Bitcoin: The Swindle of the Century | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin: The Swindle of the Century

entrepreneur.com

17 pointssjcsjc15 comments

Lost me with the description of Satoshi Nakamoto as "possibly fake". Pseudonymous is not the same as fake.

The rest of the article is a combination of straw-men and ad-hominems. Move along. Nothing to see here.

I'm surprised this article is still here. A few months ago, a well-written article by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet criticizing cryptocurrency was removed by the moderators.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffet aren't exactly the kind of authors who you flag... You're free to disagree with them, but they do know a thing or two about amassing large quantities of wealth!

I'd respectfully disagree. They knew how to get wealthy in the past, I doubt they've actively managed their investments for the last decade.

These are people who are worth listening to, but the first rule of investment is: past performance is no indication of future performance.

There are a lot of scams and swindles of the last few decades.

Student loans and medical billing are outright scams in the United States.

Purchasing a used car and many types of home financing are quite scammy as well.

Bitcoin is an asset with a wildly fluctuating price as people attempt to find a viable use case for it. It benefits from a strong network effect, not from its particular strength in storing or transfering wealth.

You can do stuff with a university degree, people recognize it. And you can do stuff with a car and money from a home finance. These might have predatory aspects to how you acquire them, but they aren't scams and nobody is being swindled.

You distinctly cannot do anything with bitcoin. There are a few dinky companies that will accept bitcoin as payment for unimportant knick-knacks and electronics, but that's about it. It will just sit, taking up space on a hard disk, until society decides to fully take it up as a currency (which won't happen in its current state).

An asset that has no use is not an asset, it's a liability.

A used car has no value when the engine blows up the next day.

A university degree has questionable utility when you spend $30,000 a year to make $30,000 a year, doing a job that previously didn't require a degree (sales).

I sent Bitcoin to someone in Uzbekistan. Foreign currency and even gold importe are banned there.

> A used car has no value when the engine blows up the next day.

Sure it does, you can sell it for scrap or repair/replace the engine.

> A university degree has questionable utility when you spend $30,000 a year to make $30,000 a year, doing a job that previously didn't require a degree (sales)

This isn't the case for everyone. Many people find utility in their degrees. Just because a few people don't doesn't mean there is no utility to be had.

> I sent Bitcoin to someone in Uzbekistan. Foreign currency and even gold importe are banned there.

So is bitcoin an asset or a method for transferring money? The person you sent those bitcoins to didn't keep them as bitcoins, they converted them to a local currency. If it's just a method for transferring money, then there are better ways (some don't see them as "better", though, because there are restrictions on them that prevent criminals from transferring their ill-gotten gains).

Spare me. If you've paid $3,000 for the car and sell it for $150 in scrap the next day, that's not a win win transaction.

Bitcoin's extreme inefficiency (in terms of electricity consumption) is the main reason why I didn't give cryptocurrency a second look when I learned about it several years ago. It never made sense to me that something should have value just because it's expensive to produce. You'd think capitalism would reward efficiency and not punish it.

That said, I think that Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrencies will revolutionize a lot of things including:

- How tech companies are created and who will end up owning them (it will be developers and early adopters instead of VCs and investors).

- It will transform what it means for a project to be open source; the GPL license will become increasingly important.

- It will transform how people think about ownership.

One of the biggest innovations of blockchain technology is that for the first time in history, it has allowed open source projects to have actual financial value. The value so far has been restricted to cryptocurrency projects but it will soon spread to other open source projects.

The value of a coin is not about the coin itself, it's about the community and the network of services that exist around it.

Proof of stake has never been shown to work and the largest projects attempting to move towards it, ie. Ethereum, are finding PoS's issues insurmountable. There is still no proof of concept for PoS (Casper), something that is becoming increasingly apparent to the ETH/BTC market these days...

There are several delegated Proof of Stake cryptocurrencies which achieve similar results as PoS and have been running successfully for years. E.g. Lisk and EOS.

The reason why Ethereum is taking so long to move to PoS is not because PoS is impossible but rather because a seamless migration between PoW to PoS is challenging. If they implemented PoS from scratch, it would be a lot easier.

Lisk is a sidechain and EOS is centralized.

YESSSS more do more of this. This is how we get the bottom

And yet it moves.

tl;dr "You don't have to take my word for it: No less an authority than JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon has identified crypto as a bubble just waiting to bust."

Is this satire?

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