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The first Bitcoin post on HN
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- onebaddude 13y ago>Over the last two weeks especially, many in the upper echelons of international finance are moving into the bitcoin space in a mich bigger way than they had before. Do you have a source for this? I haven't heard of any major hedge funds buying bitcoin. It's still considered quaint in the internet circles I frequent.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- shocks 13y agoHindsight is 20/20 [1]. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- Semaphor 13y agoA lot of people link there but it always looked to me like the response he got was overwhelmingly positive.
- colinbartlett 13y agoActually, I didn't like Dropbox then and I still don't like it. I wonder how many people who make bold public statements about things ever change their mind? Or if they just become entrenched in their opinions.
- astrodust 13y agoWhy not? What's not to like? As far as a hosted shared drive goes, Dropbox does a great job.
- galapago 13y agoYou need to install propietary software to use it.
- astrodust 13y agoI've never done that, I just use the browser.
- j_s 13y agoI use Dropbox as a glorified large email attachment distribution system, touching only the web interface. Edit: obviously not clear enough, I'll try again: Is it true that 'You need to install propietary software to use it'? No.
- dublinben 13y agoThe web interface is proprietary too.
- sejje 13y agoWhich is largely irrelevant to the claim of "forced proprietary software install."
- asadlionpk 13y agoI don't get what you mean, but you can use their API to make your own front end.
- galapago 13y agoI was wrong, and you were right. You don't need to install it but you will probably want it if you to take advantage of the full potential of Dropbox.
- tomasien 13y agojdoliner's comment is a good reminder to forget the haters
- filipedeschamps 13y agoAmen to that!
- kamjam 13y agoJust because someone expresses skepticism that makes them a hater?
- tomasien 13y agoSkepticism is different from hating, absolutely, but the user didn't say they were skeptical - they said there was "no way". That's hating and you have to ignore it - skepticism and critical feedback you value, treasure, and seek out.
- DigitalJack 13y agoIt's a just a firm opinion.
- tomasien 13y agoNo, it's a haters opinion. Being a hater doesn't make you a terrible person or mean you can't or shouldn't be allowed to have opinions, it just means you're a hater and your opinions should be ignored.
- kamjam 13y agoStill doesn't make them a hater, at least not from the way I would use the term. A "doubter" maybe. By your definition all the Dragons Den are haters, because they say no way? Regardless, i'm sure if you looked through anybody's comments in HN (including your own) then there is bound to be one that dismisses the next best thing as "no way this will work". Difference here, it's on a post with only 2 comments. If this had made it to the frontpage of HN then that comment would have been buried so deep no one would have batted an eye-lid.
- lcasela 13y ago>Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency. Hah!
- marvin 13y agoPeople should be required to place a monetary bet whenever they make a bold claim in public. I think we would see less comments like this one.
- joosters 13y agoFor all we know, the comment might be proven right next week/month/year. It's just right now that it's plainly wrong. How much is your monetary bet then?
- smtddr 13y agoWhich brings us to an interesting question... how long does something have to go before we consider it a success even if it fails later? When something comes along to defeat Facebook, are we going to call Facebook a failure? Was Myspace a failure?[1] The fact that Bitcoin has ran this long, given some huge payouts and legit(albeit small) businesses accept it as payment, I'm almost ready to call bitcoin a success even if it fails 6 months from now. 1. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/aug/13/observerreview.onlinesupplement http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/aug/13/observerre... Myspace listed among the top 15 most influential sites.
- nutate 13y agoTelegraph... colossal fail. But note that the first wire transfers in 1871 were done on western union's telegraph system. Yours is an interesting question. The tulip mania bubble people like to reference was less than a year long, so BTC is already beating that.
- joosters 13y agoAnd if/when it fails, Bitcoin can reasonably claim to have shown that distributed computer-based currencies are feasible and people will use them. Even if a successor comes along and solves Bitcoin's problems, you could justifiably say that it only succeeded because of Bitcoin.
- techprotocol 13y agoHow many people had the slightest clue that books would be replaced by Kindles, CDs by iPODs, tablets selling as much as laptops. The comments show that people underestimated the impact bitcoin would make. I still believe its just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Bitcoin.
- kamjam 13y agoTechnically true, but we still have the governments to weigh in and try to crush this. Unless they can monetize from BitCoin, they will find a way to kill it - blaming it on funding organized crime and terrorism. "Real world" currency is just too important for them to loose control of it.
- pjc50 13y agoI've actually changed from thinking "financial services law will destroy this" to "this will become like the War On Drugs: ubiquitous illegality, especially evasion of exchange controls, witholding taxes, and foreign income reporting requirements".
- alskdjfhg 13y agoYesterday's congressional hearing made me surer than ever that bitcoin is actually an FBI/ CIA/ NSA/ whoever -made honeypot. Think about it. Bitcoin is robust enough that it could have only been developed with the resources offered by a government, the currency records all transaction histories, and we still have absolutely no idea of who this Satoshi Nakamoto guy is, assuming he's not some government taskforce. Didn't it strike anybody as odd that the same congress and government that normally takes an extreme luddite stance was so enthusiastic about Bitcoin? They can hardly wrap their heads around things like Google Glass and net neutrality, and yet they're absolutely pandering over Bitcoin. Something isn't right here.
- dublinben 13y agoI think it makes perfect sense if the government types think they can apply all the existing laws to Bitcoin transactions. Money laundering, tax evasion, fraud, theft, etc. are all still illegal, even if you use Bitcoin to carry them out.
- cs702 13y agoThat four-year-old submission has just two comments: one expressing doubt, one expressing optimism. Interestingly, despite growing worldwide adoption of Bitcoin, comments about it on HN continue to be more or less evenly split between doubters and optimists. And I wouldn't be surprised if comments to this submission are evenly split between those same two camps. No amount of evidence or reasoning seems to persuade either camp to change its views!
- antr 13y agoand one [dead] comment: ram1024 1655 days ago | link [dead] | fold i'm having trouble wrapping my head around the logistics of this...
- baby 13y agoit looks like a spam comment.
- mtrimpe 13y agoNot really: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ram1024 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ram1024
- coherentpony 13y agoHis comments seem entirely reasonable to me. Why are they all grey?
- chops 13y agoHe is definitely Hellbanned. He made a poor-taste attempt at humor on a mental health post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=407576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=407576) which was voted to oblivion, and every post since then is [dead]. Looks like it took him a few months to find it (I had to go back like 10 "more" clicks to get to his non-dead posts).
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- josephagoss 13y agoIt just shows that many people are quick to be negative and for some reason unwilling to consider alternative possibilities. Remember that negative and critical viewpoints are normally perceived to be from the the more intelligent person. Unfortunately people who are more accepting of new and novel ideas can at first seem like the less intelligent of the group. (Probably because they are not quick to dismiss and put down a thing, and thus have less to say at first glance) The only solution is to think for yourselves and research the positions presented.
- sz4kerto 13y agoIt just shows that many people think that if somebody won the lottery then his strategy is good, and the others are less clever. If you see what I mean. (Should I give you a much-much longer list of posts where people expressed their doubt and eventually they were right?)
- baby 13y ago> many people many people ? Are you generalizing over a single post ?
- josephagoss 13y agoIt's a thing I have noticed in intelligent forums such as HN and also in real life.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- vinhboy 13y agoIt's really not fair to dig these things up and call people haters for doubting it. I bet the list of failed companies and "haters" who called it accurately is much much bigger. Although I do like the nostalgic value of these posts.
- Sambdala 13y agoIt's really easy to be right >90% of the time, if 100% of the time you predict a new technology will fail.
- Luc 13y agoThere's hedge funds that systematically short biotech companies, since they estimate most of them will fail. Reasoning with them about the merits of the company doesn't work, they just admit it's a matter of statistics.
- herge 13y agoNo, it's just a question of selling them these shorts and greatfully profiting from it when the merits of the company pan out on the market.
- xixi77 13y agoAssuming that "most of them would fail" has little to do with this investment strategy being good or bad. Venture capitalists also assume that most of the companies they fund would fail. What the hedge funds you are talking about assume is that investors in biotech companies value them more than they are worth. It may sound similar to what you said, but really is a very different assumption.
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- crassus 13y agoBitcoin could revolutionize the foundation of the world's economy with a piece of software some guy wrote in a few months. You'd figure that would be the kind of thing that hackers would get excited about, as opposed to social-sharing startups (which are just a replacement for reality TV)
- hardwaresofton 13y ago'always be naysaying' is the mantra of about 80% of HNers
- vitalique 13y agoWell, yeah, but more like 97,89%, from what I gather. From time to time I fancy this idea of toying with some NLP package to calculate percentage of the HN comments that go like "Yes, but no", "Cool, but meh" or "Sure, but no way". Oh wait, what did I just do?
- notahacker 13y agoThe ~97% of comments that are "nice idea but..." is probably not far off the percentage of nice ideas discussed on her whose implementations don't quite work out :)
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- r3m6 13y agoOne of my favorite quotes (forgot by whom): " Great ideas are fragile at birth because they are indistinguishable from crazy stupid ideas."
- plainOldText 13y agoYeah, I think the lesson I've learned from not embracing Bitcoin sooner, is that I should spend more time analyzing a novel idea, and not be dismissive of one that might seem crazy initially. However, with all the information flow these days, it's kinda hard, but sure worth the effort.
- bottled_poe 13y agoEspecially when the stupid ideas far outnumber the great ones. But hey, if you think you have excellent judgment, perhaps it is worth your time.
- rheide 13y agoThis one has a more interesting discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1532670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1532670
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- applecore 13y agoHere's the first popular post (with 20+ comments) referencing Bitcoin on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1532670 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1532670 - Bitcoin P2P Cryptocurrency | 1217 days ago | 24 comments Some other early, popular posts about Bitcoin: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1942708 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1942708 - Imagine your computer as a wallet full of Bitcoins| 1088 days ago | 36 comments http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1998144 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1998144 - How to Get Started with Bitcoins | 1072 days ago | 47 comments
- easy_rider 13y agoI love the comments by illumin8 in that first one. It describes the seemingly only legitimate threat at the moment for the future of BitCoin (long term). I'm suspect that governments are now probably more interested in the 'monitoring' of the system rather than governing. In the case of Silk Road, feds seem to have done their homework when it comes to tracking down the money. But they cracked down SR, and BitCoin dipped slightly, and the crackdown actually seemed to boost confidence in the currency. There are points to be made I think that governing entities would want to keep a system like BC alive (for a while), solely because it would be used as probable platform for money laundering. However if indeed, they are not confident that they can track down on money, or will be able to in the future, they would surely want to shut down BTC as soon as possible. In the age of the war on terrorism, organized crime syndicates and drug cartels. One could think of many reasons to give when opting for that solution. I might be considered a conspiracy nut: But "decentralized, anonymous, crypto" + "currency" sounds like a contradictio in terminis to me. Especially the "anonymous" part.
- zymhan 13y agoIt may sound like a contradiction to you, but that certainly doesn't mean that anonymous currency has to be a contradiction.
- jpadkins 13y agoone of those posts got me started on bitcoin. I mined like ~30 BTC off my laptop GPU and then forgot about them. Thanks HN!
- neotrinity 13y agoI quite liked the polarity of the 2 comments in the post .. Hence I posted it !
- khawkins 13y agojdoliner's comment is interesting, because it's almost true. At the time, hardly anyone could find faith in the currency. But what he failed to understand that if "someone" could find faith in the currency, then others would follow. It's an interesting property of markets that they can seemingly boostrap themselves, just so long as there is support during the initial growth stage. You don't have to believe in Bitcoins to trade in them, you just have to believe someone wants them. This might be why black markets and transaction privacy are so essential to making the currency work. Since there are a large number of people who need to make their payments private, the rest of the market believes that the currency has intrinsic value in its exclusivity in certain transactions.
- sidcool 13y agoIf the vice president of ReThink DB could be wrong, I have all the liberty to make 100s of mistakes
- kamjam 13y agoMake as many mistakes as you want, it didn't kill anyone (or yourself) and you can only learn from those mistakes. The only person that I know that is always right is my wife.
- singold 13y agoI hope, chaostheory doesn't have something related to Tor hidden services posted anywhere on the internet :P
- pinaceae 13y agoand let's revisit this discussion 5 years from now. right now there is so much fluctutation within BC it might as well be tulips. maybe it will become a stable currency, maybe it won't.
- mpg33 13y agoHate when people use the tulips comparison. The basic protocol of bitcoin that allows people to send value anywhere in the world and solves the double spend problem must have some value unto itself. I don't know it's worth $0.10, $100, or $1000000 per bitcoin to use the protocol but to compare it to a plant seems kinda ridiculous.
- g8oz 13y agoBut those attributes can be replicated by another crypto-currency right? So the distinct edge of both bitcoins and tulips are the maddened crowds. They have that in common.
- andrewla 13y agoThis is actually a really good point that I don't feel has been adequately answered -- usually people say something like "well, bitcoin has momentum" or somesuch, which strikes me as being nonsense if you accept the idea of why bitcoins have value as being an intrinsic property related to their fungibility, scarcity, and non-consumability; in theory the same things that give all currencies their value. The only explanation I've come up with that sounds plausible is that a new currency, even just Bitcoin with a different genesis block, should be as valuable as Bitcoins, but fails the test of scarcity -- it's too easy to counterfeit them by double-spend attacks because of the smaller power of the network. I don't trust this idea, though -- it smacks of post-hoc reasoning. I guess by extension the value of a proof-of-work-backed currency in aggregate should be bounded by the expected cost of a 51% attack given rational actors; doing this math for the Bitcoin network would either give strong evidence that the current pricing is irrational or weak evidence that it is rational.
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- jcfrei 13y agoI was relieved to see I hadn't even joined HN at that time.
- steven2012 13y agoCan someone explain how the idea that every single transaction has to be stored in the ledger is scalable? Won't wider adoption mean that the ledger grows even quicker, to the point where it makes using btc harder and harder?
- walden42 13y agoTechnology evolves over time as does bitcoin's use. Hard drives are becoming cheaper and cheaper, for example. Bandwidth is also a non-issue, as the typical transaction size is less than a KB. However, there's also the fact that a typical user doesn't have to download the whole blockchain in order to use bitcoins--they'll be connected to the nodes that do (that are dedicated for that purpose).
- kaoD 13y agoThere are plans to implement Merkle tree pruning. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability#Storage https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability#Storage
- pg 13y agoHow much money would you have made if you'd bought $1000 worth of bitcoin on that day?
- jeffasinger 13y agoThis was posted in May 2009. On October 5th, 2009, $1 = 1,309.03 BTC [1], so you'd have bought about 1.3 million bitcoin. Which means you'd have over $500M dollars in Bitcoin. I bet that spending $1000 back then would have considerably changed the exchange rate though, and selling $500M now would definitely aversely affect the economy. 1: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/History https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/History
- cfinke 13y agoso you'd have bought about 1.3 million bitcoin There weren't even 1.3 million bitcoin in circulation at that point [1]. If you bought every bitcoin, you could have accumulated about 1.1 million BTC for $850. [1] http://blockchain.info/charts/total-bitcoins?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address= http://blockchain.info/charts/total-bitcoins?timespan=all&sh...
- antocv 13y agoWeird, and people are now paying close to that 850usd just for 1 coin. However, if someone had bought coints for even 100usd back in 2010 that would have been weird too and affected the network perhaps a little too negatively.
- eru 13y agoNot positively?
- Steko 13y agoI see claims like this all the time but it's important to realize that the price you can buy a small amount of something is generally the lowest price any seller will take, not a price all sellers will take.
- tlrobinson 13y agoI'd like to see a "where are they now" of the commenters' views on Bitcoin.
- crystaln 13y agoLikely the best investment opportunity ever posted on HN, possibly in the history of the world, for simple buy/mine and hold ROI.
- GeneralMayhem 13y ago~40,000,000% profit over 4 years? Yeah, not too shabby.
- ghostdiver 13y agoPerhaps it was posted during wrong time of the day or was crowd power pointed to front page. It is also possible that people here on HN do not have enough intuition about ideas, which could possibly change the world just like bitcoin is doing it right now. It's fun to read retrospective posts here on HN, but apparently innovation starts elsewhere..
- infra178 13y ago> jdoliner 1655 days ago | link >Well this is an exceptionally cute idea, but there is absolutely no way that anyone is going to have any faith in this currency. > joedoliner.com jdoliner@gmail.com https://twitter.com/jdoliner https://twitter.com/jdoliner
- BlackDeath3 13y agoGood idea. We really need to make sure that everybody is forever held accountable for everything that they ever say online. I like where that's going.
- neotrinity 13y agoThat never was my intention when I posted this .. Like I said, I quite liked the polarity of the comments and the fact that it was the first post on bitcoin in HN .. But it snow-balled into this !
- nulltype 13y agojdoliner just walked over to me and told me how he was laughing along with everyone else at this guy who posted on the first HN bitcoin post until he realized it was him.
- neotrinity 13y agoLolz ...! No offence meant though ... I can only imagine ...
- pearjuice 13y ago"Why did you buy a bitcoin?" "Because I don't want to enter too late!" The absolute problem with bitcoin is, is that it cannot be used as a currency. If one bitcoin can buy you one "x" today, two "x" tomorrow and in a week only half an "x", what is the point of spending it? Its value fluctuates way too much and that's why so many people are getting on board. They want to be in the elevation towards another all time high. I am not saying that Bitcoin does not have a future, but key in this future is that all those investors and startups on the get-rich-quick-with-a-very-high-potential-to-loose-a-lot-scheme have to abandon ship. The value of Bitcoin has to stabilize because at this point it is not a viable currency. Currently it is just an asset so many people are interested in, which drives the price only further up. As soon as it stabilizes or drops we will see what it will d o with Bitcoin its popularity and acceptance for other goods and services.
- DevX101 13y agoWhen don't you spend all of your USD money today since inflation will make it worth less tomorrow?
- thesimpsons1022 13y agoto be fair, that comparison isn't too valid. Look at the wild yearly fluctuations in bitcoin, compared to the steady rate(3 percent) of inflation of the dollar throughout history. On the other hand, OP is wrong because bitcoins will eventually slow down massively in production(almost to a halt) and stabilize at that point.
- pearjuice 13y ago>OP is wrong because bitcoins will eventually slow down massively in production(almost to a halt) and stabilize at that point Eh, quite the contrary. If this rate of growth continues and production becomes 0, it will not stabilize at all because demand increases yet supply stays constant. Which results in the existing supply getting worth even more. This will make it an hoarded asset even more still not able to function as a currency as fluctuation will still be too drastic.
- chaostheory 13y agofunny - I don't remember posting it
- conformal 13y agohah. nice try, satoshi!
- shashwatak 13y agoI could be so rich right now. I missed the bus completely on this one.
- ye 13y agoYou haven't. Various estimates for the future BTC value range from $2,000 to $1,000,000.
- totti 13y agoI don't know about you guys but I found this really motivational.
- dschiptsov 13y agoVery telling, a reply of a sceptic and of a dreamer, everyone else just ignored. I wish I could be such a dreamer, capable to understand the idea and its potential and have a bit of drive and courage to give it a try.
- BrokenPipe 13y agoMark my words: The US regulators will do to Bitcoin what they have done to the Internet ecommerce, i.e. providing strong incentives like reduced taxes and simplified rules. There are plenty of new bitcoin merchant and users every day and the USA won't stand while the rest of the world adopts THE next store of value/currency/commodity/new category.
- sireat 13y agoWhat google-fu did you use to find the first post on bitcoin on HN? I am asking, because I tried to find the first post on reddit.com (obviously before /r/bitcoin was created) and couldn't really retrieve anything useful. I was searching by date ranges on site:reddit.com and was getting user profiles not posts.