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Comment by panarky | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure there are some "bitcoin purists" who think someday bitcoin will be used to buy everything, but that's certainly a minority viewpoint.

There's a more pragmatic way to think about it.

Bitcoin can coexist just fine with national currencies, and with other cryptocurrencies, and with precious metals. Bitcoin doesn't need to "win" by replacing any of these.

Bitcoin is valuable because it's a secure way to store and transfer value between people.

If bitcoin is never used to buy your morning coffee, that's OK. If only 1% of the population finds bitcoin useful, that's OK, too.

Dollars, euros and yen are better than bitcoin in many use cases, and bitcoin can do things that dollars, euros and yen cannot do in other use cases.

The simple fact is that many people find bitcoin useful, and that's what makes it valuable.

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Yeah, I think there's a strange amount of both fans and people who dislike bitcoin that think bitcoin can only be valuable if it's on a path to complete adoption, replacing other currencies.

I see it more like a decentralized PayPal alternative, and I keep seeing it pop up in more places that I buy stuff online and I've made personal transactions with it to other people, so it's providing value to me and seems to be on a reasonably successful path.

I know miners will hate me for saying this it will bring up the lightning network but I think the transaction costs are too high. They have to come down (close to zero if not zero) even if it means miners and node operators are working for no gain. I don't understand why it means that Bitcoin is insecure for people to be able to mine in their gpu.

Maybe we need to leave Bitcoin alone and come up with another currency for low value transactions that happen frequently? I'm thinking like buying coffee or groceries.

>I don't understand why it means that Bitcoin is insecure for people to be able to mine in their gpu.

What do you mean? People can mine with a gpu, but they won't make much because of the many miners using much faster ASICs. If you think Bitcoin should have been made so that ASICs weren't possible: a number of altcoins agree with that idea, but there's an argument to be made that optimized hardware is always possible, and by making it hard to make, it makes it more likely that a single small group who manages to make optimized hardware will be the only one to do so for a large time period, will be able to make huge amounts of profits funding more hardware, and at that point will easily be able to get up to >50% of the network hash rate (which breaks Bitcoin's decentralization and allows rewriting the blockchain). By using a proof-of-work that's relatively straight-forward to optimize means that when the possible mining rewards eventually incentivize development of ASICs, it's likely that multiple groups will be able to build them.

Yes, but this way you're trading an elite made of hardware specialists and people that can afford to hire hardware specialists, with an elite made of people that can afford to fill datacenters with the most specialized hardware. Mining quickly becomes a game of "who can throw the most money into the problem" and ends up skewing the pool significantly because you are rewarded with money for winning the game, which means you can afford even more of the specialized hardware. That's the big thing with Bitcoin: All the miners are rich folks (these days, mostly Chinese) with huge datacenters and tons of cheap electricity. I have 12 of the USB ASIC miners that are many times unable to even pay for themselves in electricity costs because the difficulty is so high, which is the problem that squeezes out grandma's GPU miner and pushes even more people out of the mining game (not to even mention the ballooning size of the blockchain).

Sort of. There is a potential that if you take over the network that it all becomes worth nothing because users understand the trust problem and cash out in the lead up. Or the users elect to not use your currency, it could still hold value, as the blockchain until that point is valid, but it remains paused until the 51% is resolved. This encourages you to work covertly to organize the 51% stake and you have to hold it in secret or all your coin/power may become worthless. It's essentially the cold war and in the same way, it's in everyone's best interest to avoid destroying the value of the coin by being selfish in an attempt for differential advantage.

Sure, and to this point, there have been at least a handful of times when the 51% attack could have happened, as well-known, related mining pools could have combined their power to achieve the majority. It has been plausible before, and I'd imagine what you mention is the reason it still hasn't happened. It would destroy the coin, because who knows what happened while they had majority. There would probably be some kind of fork, and I'm sure the value would diminish. It would be messy for everybody.

It doesn't need to be another currency. You could have a lower security blockchain tethered to the main one, with higher capacity and lower fees but still carrying Bitcoin transactions. In general those are called sidechains, and there is a particular proposal right now called drivechain that might be worth a second look.

There are several other ways of transacting in Bitcoin outside the main replicated-everywhere-forever blockchain, Lightning perhaps being the most well known (with the defining feature of instant transactions).

Most of these systems are hard to implement without unmalleable txids, so interest will likely pick up now that we have segwit on the main chain. Those systems never left the idea stage while transactions were free but there's significantly more interest now. There are lots of interesting developments going on.

The real value is in the underlying technology of the platform, the blockchain. Instant, secure transfers of value to anyone in the world at minimal cost with a publicly auditable ledger. There are also many cool things that can be built on top of the tech, including secure online voting: https://followmyvote.com/online-voting-technology/blockchain...

Instant as "as soon as miners picked it up and added a few chain segments". And so far no digital system offers all requirements for proper anonymous secure online voting: 1. you can only vote once; 2. you can verify your vote was properly counted; 3. others cannot find out how you voted, even with your cooperation.

We'll see whether someone will ever come up with some system satisfying them all...

Basically bitcoin becomes digital gold, and I think that's the most likely outcome of it.

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