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Comment by antocv | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin is not the only cryptocurrency, and not all cryptocurrencies are based on a blockchain data-structure.

There are other currencies which are not-inflationary, trustless and decentralized, and many more currencies with various levels of those properties, some are more centralized and require trust in a few in various ways, and some are decentralized trust-less but still inflationary.

There is even cryptocurrencies which do not use Proof-of-Work, or Proof-of-Stake, or Proof-of-Anything - but still can reach consensus in open distributed network.

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Sure, but this is an article specifically about BTC; none of its conclusions hold for cryptocurrencies generally. I guess it just seems really deceptive to talk about fiat's "hidden cost" of inflation while ignoring BTC's not-at-all-hidden cost.

Similarly, I'm unclear on why confirmation times aren't considered a serious problem. It seems like BTC enthusiasts like to discuss a hypothetical future in which the BTC infrastructure is so mature that you can buy coffee without worrying about fees and confirmation times, but I don't see how we get there from here. Either the payment takes hours to confirm (leaving the coffee shop vulnerable to double-spending) or it goes through an off-chain processor (who would demand to know my identity). Either way you're losing one of the main selling points of using a cryptocurrency in the first place.

I appreciate your sharing awareness of iuch systems. Are you talking about something like iota? Reaching consensus to avoid double spending is a very real problem. Additionally, if we are talking about smart contracts, the order of the transactions can often be very important. Additionally what happens if a contract is interacted with by two parties with neither transactions being aware of the other?

I didn't bring it up because I suspect that we'll eventually find a scaling solution, whether it be sidechains, tree chains, riding on Moore's law, multiple cryptocurrencies connected through an interleger.

It's a more long term view of the impact of cryptocurrencies concerning government issued currencies.

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