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> Understanding the trend towards Bitcoin usage is less in understanding the caveats developer Amir Takki employs: i.e. “a pure form of money with a mathematic
by altoz 13y ago
> Understanding the trend towards Bitcoin usage is less in
understanding the caveats developer Amir Takki employs:
i.e. “a pure form of money with a mathematical basis,” and
more about the social behaviours of those playing the
system, those employing the mechanics of scarcity for
leverage.
Ugh, I hate these sort of comments. It's as if bitcoin is only an exercise in speculate supply and demand. People, there is a huge network and protocol that's behind this thing! It's not just about the currency everyone's trading, it's about the underlying network! There's a distributed registry that anyone can look up. There's a source of truth for every single bitcoin (and future uses thereof) in existence. There's a reason network difficulty trends with price.
No, bitcoin is NOT just a bunch of traders trading and no, that's not what's going to give you an understanding bitcoin. That's like saying that understanding how a computer works is just by watching the monitor. There's an underlying fundamental, dare I say, intrinsic value to bitcoin that gets ignored by almost everyone fixated on bitcoin the currency's price when the real interesting thing is in bitcoin the protocol.
- scotty79 13y agoBitocoin protocol is just a tool for guaranteeing scarcity and transferability. Better tool than ever existed. Better tool than government assurances that are basis of the value of fiat currencies.
- altoz 13y agoI wouldn't say "just a tool". It's an enormously powerful tool that has backups everywhere, is not corruptible without at least 50% of the hashing power on the network, and has a consistent, decodable, verifiable format. No registry of deeds by the government, no bank vault and certainly no website has this level of security around transactions.
- chc 13y agoYour comment seems to be saying, essentially, "You are talking about X, but I would prefer it if you talked about Y, because I think that is more interesting." Another example would be, "You are talking about how to seamlessly add someone to a photo in Photoshop, but I would rather hear about how to optimize image algorithms for efficient cache usage, because I think that is more interesting." This article is talking about Bitcoin as a commodity and a currency, which are actual use cases for it. I agree that the Bitcoin protocol is interesting, but to demand that people only talk about the protocol and not Bitcoins themselves seems a bit restrictive to me.
- altoz 13y agoThe author specifically claims that to understand bitcoin usage, you only need to look at the trading activity. That is what I'm disputing. No, you can't understand bitcoin usage without actually understanding the protocol. In your analogy, it would be someone saying that you can understand Photoshop by looking at how people use the resulting pictures. It's nonsense and that's what I'm disputing.
- chc 13y agoThe actual phrase the author uses is "Understanding the trend in Bitcoin usage." Why is it necessary to understand the protocol to understand high-level trends like "More people are investing in Bitcoins"?
- johnwyles 13y agoI actually think what he meant is that Bitcoin is valuable from the network that stands behind it and all the tools, websites, and services that have sprung up around it. In addition to all of that you also have the actual rules of the bitcoin system ("protocol"), which of course is interesting from a technical / mathematical standpoint, but also setup a structure and ecosystem that may (or may not) have long term staying power until the next and more sophisticated cryptocurrency comes along.