Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

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Ok, what's going on here is that people have this expectation of Bitcoin not based in reality.

Bitcoin was not designed to be a high-throughput currency. It's a store of value.

You put your money in it and let it sit. That's it.

If you don't want to do that, don't use it. But that's what it's for. Or at least what it's evolved into.

I think it can cause a gigantic speculative bubble that will put people like Thiel in control over even more wealth in the world than they already have – if BTC goes to $1M/coin, what do you think will happen? $10M? There's no upper limit.

But that's a separate issue.

Bitcoin doesn't have to do anything except what it was designed to do. And it was designed this way. Satoshi certainly thought through this scenario and specifically decided to do this, and not something else. So those who are putting money into BTC are betting on Satoshi's original vision.

Now, do you think Satoshi really believed BTC would be the only crypto? I think he knew others would spring up. He solved the byzantine generals problem with sybil resistance. Of course he knew others could solve it too, in slightly different ways.

So I think he just said "Well, let them do that." And hence, use different cryptos for different circumstances.

Where does this "bitcoin is a store of value, not a medium for exchange" nonsense come from? Literally the first line of the white paper:

> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.

And it is. When you pay Coinbase, they send you BTC. Then you're free to send your BTC around if you decide the $20 transaction fee is worth it.

In that scenario you're not using bitcoin, you're asking a centralised, trusted third party to adjust a couple figures in a database.

If I wanted to do that, I would ask my bank to do it, because they're better at it.

Maybe free money isn't free. That is, liberated money isn't free (as in beer). Potentially it can be, but this is a great first step.

Which is fine until they decide to freeze your assets.

Yeah, that is the problem with relying on Coinbase. You have essentially no recourse when they freeze your assets, which happens a _lot_ more often than the banking system, with its consumer protections and actual regulations.

That's why you don't store assets on coinbase...the whole point of crypto is that it allows you to be in exclusive control of your assets. Why is that so hard to understand?

The response when somebody tries to do transactions on-chain:

> And it is. When you pay Coinbase, they send you BTC. Then you're free to send your BTC around if you decide the $20 transaction fee is worth it.

The response when somebody tries to do transactions off-chain:

> That's why you don't store assets on coinbase...the whole point of crypto is that it allows you to be in exclusive control of your assets. Why is that so hard to understand?

The important thing is to make sure that no matter what anybody does, they're wrong, and that way bitcoin cannot possibly have any flaws.

> Bitcoin was not designed to be a high-throughput currency. It's a store of value.

Could've fooled me with the whitepaper title "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System".

Before a store of value it was also billed as a mechanism to high-fee trans-border remittances, a solution for micropayments on the Web, currency replacement for countries with high local currency volatility, etc.

Meanwhile, BTC just hit $15k.

You're free to snipe at it, but it's simply a financial wishing well. You throw your money in and wish for more, and maybe you get some.

The world will go along with or without you. And the more people that do, the more BTC fulfills its current purpose.

Careful, though, because if the entire world decides to do that, you could find that not having any BTC isn't a very good position to be in.

You're one of the few that isn't blind.

> Bitcoin was not designed to be a high-throughput currency. It's a store of value.

That's a straight up falsehood right there. Bitcoin was explicitly designed as a currency, or medium of exchange. It became a store of value (ha!) because it was growing in use as a currency so its value was increasing and more and more people started "investing" in it. But it's volatility and rapid rise in value diminished its value as a currency. Its present value is a collective delusion.

I don't know why everyone is saying this is a falsehood, but this will be my last comment on the subject.

Read https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf. Read section 6, incentives. Note transaction fees. Read the conclusion. Note "We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust." None of this has anything to do with being a currency, or being low-overhead.

It is named bitcoin. The first line of the paper you cite: "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."

I'm not sure how you can say it was only meant to be a store of value with a straight face. I don't know whether to question your sanity, your reading skills, or your integrity.

> Bitcoin was not designed to be a high-throughput currency. It's a store of value.

I think you should spend some time reading https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf before making factually incorrect statements. Bitcoin is only viewed as a store of value today because it no longer can be utilized for its original purpose. It's a complete failure in that regard.

The whitepaper lays out the current predicament quite well.

> The incentive can also be funded with transaction fees. If the output value of a transaction is less than its input value, the difference is a transaction fee that is added to the incentive value of the block containing the transaction. Once a predetermined number of coins have entered circulation, the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees and be completely inflation free.

I think most people who read the paper focus on the early parts, rather than gaming out the implications of the later parts.

"It's a store of value."

Maybe this was the intention all along, but this idea has only recently reached some saturation among information channels.

Because I haven't heard much about "store of value" until about a month ago. Which seems to be either a shifting of goalposts which is bad, or a complete morphing of why people are interesting in crypto which is even worse.

It means, people are scrambling trying to justify why the hell they're throwing all their money at crypto.

Ex Post rationalisation bullshit.

It's called Bitcoin, not Bitgold. It was sold to the public as an anonymous, decentralised, safe, fast, and cheap way to transfer money. It has failed on every single one of those claims.

I would absolutely love for one of my creations to “fail” half as hard as Bitcoin has.

If I wanted a store of value, I would put my money in gold.

This what it evolved into, yes. The knee jerk objection is always “De whitepaper de whitepaper!” Let it go already! Satoshi has not weighed in for quite some time now.

Satoshi is most likely dead, because I doubt there is anyone on the planet with enough self control to have not touched Satoshi's wallet to liquidate some of its value.

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