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Comment by Joeri | Hacker News Reader

A bug is discovered allowing fraudulent creation of bitcoins, and no easy or timely fix is possible.

That or governments outlaw it entirely.

You are fundamentally arguing that cryptocurrencies, all of them, will be gone? That like 30 years from now, there will be 0 things that are basically cryptocurrencies or something that replaced them?

That's irrelevant. If every cryptocurrency around in 30 years has yet to be created then every current cryptocurrency would be dead.

Consider, what happens if the Internet dies? Well you could run a private coin on an old laptop, but that's not really meaningful.

Now that's a scary thought.

It's not an overnight thing. Like the transfer from Bitcoin to the new thing would be very gradual, standard technology adoption rate curve. And like, it's not clear by how much would you really diminish Bitcoin. Like crpyto became a thing but I dont think it was at the stock market.

It's a possibility. Maybe they'll still be here, maybe they'll be totally gone; maybe they'll exist, but only in certain niches, or in a form that's unrecognizably different than what they look like now.

By analogy: two decades ago, US consumers were buying almost a billion dollars' worth of photographic film a year [1]. Photography hasn't gone anywhere -- people are taking orders of magnitude more photos than they used to -- but if you had invested your entire net worth into Kodak in 2000, you'd be penniless now.

[1]: http://blog.keh.com/the-evolution-of-photo-lab-life/

But this time it's different, because you can invest your entire net worth into KODAKCoin: https://www.kodak.com/kodakone/default.htm

Ok so we disagree on whether Bitcoin has peaked or not. Do you feel like crypto has peaked? There's this half trilion just waiting to be multiplied. Like people just bought in, they wont be selling. In some sense, I wonder if the fact that beginner investors bought in means that it's more resistant to a price dump as they wont have stop losses. If they bought for 1000, they wont sell for 500 thereby keeping the price afloat. Not saying that's the case.

> Like people just bought in, they wont be selling

Is this a serious argument?

You've never met a "naive" investor.

Someone buying for $1000 and not selling for $500 will not keep the price afloat. It just means they're stuck with something they refuse to sell and no one else wants to buy. Other people will sell at the lower price (to get out and write off their losses rather than incur more) and the price will drop anyways.

It's not someone. It could be large part of the market.

"Could be"? Dude, this is why people bought fucking Beanie Babies 20 years ago and held them. Hell, I have 10 in my apartment because my grandfather was buying and trading them in the late 90s. Thank god he traded enough for a profit, he was essentially break even at the end of that bubble. Some people bought them expecting the absurd valuation to continue. See also comic book and baseball card bubbles that started in the 1990s. People held them until they were valueless. Now there's a glut on the market and no one wants the damn things.

Drug prices don't dip when the government outlaws them. If anything, the need to outlaw crypto validates their utility.

Drugs have a purpose beyond trade, cryptocurrency doesn’t. Make it illegal to sell, and there’s no reason to buy it.

Make alcohol illegal to sell and there's no reason to buy it. Got it!

I see, my mistake. You are suggesting that trade outside of the purview of Governments has no utility. It must be a wonderful place where you live.

Governments outlawing numbers, that'll be the day.

Governments outlawing of numbers has been going on for a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

All those of those are examples of numbers that have already been discovered, not preemptively banning numbers yet to be found.

They still pre-emptively ban numbers, for instance if they represent something illegal: "Any image file or an executable program can be regarded as simply a very large binary number. In certain jurisdictions, there are images that are illegal to possess, due to obscenity or secrecy/classified status, so the corresponding numbers could be illegal."

Also, the concept of "numbers yet to be found" is philosophically questionable.

In 2017, far-right Slovak politician Marian Kotleba was criminally charged for donating 1,488 euro to a charity.

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