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A comment on Ask HN: What was impossible earlier that is easy in the BTC and ETH blockchains?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What was impossible earlier that is easy in the B... by ilikebits on Friday June 30, 2017 @01:47PM (#14672406)
I think their intrinsic value is backed by their usefulness as a medium of exchange for the use cases described in the parent comment. Solving the crypto problem seems more like something that makes them useful for exchanging.
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Re:Ask HN: What was impossible earlier that is easy in the B... by pmiller2 on Friday June 30, 2017 @01:50PM (#14672431)
Solving the crypto problem is just part of the mechanism that ensures there's a limited supply of them. We could do the same thing by randomly assigning floating point numbers between 0 and 2.1x10^10 - 1 (corresponding to the 21M BTC that are ever allowed to exist).

The part that makes BTC relatively safe to transact with is the blockchain itself.

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