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Bitcoin has also died over 70 times- http://bitcoinobituaries.com http://bitcoinobituaries.com so maybe it's not a bitcoin community problem but just journalist

by drcross 11y ago

Bitcoin has also died over 70 times- http://bitcoinobituaries.com http://bitcoinobituaries.com so maybe it's not a bitcoin community problem but just journalists creating linkbait.

sanswork 11y ago
Have you ever read through that list? Most of them don't say it has died they say it is dying. Given the amount of investment, the number of new services, and the publicity it has received over the past 2 years the complete lack of interest from the general public says it probably is. Will it disappear anytime soon? Not a chance. Is it past its peak? Did it miss its chance at mainstream success? Quite possibly.
- IkmoIkmo 11y ago
  > Is it past its peak? Did it miss its chance at mainstream success? Quite possibly. Quite possibly but it's too soon to tell. The fact is that price isn't always the best proxy for success. More people using it, more companies getting involved etc, can be more important. When we look at price historically we can find strange things like the price being a fraction of a dollar (some 70 cents or so) in April in 2011. Only a few months later, in June 2011, the price was $30. And then it collapsed that very same year and the price dropped to $2, a few times more than it was earlier, but far from the peak. It'd have been pretty myopic to then conclude that bitcoin was past its peak, even though in the short term it was, having lost more than 90% of its value at peak. It'd also have been wrong to say it missed its chance at mainstream success. Today the price is an order of magnitude larger, and users, usage and involvement with mainstream (large) companies has grown even more. So again, it's quite possible, but I think too soon to tell. As for the lack of interest from the general public... I think bitcoin at its core is a utility, like you could say the internet is. The internet is extremely uninteresting to people, very few get it, nobody is excited about it. But the web is huge, as is emailing and skype and netflix. That's completely different from the Internet though, the boring platform/utility/infrastructure that supports it. I can't blame someone not being interested in bitcoin. But internet of things having digital wallets and doing payments, contracts, deeds etc on the bitcoin ledger, where all the consumer sees is that it 'just works', that's interesting. It's up to companies then to build ontop of bitcoin, and there is tons of interest from companies, both startups and traditional (tech) companies. Which means it's not very surprising to see companies and VCs get excited, but the general public not, in the same way that few got excited about the Internet, but Internet entrepreneurs did, who built companies like Amazon or Skype that people did get excited about. The fact that bitcoin couldn't start out like that and had to grow based on a small amount of fanatics looking to avoid the dollar/euro/etc and live on a new currency is probably a great source of distraction from the larger point of bitcoin as a platform, as it reduces bitcoin to being a currency used to shop online and not many feel like doing that, making it look as there is no interest from the general public and nobody will ever use it etc.
  - sanswork 11y ago
    What I see in the bitcoin space is the participants constantly trying to find a reason for its use. Payments - It isn't actually a better experience for customers so it is failing against the incumbents. The only play it is better is DNMs. Store of Value - It is extremely risky so the only people pushing this are ones that are already bought in and figure hoarding is the only thing that will drive the prices back up Sharing money between friends - Venmo and friends far and away destroy bitcoin in this use case. Remittance - Has potential but all the companies so far are basically saving money by skirting money transfer laws and using other peoples services. That isn't sustainable. The expensive part of remittances has never been the movement of value. They are also all extremely secretive about their numbers which makes me suspicious since their reasons given are extremely week. Micropayments - Bitcoin sucks for micropayments so every solution for this is basically an off chain system. Soon enough they will discover that all the other micropayments services shut down because the demand for micropayments is non-existent Data Storage - We're seeing this one more and more. The problem is all the things people are trying to do still require third party validation and registration(shareholders and landholders need to be identifiable and someone needs to verify that information). I don't see this panning out in any big way. Communications protocols - This is another big one. With the 21 announcement everyone and their dog is talking about how the blockchain will allow devices to communicate without needing to agree on a protocol. But they are ignoring the fact that in that use case the blockchain is a medium not a protocol so there would still need to be an agreed protocol on top and if you're going to do that might as well just centralize it or use private APIs. Did I miss any? Bitcoin people also love to compare it to the early internet but the existence of the internet itself makes that comparison weak since the internet has massively sped up the distribution of information and technologies. They then say that its different because it involves money but look at the early Paypal growth. It wasn't like getting people to use their credit cards online was easy in 2000.
    - ikeboy 11y ago
      You missed anti-censorship. Many controversial entities have been banned from traditional funding sources (see wikileaks, mega, etc.)
- celticninja 11y ago
  im not sure that it will ever result in huge interest from the general public, I also dont think it needs to. Bitcoin/Blockchain has multiple potential uses for business, it is business adoption that will succeed and general public use will be indirect. In the same way that people dont care/realise/understand that the internet protocol allows them to shop online, bank online, watch mvoies etc, bitcoin will be able to underpin financial and contractual exchanges online. End users will not know how it ocurs just that the system works, the businesses behind it will be the ones interacting with the bitcoin.
  - sanswork 11y ago
    The thing is there is almost no use case there where using the blockchain adds any improvement over the existing solutions and it comes with a large cost. Most companies/banks don't care/are comfortable with centralization so decentralization for the sake of it isn't a great sell. There is a lot of room for improvement in traditional banking but bitcoin doesn't really solve those problems.
    - yuddil 11y ago
      I think the only real advantage Bitcoin has is as a proxy currency for illegal online financial transactions - ones where you'd like to obtain some measure of anonymity. Of particular note, the darknet markets such as Silk Road and its ilk. Of course it requires the other side of Bitcoin, the hype and speculation, so users can easily convert to and from real money.
      - billions 11y ago
        Tell that to Argentinians. Inflation led their currency to bankruptcy 3 times in 100 years. When government moves cash out of constituents pockets directly into those of politicians, bitcoin is a practical alternative. Which third world currency would YOU rather hold over bitcoin?
        sanswork 11y ago
- markkat 11y ago
  Here are the number of bitcoin transactions per day: https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=7&show_header=true&scale=0&address= https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all&s... It seems to be increasing. Given that using BTC isn't useful unless someone else uses BTC (like email), the growth is impressive to me. I remember when the number of people I knew that had email addresses was very limited. It took about 10 years between me and my mother getting one.
  - sanswork 11y ago
    There are many ways number of transactions can increase without adoption increasing. Changing use cases can increase the number of transactions per user. https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-excluding-popular?showDataPoints=false&timespan=&show_header=true&daysAverageString=7&scale=0&address= https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-excluding-popu... Looks like there is about 10k transactions to popular addresses per day. https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-excluding-chains-longer-than-10?showDataPoints=false&timespan=&show_header=true&daysAverageString=7&scale=0&address= https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-excluding-chai... Chain transactions can't be completely discounted but as of yet no one has come up with their actual purpose and they really don't make sense other that inflating the transaction count. Once you subtract the above 10k to popular addresses that leaves you with about 20-25k actual transactions per day.
grubles 11y ago
Funny thought you brought that up. I say that because currently there is a "The Death Of Bitcoin" submission on the front page of HN.

by drcross 11y ago

Bitcoin has also died over 70 times- http://bitcoinobituaries.com http://bitcoinobituaries.com so maybe it's not a bitcoin community problem but just journalists creating linkbait.

sanswork 11y ago

Have you ever read through that list? Most of them don't say it has died they say it is dying. Given the amount of investment, the number of new services, and the publicity it has received over the past 2 years the complete lack of interest from the general public says it probably is. Will it disappear anytime soon? Not a chance. Is it past its peak? Did it miss its chance at mainstream success? Quite possibly.

IkmoIkmo 11y ago
> Is it past its peak? Did it miss its chance at mainstream success? Quite possibly. Quite possibly but it's too soon to tell. The fact is that price isn't always the best proxy for success. More people using it, more companies getting involved etc, can be more important. When we look at price historically we can find strange things like the price being a fraction of a dollar (some 70 cents or so) in April in 2011. Only a few months later, in June 2011, the price was $30. And then it collapsed that very same year and the price dropped to $2, a few times more than it was earlier, but far from the peak. It'd have been pretty myopic to then conclude that bitcoin was past its peak, even though in the short term it was, having lost more than 90% of its value at peak. It'd also have been wrong to say it missed its chance at mainstream success. Today the price is an order of magnitude larger, and users, usage and involvement with mainstream (large) companies has grown even more. So again, it's quite possible, but I think too soon to tell. As for the lack of interest from the general public... I think bitcoin at its core is a utility, like you could say the internet is. The internet is extremely uninteresting to people, very few get it, nobody is excited about it. But the web is huge, as is emailing and skype and netflix. That's completely different from the Internet though, the boring platform/utility/infrastructure that supports it. I can't blame someone not being interested in bitcoin. But internet of things having digital wallets and doing payments, contracts, deeds etc on the bitcoin ledger, where all the consumer sees is that it 'just works', that's interesting. It's up to companies then to build ontop of bitcoin, and there is tons of interest from companies, both startups and traditional (tech) companies. Which means it's not very surprising to see companies and VCs get excited, but the general public not, in the same way that few got excited about the Internet, but Internet entrepreneurs did, who built companies like Amazon or Skype that people did get excited about. The fact that bitcoin couldn't start out like that and had to grow based on a small amount of fanatics looking to avoid the dollar/euro/etc and live on a new currency is probably a great source of distraction from the larger point of bitcoin as a platform, as it reduces bitcoin to being a currency used to shop online and not many feel like doing that, making it look as there is no interest from the general public and nobody will ever use it etc.
- sanswork 11y ago
  What I see in the bitcoin space is the participants constantly trying to find a reason for its use. Payments - It isn't actually a better experience for customers so it is failing against the incumbents. The only play it is better is DNMs. Store of Value - It is extremely risky so the only people pushing this are ones that are already bought in and figure hoarding is the only thing that will drive the prices back up Sharing money between friends - Venmo and friends far and away destroy bitcoin in this use case. Remittance - Has potential but all the companies so far are basically saving money by skirting money transfer laws and using other peoples services. That isn't sustainable. The expensive part of remittances has never been the movement of value. They are also all extremely secretive about their numbers which makes me suspicious since their reasons given are extremely week. Micropayments - Bitcoin sucks for micropayments so every solution for this is basically an off chain system. Soon enough they will discover that all the other micropayments services shut down because the demand for micropayments is non-existent Data Storage - We're seeing this one more and more. The problem is all the things people are trying to do still require third party validation and registration(shareholders and landholders need to be identifiable and someone needs to verify that information). I don't see this panning out in any big way. Communications protocols - This is another big one. With the 21 announcement everyone and their dog is talking about how the blockchain will allow devices to communicate without needing to agree on a protocol. But they are ignoring the fact that in that use case the blockchain is a medium not a protocol so there would still need to be an agreed protocol on top and if you're going to do that might as well just centralize it or use private APIs. Did I miss any? Bitcoin people also love to compare it to the early internet but the existence of the internet itself makes that comparison weak since the internet has massively sped up the distribution of information and technologies. They then say that its different because it involves money but look at the early Paypal growth. It wasn't like getting people to use their credit cards online was easy in 2000.
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    You missed anti-censorship. Many controversial entities have been banned from traditional funding sources (see wikileaks, mega, etc.)
celticninja 11y ago
im not sure that it will ever result in huge interest from the general public, I also dont think it needs to. Bitcoin/Blockchain has multiple potential uses for business, it is business adoption that will succeed and general public use will be indirect. In the same way that people dont care/realise/understand that the internet protocol allows them to shop online, bank online, watch mvoies etc, bitcoin will be able to underpin financial and contractual exchanges online. End users will not know how it ocurs just that the system works, the businesses behind it will be the ones interacting with the bitcoin.
- sanswork 11y ago
  The thing is there is almost no use case there where using the blockchain adds any improvement over the existing solutions and it comes with a large cost. Most companies/banks don't care/are comfortable with centralization so decentralization for the sake of it isn't a great sell. There is a lot of room for improvement in traditional banking but bitcoin doesn't really solve those problems.
  - yuddil 11y ago
    I think the only real advantage Bitcoin has is as a proxy currency for illegal online financial transactions - ones where you'd like to obtain some measure of anonymity. Of particular note, the darknet markets such as Silk Road and its ilk. Of course it requires the other side of Bitcoin, the hype and speculation, so users can easily convert to and from real money.
    - billions 11y ago
      Tell that to Argentinians. Inflation led their currency to bankruptcy 3 times in 100 years. When government moves cash out of constituents pockets directly into those of politicians, bitcoin is a practical alternative. Which third world currency would YOU rather hold over bitcoin?
      - sanswork 11y ago
markkat 11y ago
Here are the number of bitcoin transactions per day: https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=7&show_header=true&scale=0&address= https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all&s... It seems to be increasing. Given that using BTC isn't useful unless someone else uses BTC (like email), the growth is impressive to me. I remember when the number of people I knew that had email addresses was very limited. It took about 10 years between me and my mother getting one.
- sanswork 11y ago
  There are many ways number of transactions can increase without adoption increasing. Changing use cases can increase the number of transactions per user. https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-excluding-popular?showDataPoints=false&timespan=&show_header=true&daysAverageString=7&scale=0&address= https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-excluding-popu... Looks like there is about 10k transactions to popular addresses per day. https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-excluding-chains-longer-than-10?showDataPoints=false&timespan=&show_header=true&daysAverageString=7&scale=0&address= https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-excluding-chai... Chain transactions can't be completely discounted but as of yet no one has come up with their actual purpose and they really don't make sense other that inflating the transaction count. Once you subtract the above 10k to popular addresses that leaves you with about 20-25k actual transactions per day.

grubles 11y ago

Funny thought you brought that up. I say that because currently there is a "The Death Of Bitcoin" submission on the front page of HN.