I don't know - in their current forms BTC/ETH offer a stupendously wasteful, environmentally disastrous way to add / subtract numbers or execute bits of code for $10-20 a transaction, for bits of digital data that, based on the mania of the masses may be worth $100 this week and $5000 next week.

I've read the white paper and the Ethereum yellow paper - the technology is undeniably fascinating and cool, and I have some hope for proof-of-stake systems curbing the current waste, but in their present form they're almost useless as a monetary / payment system, and the only thing I really see happening in the crypto space is various get-rich-quick schemes based around issuing probably-worthless tokens of data, and a million and one ways to convert them amongst each other.

Ethereum is actively moving away from POW, does that change your opinion of it at all?

If they can pull off merging mainnet into ETH2 it'll be a big improvement environmentally & scalability-wise, so yes. Supporting ETH/BTC now is pretty harmful to the world.

Not sure if the volatility thing will be solved, it's still people bidding at the value of intrinsically meaningless bits of data. But maybe more genuine utility, i.e. a payment solution better/cheaper than cash / credit / brokerages, would help justify the valuation. Ethereum's decentralized computation model might find more actually-beneficial-to-the-world applications if the tx costs weren't so painful.

Private keys are dangerously powerful for the average person, i.e. lose or have them stolen and you've lost your money forever. But that's a feature too, you can "open an account" in the few milliseconds it takes for your computer to generate a keypair.

Agree about private keys, but I see the problem a little differently.

Combustion engines are dangerous and frankly beyond the comprehension of the average person, but cars put such a heavy layer of abstraction on top of them that anyone can get a ton of utility from the combustion engine.

Software and smart contracts like key escrow services will solve this problem I bet.

Volatility, I don't agree with. Look at DAI, it's completely decentralized and has done a great job pegging to the dollar. With DAI you can participate in DeFi / smart contracts without ETH volatility.

> Bitcoin is as useful at $100 dollars as it is at $1 million. Why then are we fixated on price when this technology can change millions of lives? Let's talk about the many awesome things we can do by coding trust into a decentralized Internet. Price is just a footnote.

That's a great argument, but for BCH (or any other altcoins without a speculation problem) instead of BTC. There's virtually no technical differences between the bitcoin family of cryptocurrencies. That implies that there's no artificial limit on supply of coins, either. Just fork or spin up a new blockchain if there's ever a real supply crunch for cryptocurrency in general.

The BTC mining pools could trivially mount a >50% attack on BCH or any of the other alt-coins, but it's apparently not even worth it for the lulz. All the more reason to use them as simple currencies if that's the case. Any fiat currency issuer would be overjoyed with a 0% interest in counterfeiting.

> That implies that there's no artificial limit on supply of coins, either. Just fork or spin up a new blockchain if there's ever a real supply crunch for cryptocurrency in general.

I agree and this is the argument that I haven’t heard a good response to. If Bitcoin has value and utility, why shouldn’t a second chain, with the same parameters, have roughly equal value and utility?

Gold is on the periodic table of elements. You can’t make another gold.

For the same reason that a photocopy of a dollar bill isn't worth anything. As long as you can distinguish between two things there's enough room for a value difference, even if they are functionally the same.

The value in bitcoin comes from the boatloads of people trusting it enough to use in one form or another. If you spin up a bitcoin fork you'll need a lot of work to get people to believe in your fork.

> The value in bitcoin comes from the boatloads of people trusting it enough to use in one form or another. If you spin up a bitcoin fork you'll need a lot of work to get people to believe in your fork.

Sure, but the trust transfers a lot easier than to some completely different cryptocurrency because the only meaningful difference is which protocol the miners and clients accept and which block hash is the root. People trust that bitcoin has value because not many people are going to switch to a new client that e.g. accepts 10^20 bitcoin rewards to miners per block; it's in too few people's self-interest. Or, more specifically, if a group of people do want to issue 10^20 coins every block then the bitcoin protocol serves as a coordination method for them to do that with each other.

Being on the first blockchain has only sentimental and inertial value.

Bitcoin is a scare digital asset; scarcity is why it has the value that it does.

You can’t just spin up another Bitcoin blockchain and expect to have the ecosystem move that chain without sacrificing their hash power on another chain when they’re deeply invested in the original $1 trillion (and growing) chain.

That’s like suggesting Apple move to a copy of the NASDAQ exchange.

Lindy effect. Sure you can copy it, but the original remains. The scarcity exists inside the network, and in a sense you cannot copy it, because the copy is just that - there is no use in copying it.

> Lindy effect. Sure you can copy it, but the original remains. The scarcity exists inside the network, and in a sense you cannot copy it, because the copy is just that - there is no use in copying it.

That's why I refer to it as a speculative bubble; everyone is betting on how much other art appreciators will pay for artsy bitcoins in the nebulous future.

It's also only moderately explanatory; the original BTC client doesn't work on the current network any more, either. So what does BTC have that BCH doesn't? They share a root block.

I loved the idea and for a couple of years I was using Bitcoin as a currency whenever I could. I even sold some speakers to someone over 1000 miles away on Craigslist once since they were willing pay me in BTC in advance.

At this point though, and really for the last 3-4 years or so, it’s fairly useless as a currency and it’s an environmental nightmare.

And just like everything in life, people are greedy, and now it's turned into a hyper deflationary investment vehicle.

I read the Bitcoin whitepaper and I find blockchain a terrible and entirely inelegant technology. It is horribly inefficient and I can think of only a handful of domains where blockchain's properties would outweigh its problems. Cryptocurrencies with no central issuer are possibly one such domain, but do we really need them (esp. at that environmental cost)?

Bitcoin the technology is interesting, in so far as it has inspired new technology that is more useful or less wasteful. Bitcoin the asset is pretty terrible for anything besides speculation.

> It breaks my heart how few people in HN appreciate/understand BTC.

Isn't bitcoin nowadays a big pump-and-dump scheme where a hand full of collosal industrial players manipulate the market at will?

No. The most cursory google search would show that Bitcoin is the best performing asset the last 10+ years.

Tesla, Square and Micro Strategy aren’t investing billions of dollars in a pump and dump scheme…

> BTC is as useful at $100 dollars as it is at $1 million

or as useless, on the other extreme.

HN community are generally sceptical of anything novel.