A new digital, internet-native asset with the greatest monetary properties in history is monetizing before your eyes; meanwhile you're relying on your understanding of an old world to convince yourself it doesn't matter and the people who see something deeply interesting are kooks.

It's very interesting that a large contingent of smart software people on HN heard about Bitcoin extremely early, said it was a useless failure, and then had to re-justify their position for a decade as Bitcoin marches on. It's impossible for anyone to claim Bitcoin has no value at this point, but on every blockchain post on HN there is a core of haters that will make the same tired arguments against it. Meanwhile, no one cares!

You'll never hear that quote about actually revolutionary technologies, because their revolutionary nature is immediately apparent, even if the economic case for the technology is not (at the time).

Cryptocurrency isn't revolutionary. There isn't any use case for cryptocurrency that wouldn't be easier to address with normal cash or credit payment. Cryptocurrency solves none of the actual problems in the current financial or banking systems but introduces a host of new problems that weren't issues in the old system. It's a solution in search of a problem.

I also used to be heavily involved in cryptocurrency, when it first started, and what I saw then is a large part of why I don't see any usefulness in cryptocurrency now and why I'm convinced that it will never replace any part of the financial system.

A lot has changed in 10 years. Crypto has gotten worse. Multiple exchanges were hacked, or turned out to be entirely fraudulent. Black markets came and went. ICOs for non-existent and useless products. The discovery that major participants in the system were manipulating coin values and were engaged in multiple types of financial fraud. The uptake of cryptocurrency as the primary means of paying ransoms to hackers who have encrypted your website, database, or computer. Facebook attempting to introduce its own cryptocurrency. The Bitcoin Craze where awareness of bitcoin hit the general public and the techies who got in first exploited the rubes for everything they were worth(and cryptocurrency industry's response to the criticism: they should have known better!?!? That tarnished all cryptocurrency in the eyes of the public and they learned to avoid all of it, not just Bitcoin. That on its own was a fatal blow to the uptake of cryptocurrency in general use, anywhere, and it was only a few months later that Bitcoin started getting removed from e-commerce sites).

All in all, I'm glad I got out when I did.

Yes, maybe the popularity of BTC will overcome the issues, but I doubt.

I recommend taking a look at something like https://bitcointreasuries.org/

And don't just glance at it - try asking some probing questions, like "What does this mean?" and "What might I be missing concerning the underlying dynamic at play?"

You can also try reading The Bitcoin Standard for a good analysis of the dynamics and history of competition between different forms of money - the central thesis being: History has shown that you can't protect yourself from someone else holding money that's harder (better) than yours. Bitcoin is better money than anything else we have or have ever had.

That's not how money works, if by money you mean a currency. Currencies are issued by sovereign governments, and don't exhibit network effects within that sovereign jurisdiction, because they don't need to. They're legal tender; you're required to accept them, and everyone needs them to pay taxes.

If you mean money as in wealth, that's an entirely different topic.

Why is this important: note "public." To do this legally, they had to convince: - external auditors - internal compliance - external/internal legal - and where it gets interesting: the institutional investors who are large enough to matter, i.e. your big-money movers. This party says no at a shareholder meeting, the conversion isn't happening.

CFO who led this found that last party were all ok with the move given explanation, and most owned BTC already. 1 holdout took some convincing. These big money-movers hold BTC already, in short. Yeah it's not 100% of their assets, but this isn't an argument about that.