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Comment by alexeldeib | Hacker News Reader

It's funny, I frequently come across two views on bitcoin: the parallel you presented, and that it's not a currency but a store of wealth or other generic asset (comparable to gold). I must say I find the Ponzi framing more compelling, although I have some hope yet for Lightning/insert hot scaling idea here to improve the viability as a currency at least incrementally.

As a currency, I have little hope for bitcoin in its current form. This is an area where it remains possible in my mind for an upstart coin to displace it. Some people seem to care about this; I've looked at a few niche coins that seem to care about this concept and focus on transaction speed, but none have made great progress yet.

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The gold analogy makes me so nervous. Gold has specific and permanent properties (eg, high density, an entry in the periodic table :P). Many detractors of gold claim those properties are not valuable, but it still has them and is specific and unique.

Bitcoin has mathematical properties that can be 100% cloned. The only thing that makes bitcoin unique from some random bitcoin clone is that it has the backing of a big mining networks.

I firmly believe that whatever value bitcoin has is tied to the size of the mining network, and by extension to the energy burned to transact bitcoins. This simply isn't close to being permanent in the same way gold is. It could potentially work like a social thing, and go the way of, eg, MySpace. I don't see how that can hold its value for a generation; the risk of current prices being a blip is still very high.

Bitcoin can be cloned the same way Facebook can be cloned. You could spend a billion dollars copying Facebook's features and spend a billion marketing it, and you'd still fail.

The mining network behind it, the developer ecosystem working on wallets/libraries/services, etc. is the hard part to copy. It's worth the most, therefore it attracts the most time and attention, which helps to maintain its value. It may not be the best from a technical standpoint, but the size of it ensures a healthy financial incentive to improve upon it, which we're seeing now with layered scaling efforts (lightning network).

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