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Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

They could also replace it with money, which one can readily and easily, through systems with well-understood protocols that are agreed upon by participants in those systems, exchange for goods and services.

(Even the Lightning Network people don't think you should use it with money. Not that that's likely to be a problem, what with it being for Bitcoin and all. Stripe also doesn't support any other commodities as method of payment, and frankly if they did I'd hope they'd choose cattle before Bitcoin because we know that cattle is actually worth something.)

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In fact, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange live cattle futures contract is deliverable, whereas the Bitcoin contract is settled in US dollars. I.e., the biggest US commodities exchange literally considers live cattle to be more practical to deliver than Bitcoin.

To me this suggests Bitcoin is not actually a good medium of exchange.

http://www.cmegroup.com/rulebook/CME/II/100/101/101.pdf

https://www.cmegroup.com/confluence/display/EPICSANDBOX/Bitc...

It might actually be the other way around. If you want Bitcoins in (say) six month's time, you can just go out and buy Bitcoins now, so it doesn't make much sense to have Bitcoin futures contracts except as a means of speculation on the price and that doesn't benefit from actual delivery. This isn't nearly so easy or practical if you want a certain number of live beef cattle of a certain quality in six months or a year. (Matt Levine talked about this in his Bloomberg column, as I recall.)

The Euro and GBP contracts are delivered 'physically', not cash-settled in USD:

http://www.cmegroup.com/rulebook/CME/III/250/261/261.pdf

I think this is not overvaluing the utility of Bitcoin, but undervaluing the utility of cattle. I, for one, am very bullish on bovine-based exchange.

You seem very confused about what money is.

I don't see the confusion. Care to explain?

Countries and their economies collapsing now and then are not that rare.

Crypto's value collapsing now and then isn't rare either

At the minimum you can't fake its value.

No, obviously you can. You're confusing the bits covered by a signature with the real-world interpretation of those bits.

Well, good luck getting even the real inflation rate from a corrupt government.

Good luck buying a slice of pizza with bitcoin.

In Zimbabwe you can.

Sometimes I wonder what percentage of the people talking about all the things one can do with bitcoin in Zimbabwe have been to Zimbabwe and done those things.

In this case I was the child of my parent. But given that people over there are selling their cattle with bitcoins it seems not too far off.

Are they transacting in bitcoin, or simply using bitcoin as a device to evade capital controls? There are lots of ways to get around capital controls, and bitcoin may very well be an effective way to do that, but that's not evidence of bitcoin's utility as a mainstream currency.

Seems rather rare to me.

If a Dotcom type of an event affected bitcoin ecosystem, it would not have recovered - it had millions of participants actively winding up and unwinding positions in real time, which is not something that bitcoin is capable of supporting at this time.

If a Housing Bubble type of an event affected bitcoin ecosystem, it would not have recovered. Lots of special purpose leveraged positions needed to be de-leveraged. Something that bitcoin is not capable of supporting.

If LTCM type event affected bitcoin ecosystem it would not have recovered. I dont even want to think about the effect of LTCM type event on a bitcoin.

All three were absolutely survived by the modern economies.

Sure, but not everyone has the privilege of living in a first world country. See for example the Republic of Georgia utilising blockchain tech to secure real estate transactions [0]. Now I am actually less afraid of investing my money as I don't trust their government.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2017/02/07/the-first-...

It uses a distributed public ledger, not bitcoin.

It does use bitcoin to verify the transactions. Point is, bitcoin - currently being the biggest blockchain deployed - is more trustworthy than most governments and therefore most currencies.

I am not an economist though and regulations seem to be necessary in the real world. Any ideas as to what technology, giving widespread adoption, would make them obsolete?

If the claim is that the private data unrelated to bitcoin transactions is being published and verified on a bitcoin blockchain then this is a scam.

It is absolutely amazing that the person who wrote this article still has a title of a Senior Editor that claims to write on this topic.

It is possible to hash the data and make that hash part of the transaction [0].

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.04015

That's not the application, however.

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