there is a difference between "succeeding somewhat in the original goal" and "succeeding in a way different from the original goal all together". the former seems to closer to start ups that made it big - they had a product that became successful even if the endproduct isn't 100% as the original product
with bitcoin, wasn't (isn't?) the original goal to create an alternative to mainstream financial system? just based off the example you listed, among other things, it seems like Bitcoin has completely 100% has failed in that regard since it's just become another feature of the mainsteam financial system
sure bitcoin and crypto are still here, but they're just another asset class at this point. sure it's not "failure" - it certainly is successful by a different set of metrics from the original, but I'm sure this isn't what Satoshi had in mind
As for the early community, there may be as many narratives as there were bitcoiners.
And even if satoshi would have posted a more explicit manifesto, who’s to say that they are the authority to dictate the goals of a project they abandoned almost a decade ago and that others have picked up?
Saying “nobody buys their coffee settled and priced in bitcoin; that was the whole point and should have happened in <10 years” is simply a straw man.
Hell, several of the “failures” points the author brings up are considered features by some.
The existence of permissionless and liquid cryptocurrency markets have political and economic implications. That you do not agree with them does not make it a failure; you just have a different perspective.
All that aside, I think it’s too early still to call Bitcoin’s success or failure.
(PayPal recently rolled out allowing users to use crypto assets including btc for any PayPal payments but arguably that is not “real adoption” in context of payments, as merchants still get paid in fiat with PayPal’s partner Paxos acting as intermediaries)
The fact that a lot of people care about blockchains and are willing to make speculative bets on them doesn’t mean that the idea is actually useful for much.
The FAANGs at least have made some real products, some of which some people find useful.
But Facebook hasn't succeeded. It was supposed to do something useful but all it does is mine data for ads. They were supposed to connect everyone but all they did was corrupt our political system.
But Apple hasn't succeeded. It was supposed to do something useful but all it does is pump out a new Iphone color every year and remove a port. They were supposed to revolutionize computing but all the did was figure out how to sell shiny junk made by poor people in developing markets to middle class people in developing markets.
See how easy it is to play that game?
Somehow I'm guessing most people who like bitcoin in 2011 aren't reeling from the failure of bitcoin.
Comparing the usefulness of Bitcoin to Google Search or the smartphone is asinine.
> Somehow I'm guessing most people who like bitcoin in 2011 aren't reeling from the failure of bitcoin.
Of course not — they’re all extremely wealthy. That’s irrelevant to the discussion; I’m sure the author of this piece understands that Bitcoin has increased in value, but that’s not at all what the piece is about.
Turns out that various people may find all of these various things either useful or not useful because it is subjective.
No quasi-governmental agency can unilaterally decide to print gobs more of it & drive inflation through the roof...
Or Monero. It's a bit more stable since people use it as a currency more often.
You have options, which pretty much depend on what that person wants to receive. It's not that big of a deal guys, stop the hate. It's a bit childish really
Gmail, docs, sheets, slides, drawings, calendar and geez just 1000 other things disagree with you. Yeah I know the ad network is paying for that stuff: that's the bargain that people who use their ecosystem of software products have made, just as people on Apple's ecosystem accept their tradeoffs. It just seems extremely cynical to suggest Google has done, or is doing, nothing useful. If there was no utility flowing the other way in return for the eyeballs and profile data I don't think they'd have a business.
It is, without a doubt, successful.
You can also buy tons of stuff with USD. The only innovation of Bitcoin is that it allows you to do illegal stuff.
A more expensive and cumbersome way to do what you could already do with other tools is not “success”.
> You can transfer it around the world basically for free (transaction fees amount to the equivalent of pennies no matter how much you send).
This is also true of, for example, TransferWise.
> It’s immutable
This actually makes it worse than the existing financial system, because being able to reverse fraudulent transactions is a feature, not a bug.
> It’s gained widespread adoption, a while economy, thousands of businesses.
Also true of USD. You still haven’t demonstrated any advantage of Bitcoin other than illegal transactions.
Not for small to large amounts for less than pennies
>A more expensive and cumbersome way to do what you could already do with other tools is not “success”.
You're vastly underestimating the amount of people trapped in regimes where they cannot spend their funds abroad or risk having them devalued at whim.
doesn't that describe a lot of cryptocurrencies? or are you suggesting the people in these regimes use cryptocurrencies as an intermediary to transfer their local currency into more stable foreign currency?
What percent of those business denominate their prices in bitcoin?
What percent of those businesses do anything but immediately convert the bitcoin back into fiat the moment they take possession?
To move money out of an authoritarian country, you have to know someone who wants to move money in. The only reason it works at all is because the total amount of Bitcoin doing this is comparatively very small compared to local corruption and mining which can support this use case.
To make this transaction someone else in your local authoritarian country has to have Bitcoin, and be willing to exchange it for local currency. It's no huge surprise a lot of mining power ended up in China, because of course this is a transaction you do not want to do in China: you want to originate Bitcoin and then get some Americans to pay you nice clean USDs into bank accounts outside of China.
Which of course works because electricity consumption in China is relatively unsuspect (or was: naturally China has cracked down on this and is having ongoing power shortages to boot).
Which of course creates a weird compromise: if Bitcoin is good at getting money out of authoritarian countries, then either you're outsourcing to someone who can move currency around locally, or you are outsourcing an increasing fraction of the Bitcoin mining compute, and thus control of the network.
Or Internet Computer, which is more or less a blockchain equivalent of the internet allowing you to for example host a website on it versus say AWS or GoDaddy, which has some potentially very positive benefits for data security and users being able to manage their own data as practical benefits.
https://messari.io/article/an-introduction-to-dfinity-and-th...
I'm not really a big fan of crypto, but you do have to admit that some of the projects would do some good for the world when they catch on.
I would love to have an easy system to distribute ML models and databases for projects without having to pay AWS fees for example.
> but you do have to admit that some of the projects would do some good for the world when they catch on.
The will not catch on because they are useless for real world use. The most cost efficient way to do processing or data storage is within someones datacenter.
> I would love to have an easy system to distribute ML models and databases for projects without having to pay AWS fees for example.
I would love a free meal as well. It does not make sense for me to expect free lunches though.
How is this any better than S3, which lets me rent storage space in exchange for USD?
There's an entire blockchain-based industry being built in the gaming space as we speak, to allow player to trade NFT's (unique items in games).
There are many more.
> other than illegal money transfers
To address your point more directly: depending on the regime you live under, illegal money transfers are a life-saving device, so just that use case makes Bitcoin worth it.
You missed the "provably fair" part.
It's true that if your measuring stick is toilet paper, the current price of Bitcoin doesn't tell you much.
> b) has been up till now
Past performance is no guarantee of future ... etc
Sure, that's what every traditional investment prospectus says in the first paragraph. They usually then proceed to explain how well they've been doing and why you should therefore invest.
There is something called Baye's rule. Ignore it at your own (opportunity cost) risk.
The people constantly predicting Tesla failure and shorting the stock lost all of their money. This guy won’t matter.
You’d think people would learn to change their mind and update when massive economic incentives exist to do so, but often they don’t. Confirmation bias is a powerful thing.
"The market can remain irrational longer then you can remain solvent" is a saying for a reason.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry#cite_note-Burry-...
There was a crash in 1999, but the underlying economic shift created by the internet was real and major companies survived it.
I suspect something similar is likely here.
You’re right of course and Michael Burry made a great trade recognizing the CDO issue and bad incentives around reselling mortgages leading to banks giving mortgages to people that couldn’t afford them and not taking the risk directly.
It was also time bounded (he knew when the rates would change and they’d start to fail).
That said, people often use the “market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent” line as an excuse - basically to say they’re right about an “impending crash” on an infinite timeline. If you can’t predict it within a bounded timeframe than your prediction is useless and ultimately equivalent to predicting nothing.
In the case of the OP he was clearly wrong, and instead of updating is spinning it as he was kinda right anyway. I think that’s dumb.
I mean sure...put your money where your mouth is on that one, but I'm not buying TSLA at $1096 per share.
The stock price today may be a bubble, I don’t know. But Burry’s comments were before the current run up.
Which is the point: the market can (generally) remain irrational longer then you can remain solvent. Even when you're right.
For example, the bias you are talking about means that the open minded and more virtuous people will adopt bitcoin earlier, and those who profit from the existing exploitive system much later.
This produces a massive wealth transfer from evil to good.
By his definition all of FAANG (or whatever) are total failures. You could poke minor semantic holes in their accomplishments!
CNBC lists bitcoin price next to the S&P. It's up infinity percent. There are regulated financial products. If asked at the time he would have unequivocally said those things would not have happened because bitcoin was going to fail because he was dead wrong.
It would have been much braver and more respectable to just say "yeah, I really was wrong on that one"