I also happen to be skeptical of Bitcoin's long-term outlook, but that's not why I'm actively against it as a technology. If it wasn't for the planet, I'd say people could put their money wherever they wanted. Actually, I still think they can—as long as they're willing to pay for the negative externalities they create. But then no one would actually use Bitcoin...
To be fair, Bitcoin does not do what Visa does. Visa uses trust in existing institutions to accomplish transactions. Bitcoin mining creates trust out of electricity. And trust is a valuable resource, no different than any other form of value creation.
That's not trust, that's security in the value of your money. BTC can never be taken from you unless someone either breaks crypto or steals your wallet secret key. The U.S. dollar is backed by the federal reserve, so while I don't think the U.S. is going to have a revolution that destroys or inflates the dollar anytime soon, there's a possibility of such a thing happening. BTC has an actual limited amount that can be distributed (like gold) so it'll always have value.
The point is Bitcoin created a store of trust sans institutions, one which is capable of being transacted across the internet without trusted third parties.
Bitcoin contains the built-in incentive to keep you put in place, without engaging in any economic activity. It does so on a massive scale, without sickening people, voluntarily and by design.
Everyone likes to focus on Bitcoin’s cost to the environment, without considering the upsides of Bitcoin adoption, chief of which is a pronounced decline in consumerism.
Consider what would happen if we saw continuously falling asset prices, and dramatically lowered capital investment globally. Consider what would happen if government scrip became worthless, disallowing governments to fund war machines and large public works projects. Bitcoin throttles humanity. This is a big benefit to the planet’s natural ecosystems. Meanwhile the environmental damage Bitcoin can do is capped by the maximum productive output of humanity, which puts a ceiling on the value of one bitcoin.
Especially when one of the actual primary uses of bitcoin as currency (and not speculative investing) so far has been to pay off ransomware.
Who exactly am I trusting? The person I'm transacting with - a transaction that I have no hope of reversing if something goes wrong?
Please, if you can be specific about exactly what is meant by "trust" here, I would greatly appreciate it.
That's not the case with any other monetary or payment system or store of value.
You can trust that your balance in your account is what the blockchain says it is, and that nobody but someone in possession of those keys can use it.
>You can trust that your balance in your account is what the blockchain says it is, and that nobody but someone in possession of those keys can use it.
And there are definite risks around that too.
This really feels like a solution in search of a problem to me.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/04/paypal-shuts-d...
There are also many restrictions on how, why, when, and where transfers from those accounts can be made. There is no trust in an institution required, because you know the blockchain will carry out your wishes regardless of any other factors.
It will carry out your inputs regardless of other factors. That is a very important distinction, especially in this case.
(Still think proof-of-stake is big improvement though.)
looks like cryptocurrency community's filter bubble
You compare it to Visa, but actually visa does only part of what bitcoin does (transactions), and does it using _other_ systems themselves also using energy (security, banking, etc).
Nowadays bitcoin is mostly seen as a store of value, to which it should then be compared to gold. Gold has a much higher carbon footprint than bitcoin, both for mining, storing, transactions, etc.
there are a lot of writings about this, some answering a recent article posted on HN here https://www.coindesk.com/what-bloomberg-gets-wrong-about-bit...
If you want to learn more about this concept, you should research about Slavoj Zizek's work on ideology. Bitcoin is not just technology, but a multi-faceted ideology founded around cypherpunks ideas, liberty, sovereignty, austrian economic system, free markets.
Even the way Bitcoin is developed (slow, methodical) and Bitcoin apps are built is different to SV way which is move fast, break things, iterate.
This is the narrative that people use to make it seem more savory. But it's just about the money. No one cares enough about any of those ideals for them to be a meaningful part of what Bitcoin is. Those ideas have existed forever in the back channels of the web, and are memorialized in the endless plethora of abandoned decentralized technologies that were never profitable. It's money, plain and simple. There's nothing wrong with that, but for whatever reason the crypto community has some kind of chip on their shoulder about hiding the fact that it is just about profit.
The main difference between myself and HN groupthink is I believe crypto and blockchain have inherent value and revolutionary potential. There is a loud group here that says all of blockchain is a scam, refuse to look into it deeply, parrot the same bullshit, and when they are proven wrong by the market they just say “Well wait 5 more years and you’ll see!” which is impossible to prove as the crash can always be in the future. It’s so exhausting and the only thing that makes me feel better is the fact I was super right they were super wrong and I’m rich and don’t need to spend my life building some stupid middleware that powers the middleware that powers the privacy-violation pipeline for some SV dweeb or megacorp. I just keep delivering value that frees people from the corrupt state and earn insane money because few talented people know how to do it or grasp how useful it is.
Yes people speculate on it, does it mean no one really believes in it's value propositions? This argument has very little weight when you compare it to anything else. Is the majority of the stock market all about profit? There's very little of the traditional stock pricing going on anymore.
I didn’t buy crypto as a Ponzi. I bought it because it makes perfect sense if you have a libertarian / Austrian / free market / individualist / free people mindset. Which I do!
If you were to sell 50% of all the bitcoin floating around in the world, how much would you impact the price? Would it remain above 40k? 30k? 20k?
What's the cost basis of all the bitcoin holdings in the world?
If the US government cracks down on bitcoin purchases by public companies, what happens to the price of bitcoin?
Skeptics aren't skeptical because of lacking adoption, so they aren't going to be swayed by increasing adoption either.
Also, Facebook isn't some magical Rubicon for asset valuation. It's a company that sells ads.
One of the fundamental problems with "things are going good, what could go wrong?" is that inevitably, every crash is clearest in retrospect.
Facebook on the other hand, is deeply entrenched in half the world's daily entertainment routine.
I understand the hype around BTC, but I don't know if it'll all come crumbling down if a few big fish get irked and decide to liquidate.
1) It is volatile and impossible to value; any price is as reasonable as any other. What is my benchmark here? The amount of USD in circulation? The value of outstanding U.S. Government debt? (if it is indeed going to replace Treasuries as reserve currency / safe haven asset). Can someone more knowledgable than me chime in?
2) Its utility as a currency is inversely proportional to its utility as a speculative instrument. And speculation appears to be 99% of the interest and discussion.
Volatility of currency goes away (or rather, gets abstracted) within the context of locales where that currency is used as a unit of account and goods and services are directly priced in it. So far, this hasn't happened yet for bitcoin, because there is no central authority forcing it upon people.
Nobody knows if, when, where, or how this unit of account transition will happen. Maybe Tesla prices the new roadster or cybertruck in bitcoin as a publicity stunt that starts a cascade. Maybe some country with a failing currency decides to issue a new currency backed with bitcoin, or their people start using it without permission and pricing emerges organically. Maybe Iran, Turkey, Venezuela, North Korea, Syria, and Cuba start using it as their currency for international trade.
Or maybe it never will become a unit of account, and bitcoin will just find a role as an inflation hedge and long term store of value like gold, which is currently 10x as valuable as bitcoin.
I think the opinion changed from favourable to skeptical as no use cases emerged.
A lot of the proponents of Bitcoin are pushing it in the same way people push MLM and ponzi schemes and for the same reasons, which is unfortunate.
For many, including me, it seems a great shame to be consuming so much computing power (and energy) to solve increasingly difficult mathematical problems for no human benefit when the same effort might be used for better ends.
Pushing one transaction through Bitcoin effectively uses about half the electricity that a typical US household uses in a month.
It accomplishes about 7 TPS.
120 terawatts * hours / 1 year * 1 second / 7 in kilowatt hours = 543 kilowatts * hours.
Average US household electricity usage is about 877 kWh per month https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3
Of course, increasing Bitcoin prices will likely increase the amount of resources dedicated to mining, too...
At the moment, one Bitcoin transaction costs me about $10 in network fees. The party pushing it through gets, say, another $90 or so in reward for mining it (6.25 BTC reward per block ÷ 3500 transactions per block × $50000 per BTC).
Meanwhile Visa is doing a hundred thousand per second with capacity for more.
This seems like a blatant appeal to authority.
If it's not bad, provide reasons it's not bad. Throwing out Elon Musk's name does not provide any actual argument for your position.
he is a business man who only cares about money, and he uses effective marketing to make people like you buy in
Personally, I have purposefully chosen to live in a tiny apartment, in one of the few parts of the US where I'm not required to own a car at all. My iPhone 6S is six years old and I have no plans to replace it, and just yesterday I wrote an email to my building imploring them to turn down our heat, because opening windows in the middle of winter to stay cool is a terrible waste of energy.
I'm not perfect. I'm not a vegetarian, I don't buy carbon offsets, and I make use of Amazon's inefficient two-day shipping. And I'm not asking anyone else to go sell their cars. But would giving up Bitcoin really decrease your quality of life so much?
That is literally never going to happen through the nature of technological and human advancement. The solution is where you source your energy from, not reverting to the stone age or jogging in place as a society.
Being forced to save in a currency the central banks treat as toilette paper would indeed decrease my life quality specifically through the purchasing power decrease of my lifetime labor.
But I imagine there is also a lot of opportunity for innovation in that realm to move to clean solutions for instance.
For anything you want to do with btc|fb, there is something else that does it better. But not enough people use those other things, they aren't trustworthy, they're more difficult to use, too fragmented, I already use x why would I use y, nobody knows about them, etc.
I agree it will be around in 10 years, but think it will always be highly volatile. Between now and then, I could see it being worth much more and worth much less than today's price.
https://goldprice.org/charts/history/gold_all_data_o_usd_x.p...
Bitcoin, like gold, is not a productive asset. It doesn't pay interest (like bonds), dividends (like stocks), or rental income (like real estate). Warren Buffett has a good explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtITDtZPYEw&%3Bab_channel...
The problem is that Bitcoin is not productive, so it only makes sense to own it if someone will pay more for it in future. But how do I estimate that without any long-term price history? I can see that the demand for gold increased in, say, 7 of the last 10 decades so that would give me some confidence about demand over the next decade.
So to answer your question: the only thing I can see that will change my opinion of Bitcoin is if demand generally increases over many decades.
Nothing. It's an ugly system, for soulless players: it's eating up hardware production capacities, energy supply, and the money of the ordinary folks.
Because it tops out at four transactions per second while consuming as much power as Argentina. It's not rocket science.
>I wonder what will change the opinion of the skeptics?
All of the following are necessary but not sufficient:
1. Bitcoin users must panic when Bitcoin experiences deflation rather than celebrating it going TO THE MOOOOOON!
2. Someone has to find a way to make it scale.
3. Tether must be audited.
The sentiment on HN seem still be mostly against it whenever it comes up. I wonder why that is? I'd imagine 10 years from now Bitcoin will still be around and likely much larger than today - I'm less positive about Facebook outlook and posture in 10 years actually.
I wonder what will change the opinion of the skeptics?