th weekend. I initiated some moves in the afternoon of July 3. But an ACH transaction in the U.S. takes "1-3 business days." First of all, why "1-3" and not "1" or "3" or "2"? Secondly, why business days? I get paged at night and on the weekend if something breaks at work, but the banking laws or customs say that computers only move my money 9-5 during holidays? Computers are taking non-human-holidays? I don't get it. If bitcoin won't disrupt this, something else should. I have been trading it weekly/monthly really simply, and it's a few K a month of profit. So I think it's useless at the moment other than as a scheme to gamble. I think there's a bit of a trust issue.
- yladiz 1y ago
  This is a US issue. In the EU you can do an instant bank transfer below a certain amount at any time, for free (after they mandated the fees away recently), and many other countries have systems that allow instant bank transfers. You don’t need a completely different way of dealing with money to get improvements to the current system.
  - mancerayder 1y ago
    Fair point. I don't know how many years we were behind the rest of the civilized world in terms of having chips on our credit/debit cards. And we still have the magnetic strip. Well, we also use "feet" and "cups" instead of base 10 measurement system.
- southernplaces7 1y ago
  >I have been trading it weekly/monthly really simply, and it's a few K a month of profit. What sort of tactics or strategy do you use to trade it for a consistent profit? I assume you're referring to bitcoin here. Also, the banking hours thing is absurd, and way too common not only with banks but also some online payments processors, like, for example, the utter dumpster fire, parasitic garbage company that is Paypal. Dealing with that one alone (and with banks in certain contexts) alone makes one fully sympathize with so much of what crypto is supposed to (and to a pretty decent degree does) offer.
ost-ing 1y ago
The value is in the network itself. Lots of people think that its the digital tokens or coins that have value, but its the system as a whole. The value is also in the “need”. Corporate treasuries need a way to store wealth that doesn't inflate over time, gold inflates 2% per year, bitcoin 0% - so it fills an institutional need
- al_borland 1y ago
  Does Bitcoin still fit this need with the volatility Bitcoin sees? Do corporations really want to put their stored value it something so unpredictable?
  - ost-ing 1y ago
    Whats been shown is that if you hold bitcoin for 4 years or longer the investment has performed very well and significantly outperformed the S&P. Companies buying billions worth of bitcoin are thinking strategically about it, they arent retail investors who panic sell after a few months
lproven 1y ago
> What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today? An unrivalled opportunity to fleece the gullible, and for criminals to move assets around without law enforcement supervision. That's about it. The three categories of users are hopeful fools, criminals, and scammers. Of course, membership of any one group does not preclude membership of the others, and some are all 3.

la_fayette 1y ago

> What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today? It is a highly reliable, global-scale P2P software system, we can analyse, experiment with and learn from.

edhelas 1y ago
.torrent be like: hold my beer
FabHK 1y ago
Global scale using 1% of world electricity that can do 7 transactions per second, because the thousands and thousands of nodes don't trust each other and all do the same work.

dovys 1y ago

Speculation, get rich quick schemes and scams. They will exist no matter what. At least the barrier to entry to get scammed is higher with crypto than just online payments

Synaesthesia 1y ago
No, scamming people is much easier with crypto. The transactions are irreversible, for one.
- akritrime 1y ago
  As it is with cash.
  - superjan 1y ago
    And crypto scamming is anonymous, low risk and can be automated. Scamming people for cash requires you to get close to each of your victims.
  - PartiallyTyped 1y ago
    Cash is backed by a government, which can coerce parties into following the law.
- FabHK 1y ago
  Indeed. The Economist estimates the modern scam industry to be as large as the illicit drug trade by now, around $500 bn annually in revenue. Enabled in large part by crypto (pig butchering, ransomware, rug pulls were not a huge thing before crypto).
t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago
> They will exist no matter what Ok, so then they're not a bitcoin thing then right?

lifty 1y ago

A fixed supply, digital bearer asset. It’s nobody’s debt. Not that many of those. And US debt, even though it’s still the predominant reserve asset, things are slowly changing. And yeah, btc is still not a proper currency.

wqaatwt 1y ago
A hyper deflationary asset cannot ever be a proper currency.
- samrus 1y ago
  exactly this. these people dont understand that their own speculatory practices are what makes this a terrible store of value. its unstable, they even have to rely on literal stable-coins but they still dont see the problem for the sake of argument, is there any way to introduce monetary policy into crypto currency so as to correct for unwanted inflation/deflation? without compromising on its decentralization promise
  - qqqult 1y ago
    > for the sake of argument, is there any way to introduce monetary policy into crypto currency so as to correct for unwanted inflation/deflation yeah and you don't even need to change bitcoin - just use a stablecoin over-collateralized by BTC built on the bticoin network. In essence these systems work with $1 of the stablecoin backed by $N dollars (N > 1.6) of the the backing asset (BTC). Then they use a smart contract system of price oracles, liquidations & interest rate curves to balance supply, demand and risk parameters. It's pretty much an over-collateralized lending protocol that issues its own asset that is pegged to $1 This has worked well for the past 11 years with MakerDAO on Ethereum and it's stablecoin DAI. I think at its peak the DAI stablecoin had around $7 billion in circulation and was about 5-10% the size of USDT, now it's about half that. However, high treasury interest rates and low interest in decentralized stablecoins have made more "traditional" stablecoins like USDT, USDC vastly more profitable and successful. In recent times even DAI has been trying to become more like USDC and USDT with treasuries held in intermediaries

checksum256 1y ago

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adultorata 1y ago

You can move $2 billion worth of capital PERMISSIONLESS with a click of a button, the only thing you need is the private key, are you being disingenuous on purpose or what?

Synaesthesia 1y ago
Yeah that is awesome, it's great technology but it's still not anywhere close to a revolution.

hx8 1y ago

> What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today? Aside from perhaps gold, bitcoin is the most successful currency in the world not associated with a central bank and state. It's the most liquid asset that is not issued by a central bank. At any point you can issue a transaction to anyone else in the world, without the possibility of a third party intervention. I've had issues pulling cash out of banks, or limited sizes available for money orders, or having debt/credit card transactions incorrectly flagged as fraudulent and blocked.

wqaatwt 1y ago
> successful currency Calling it a currency is a huge stretch. It’s an extremely successful token/“asset” but it’s about as much as a currency as gold is these days if not less (based on what most people use it for).
- kragen 1y ago
  Last week I happened to visit a grocery store that accepts Bitcoin payments.
  - MangoToupe 1y ago
    Huh. Were you in El Salvador by any chance?
    - kragen 1y ago
      Argentina. I didn't try it because I don't have Lightning set up.
      - MangoToupe 1y ago
        Argentina also makes sense. Solidarity.
      - Lerc 1y ago
        That's the case where I think it will pick up. If the reason for its lack of use is perception based, then instances where its utility outweighs perception will gain ground. There are numerous places and times around the world that you can look at the situation that occurred and see that Bitcoin would have been a boon had it been established at that time. Future instances will exist like that, and perhaps that's a good enough role for it to exist on it's own. It can be the candle that provides light when the power goes out. The irony of course that it doesn't work if the power goes out, but that's another degree of infrastructure damage entirely. It might even be sufficient to ensure the power doesn't go out during some crisis.

karel-3d 1y ago

You can get rich by... having it Sort of like gold I guess. I have never figured out "lightning network", their "solution" for payments. (bitcoin payments are so impractical that they have a different, separate system to use for actual payments, that works completely differently.) Seems very convoluted. I need to pay a huge fee just to make a channel so I can receive anything? And there is something about liquidity? I implemented bitcoin stuff and still cannot figure lightning out. bitcoin is mainly for buying it and looking at a chart.

omnee 1y ago
You can't get rich with gold. And haven't been able to for a long long time. It usually preserves wealth due to its long term real rate of return of around zero. But as BTC is new enough, the early owners have indeed become very rich.
p2detar 1y ago
> bitcoin is mainly for buying it and looking at a chart That’s what my broker and many others do. They buy a pool of crypto and resell to investors. You don’t get a wallet, you can’t transfer your crypto at all. It just sits there until you sell it. The most distilled Hodl practice ever. edit: typo
LikesPwsh 1y ago
In the long term everything goes to zero, so an asset that pays no dividends but has significant storage costs isn't much good for investment. Bitcoin holders as a group are constantly losing money by definition. Some of them cash out at a profit, I suppose.
- FabHK 1y ago
  > Bitcoin holders as a group are constantly losing money by definition Modulo market cap representing unrealized PnL, but yes otherwise. Miners and exchanges take a good cut.
  - LikesPwsh 1y ago

sipsi 1y ago

it's not made in rust

Quarrelsome 1y ago

they laugh at the guy who spent 10 bitcoin to buy pizza back in the early days, but you can't directly buy pizza today with bitcoin.

cinntaile 1y ago
10000 bitcoin
thaumasiotes 1y ago
10 bitcoin? It was 10,000 bitcoin.

Lerc 1y ago

Perhaps another way to think of it, is what would it take to be less disillusioned? What was about it that made you think it might be a good thing? Have those aspects gone now or is the problem that there are new factors that put you off it? Most importantly, what could be done to get you back onboard with the idea? I'm not really a fan of "Bad thing is bad" and like to think in terms of "This thing has a bad aspect, what could be done to fix it" To my mind, I was not expecting Bitcoin to increase in value this quickly. Few people probably were. On the other hand if the end point of Bitcoin was to replace money, then I can see how it would have a high value at that endpoint. That presupposes that it reaches that endpoint. The perceived value (barring the mood based fluctuations of speculation) depends on the proportion of people who believe in that outcome and when they think it will occur. When Bitcoin came out I thought that it was indeed like email for money, and that it would take a similar amount of time for it to be used by people in general. I figured it would be 20 or 30 years before the average person had even heard about it. Turns out I was quite wrong there. I don't think Bitcoin is particularly impressive as an investment today, the risk when it comes to retaining value is some unknowable but probably quite high. The risk of holding and retaining your balance adds another layer to that. For the value of the mining reward to stay level with an external currency there has to be around a 20% increase per year to keep up with the halving. Exceeding that rate is what lead to the increase in energy expenditure. While it has increased more than that so far, the one rule of exponential growth is that it cannot continue forever. It might have a few doublings left in it, but it is slowing down and with a risk level where you could probably find a lower risk way to double your money in a similar timeframe. Maybe it hits a million, but when? If it takes long enough you're better off with an index fund. Bitcoin sits around $100,000 today, that's way higher than its current utility. I feel like the value should represent the aggregate impression of where Bitcoin will be in the long term. I mostly think this is true and bubbles represent the flow and ebb of the faith that has no logical support. I used to think that nobody could sustain the delusion of value when it is not apparent for many years on end. House prices have led me to think that maybe people can pretend that their thing is worth more than it actually is for many years without faltering. I guess the world is in a funny place now. For even an index fund to be long term stable, some counties have to continue to exist, and people are beginning to have doubts about even that.

_trampeltier 1y ago

When Bitcoin started, a banc transaction was still like 3 days, 5 if there was a weekend in between. Also global transaction. Still a lot of countrys have different and strange systems.

sharperguy 1y ago

Explaining bitcoin to someone who has no interest in it is like trying to explain to your mother in law that she should remove windows and switch to linux. From their perspective it just seems unneccesarry and overcomplicated.

globular-toast 1y ago
Unnecessary and overcomplicated? Compared to what? Have you ever taken out a mortgage? Ever tried to send funds overseas? Ever wondered how entire cities are built by the people who run the money? Does your mother in law know what fractional reserve banking is? A bank run? Can they explain what happened in the 2008 financial crisis? No? They why would they need to know how Bitcoin works beyond just "trust me, it does"?
- sharperguy 1y ago
  It's not the how but the why. If you know you need bitcoin you know. If everything seems fine without it why would you bother?
- FabHK 1y ago
  No mortgages or funding of productive enterprises in crypto land anyway. I have sent money overseas, fast, cheap, securely, with fiat. The externalities of the bad US retail banking system are enormous. First we got PayPal with Thiel and Elon, then crypto. :-/

ducksinhats 1y ago

>What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today? I can tell you down to the day how many bitcoin there will be decades from now. Can you do the same for any fiat currency for next week? It offers stability and a mathematical escape from very fallible humans controlling monetary systems.

user_7832 1y ago
But what's the (inherent, or even otherwise) benefit of this?
- torbid 1y ago
  If the goal is to hoard a currency itself instead of use it as the exchange between real investments then this makes perfect sense, but those people shouldn't be upset when we tell them we don't directly accept their "currency". This sentiment models a correction to a complaint I first heard with people who tell us everything fell apart since we ended the gold standard. They ignore that we raised all boats rapidly when we didn't pin everything to governments ability to fight gold hoarders for small amounts of gold entering the market. Even gold hoarders are better off in terms of what the market has created to exchange for their gold because that exchange ceased to be limiting on market expansion. One could say the US economy was exponential both before and after the currency change, but as with Moore's Law, it gets harder to remain exponential if as few as one limiting factor is emerging.
josephg 1y ago
> It offers stability Hahaha what? Bitcoin has insane volatility.
lolc 1y ago
Funny thing is, we don't know how many keys are lost. They say it's deflationary, and I say it's deflating to zero through key attrition. And people pay for burning electricity meanwhile. Weird game.
- kragen 1y ago

ur-whale 1y ago

> What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today? I fully agree that Bitcoin did not become what it was originally built for (a currency system for the internet), and as a matter of fact, for very valid reasons: - custody is really hard, and damn near impossible for most people, including people who like to think of themselves techies and who all end up getting caught with their pants down when exchanges get hacked because they forgot the number one tenet of Bitcoin. Please repeat the mantra after me: Not Your Keys, Not Your coins. - the 10mn confirm thing is a pain for small, casual transactions - scalability (it won't and was never designed do what eg VISA can do in terms of TX/second) - most people are downright horrified when they realize the non-reversibility aspect - most people don't understand what money actually is and hot it works in the first place, so seeing the advantage of BTC is damn near impossible - etc... HOWEVER: that absolutely does not mean that Bitcoin isn't amazing and useful. Bitcoin has simply become something else entirely, a kind of financial instrument that had no equivalent up until now and which has turned out to be profoundly useful to a very large class of people (go ask USA - one of the country with the worse divorce laws on the planet - men in the middle of divorce proceeding for their opinion on the topic of assets that can't be confiscated). Oh and yes, I already hear the shouts from the back of the room: skirting the law!drug dealers! criminals! cyber-ransoms! Won't you think of the children!. One single word to counter this argument: there is thing called the USD which is used for the exact same thing as all the above "use cases" (and worse, like toppling foreign governments) and has never been considered evil for some reason. I do understand and feel for folks who looked forward o Bitcoin as a replacement for the dollar, lubricating internet commerce and why they are disappointed. I was one of them and it took me a long time to understand what Bitcoin actually was. However, if you fall in the category of the disillusioned, please consider: something else will come around to solve the problem of internet currency. It won't be Bitcoin. It maybe layer two stuff, who knows. But on the other hand, Bitcoin has become something extremely useful (and even without trying to analyze the why, the price is an inescapably clear proof of that). Its singular properties as a financial instrument make it something that no other thing in tradfi can boast having: - demonstrable finite supply, and therefore a rather predictable outcome on a long term timeline. - first mover advantage (aka network effect). Other cryptos might be better and get better all the time technically, might better for the environment, but at this point, displacing BTC in terms of mindset and allocated capital ... good luck - demonstrated long term hedge against inflation (it's been 15 years, and if you can afford to ignore volatility at the one year scale, it's undeniable). On that topic, I can't NOT post this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg - transactions are impossible to censor, be it by corps or sovereign entities (for me personally, the number one attractive trait, a basic unbreakable defensive guarantor of individual freedom). This goes from simply giving you a ton of actual leverage in e.g. a divorce, to being able to work your way around tyrannical governments (see the Canadian truckers who got all their bank accounts frozen for daring to disagree with the thugs in charge). - operates 24/7 trustlessly and outside any jurisdiction - quasi-instantaneous transmission of value across borders, geographies, distances, etc ... - pseudonymity and privacy. While not perfect in this regard, you neighbor could be a freaking multi-billionaire and you wouldn't have the first clue. - you can physically disappear and travel with *ALL* of your wealth at an instant notice. - it cannot be confiscated short of physically torturing the relevant information out of you. And even then, you can protect yourself by not knowing the full secret to accessing your BTC. And this assume people know you have them. - etc ... the list is long TL;DR: Bitcoin won't replace Paypal, and that's actually a good thing. It has become an entirely different beast, probably as, if not more, useful than what it was designed for originally, specifically when it comes to being a tool that protects individual freedom against the excesses of the group.

gexla 1y ago

This! I was around looking for alternative "currencies" before Bitcoin even existed. But they were flawed,because they (such as Libertycoin) were shady centralized systems. Each of them were shut down by the US government. Bitcoin would have been the answer, but I lost interest before it became a thing (or it was already a thing and I somehow never come across it, because I never saw it as an accepted option.) This would have appealed to my geek nature. But I think I would have still lost interest in it after finding that Bitcoin also wasn't the answer due to difficulty in spending it. I likely would have cashed out at like $5 per coin to buy a bunch of pizzas.

Spacecosmonaut 1y ago

Bitcoin is the only immutable peer to peer system ever created (barring advances in quantum computing, and even then the protocol can be updated). In a world headed toward web 3.0, generative AI content & virtual reality, I think there is tremendous value in a trustless and immutable peer to peer system. In fact, I think we NEED it, and should as a society happily bear the power consumption that underpins the security of the network. Controversial, I know. However, already we cannot trust that a digital picture is genuine. There is currently no solution to this problem. In the near future, I imagine that the raw data of your camera will be associated with a token on a blockchain (not bitcoin, but a dedicated high-capacity blockchain). Such a system would allow us to determine that a picture was indeed taken with a physical device, and thus that the events depicted have a bearing in the real world. My bet is that we are headed toward a future where blockchain is ubiquitous. Where everything of value is underpinned by a specialized blockchain. When you order groceries, the origin of the produce and raw ingredients are all embedded in blockchain. In virtual reality, every digital product has a specialized blockchain. Every kind of transaction; compute, assets, AI, will all be underpinned by trustless peer to peer systems. All these specialized blockchains trade security for throughput. My bet is that Bitcoin will act as a security guarantor in our future digital society, where the state of every blockchain is periodically validated on the Bitcoin network. Thus, I bet that every transaction in the future will have an associated Bitcoin cost. Thats why I own a small amount of Bitcoin.

PartiallyTyped 1y ago
Bitcoin is not trustless. It has as much value as the collective trust in it. Once that trust disappears, the value tanks. Reality is that you can’t bootstrap trust.
- FabHK 1y ago
  Not to mention the fact that you can hold Bitcoin trustlessly, and you can transfer it to someone else trustlessly, but then you have to trust that they send to you in return what they promised. See Goharshady, Amir Kafshdar: Irrationality, Extortion, or Trusted Third-Parties: Why It Is Impossible to Buy and Sell Physical Goods Securely on the Blockchain. arXiv:2110.09857, arXiv, 19 Oct. 2021. arXiv.org, http://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09857 http://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09857.

p3rls 1y ago

Facilitates scams and has set consumer web tech back a few years, but other than that not much.

sarbanharble 1y ago

The only answer that makes sense to me is this: BitCoin is a scam started by the oil industry as a way to tie currency to exponentially hungry power consumption.

mancerayder 1y ago

Potential? I am trying to buy a property, and I've been moving money around to prepare for a down payment. It's July 4th weekend. I initiated some moves in the afternoon of July 3. But an ACH transaction in the U.S. takes "1-3 business days." First of all, why "1-3" and not "1" or "3" or "2"? Secondly, why business days? I get paged at night and on the weekend if something breaks at work, but the banking laws or customs say that computers only move my money 9-5 during holidays? Computers are taking non-human-holidays? I don't get it. If bitcoin won't disrupt this, something else should. I have been trading it weekly/monthly really simply, and it's a few K a month of profit. So I think it's useless at the moment other than as a scheme to gamble. I think there's a bit of a trust issue.

yladiz 1y ago
This is a US issue. In the EU you can do an instant bank transfer below a certain amount at any time, for free (after they mandated the fees away recently), and many other countries have systems that allow instant bank transfers. You don’t need a completely different way of dealing with money to get improvements to the current system.
- mancerayder 1y ago
  Fair point. I don't know how many years we were behind the rest of the civilized world in terms of having chips on our credit/debit cards. And we still have the magnetic strip. Well, we also use "feet" and "cups" instead of base 10 measurement system.
southernplaces7 1y ago
>I have been trading it weekly/monthly really simply, and it's a few K a month of profit. What sort of tactics or strategy do you use to trade it for a consistent profit? I assume you're referring to bitcoin here. Also, the banking hours thing is absurd, and way too common not only with banks but also some online payments processors, like, for example, the utter dumpster fire, parasitic garbage company that is Paypal. Dealing with that one alone (and with banks in certain contexts) alone makes one fully sympathize with so much of what crypto is supposed to (and to a pretty decent degree does) offer.

ost-ing 1y ago

The value is in the network itself. Lots of people think that its the digital tokens or coins that have value, but its the system as a whole. The value is also in the “need”. Corporate treasuries need a way to store wealth that doesn't inflate over time, gold inflates 2% per year, bitcoin 0% - so it fills an institutional need

al_borland 1y ago
Does Bitcoin still fit this need with the volatility Bitcoin sees? Do corporations really want to put their stored value it something so unpredictable?
- ost-ing 1y ago
  Whats been shown is that if you hold bitcoin for 4 years or longer the investment has performed very well and significantly outperformed the S&P. Companies buying billions worth of bitcoin are thinking strategically about it, they arent retail investors who panic sell after a few months

lproven 1y ago

> What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today? An unrivalled opportunity to fleece the gullible, and for criminals to move assets around without law enforcement supervision. That's about it. The three categories of users are hopeful fools, criminals, and scammers. Of course, membership of any one group does not preclude membership of the others, and some are all 3.