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Comment by autokad | Hacker News Reader

i'd fire him because he thinks gold is impossible to value.

Bizarrely, as everyone jumps on BTC, i've just cashed my BTC out and am eyeing up gold in its place. The intrinsic value of gold has barely, if at all changed since Roman times. Maybe BTC will soar to $1m a coin and all the millennials will have the last laugh.

Although this is the not so subtle secret about gold isn’t it. If you invested in gold simply due to the inherent industrial value, you’d never get in at this price.

This is exactly why I don't think ETH has any long term value aside from its potential to unseat bitcoin as the dominant cryptocurrency. I just don't imagine even an ideal world of distributed applications running on ethereum to be worth billions. The demand for obnoxiously slow running distributed/trustless applications is extremely small in the scheme of things. Most real world cases in need of "programmable money" will just deposit to a centralized site where all the programmatic features will execute and then distribute back the result. Trustlessness just isn't that valuable outside of the currency itself.

It's important not to conflate the present issues with the eventual issues. Eventually, ETH will be an immediate and decentralized distributed value network with extremely low to nonexistent processing fees.

When we are dealing with money, trustlessness means not asking permission. It also means you can review what the code is doing before sending your valuable money to it. We also get a global headless processing center for free.

I think you should re-evaluate your opinions on eth. But, maybe you are right and people are ok with throwing their money into a centralized repository. Maybe visual sourcesafe will make a comeback as well.

My point was that its currency features are the only thing that make it potentially valuable. It being a "distributed computer" like some people envision is doomed to failure. Programmable money is useful, but not to the tune of multi-billions. The majority of value is in the trustless money aspect, not the trustless programmability. Most people will have no problem trusting sites for short periods with smallish amounts.

That's not to say there wont be any use-cases, or even many. There could be very many use cases for eth in fact, but it still not be multi-billion market cap valuable.

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