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Comment by berbec | Hacker News Reader

What other ten year old technologies, that went on to be successful, were as useless for their stated purpose as crypto?

If crypto is money, can I:

Spend it at Amazon? My grocery store? My corner deli? Pay my rent? Pay my employees?

If crypto is a store of value can I trust it will have any rational storage value over any time period?

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Digital cameras, when invented back in the 70s. It took decades until they were usable, and still another decade until they started to approach the quality of nondigital.

It's not a very good example, in that the barrier there was physical development of hardware. This is purely a software problem.

Another obvious difference is that from the first moment they were on the market, they had some practical use, and the amount of use grew quickly. If we count from the Kodak DCS 100 introduced in 1991 at a price of $20,000, then ten years later we see that they were being bought at the rate of 18 million units a year and rapidly rising. [1]

Bitcoin, in contrast, has very little practical use 10 years after introduction. Its merchant adoption peaked years ago. That's far short of what an actually useful digital payments product can do. Look at M-Pesa [2] for contrast. It was introduced only a year early than Bitcoin. It has tens of millions of active users, and processes up to 900 transactions per second, with an average of 160 per second. [3] A huge success compared with Bitcoin's average of 3-4 transactions per second, most of which are speculative rather than practical. [4]

[1] https://www.dpreview.com/articles/5474101424/pmaresearch2003...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa

[3] https://www.nation.co.ke/news/MPesa-transactions-rise-to-Sh1...

[4] https://www.blockchain.com/en/charts/transactions-per-second

> If we count from the Kodak DCS 100 introduced in 1991

Kodak invented digital cameras in 1975.

>> If we count from the Kodak DCS 100 introduced in 1991

> Kodak invented digital cameras in 1975.

DigiCash was founded in 1990 based on a paper from 1983.

Exactly. I think the fair place to start counting with both Bitcoin and digital cameras is first consumer launch.

And with M-Pesa versus Bitcoin, they're both digital cash, so I think it's even easier to see how badly Bitcoin has done.

Yes, but the real world advantages of digital cameras were apparent from the very start.

Currently there are zero real world practical use cases for cryptocurrency that aren't associated with illegal activity. If anyone knows of legal applications of cryptocurrency, feel free to respond. I'd love to be proven wrong.

Digital cameras were useful since day 1. Nobody was confused about what to do with them. What you're talking about as "usable" is just technological refinement that happens to all things.

And the industry leader (Kodak) at the time didn't think digital would be useful and delayed R&D. But don't worry they came up with Kodakcoin!

To convert Kodakcoin to cash, you have to send rolls of 12 Kodakcoins at a time off for a week to the lab to be developed. But just wait until some day there will finally be a Coinomat booth in every shopping center parking lot that can develop your Kodakcoins into cash in only 24 hours!

Great example!

>If crypto is a store of value can I trust it will have any rational storage value over any time period?

There are different types of cryptocurrencies and the one you are looking for is known as a "stable-coin". I suggest looking into Bancor and Maker DAI to get a better view of how these currencies keep their value over time.

> Spend it at Amazon? My grocery store? My corner deli? Pay my rent? Pay my employees?

YES on all accounts.

No, you can't spend Bitcoin at Amazon. They don't accept it.

The others depend on whether they choose to accept it or not. It's not the same as legal tender, where they must accept it.

I don't think "legal tender" means what you think it means.

In many jurisdictions (including the US and the Eurozone, as far as I know), almost no business is required to accept legal tender as payment. Legal tender is only required to be accepted when settling a debt, and even then there can be restrictions (such as a maximum denomination or number of banknotes or coins, a maximum amount that can be settled in cash, or contract obligations).

I think it does mean exactly what I think it means :)

It's not about debt, it's about payments. If there is no agreement to the contrary, then you must accept legal tender. You also don't have to accept anything else.

Amazon have chosen not to accept Bitcoin, and instead to accept payment via certain credit cards. Saying that they accept Bitcoin is false.

Trying to pay people unexpectedly in Bitcoin or chickens or something else will not go well. They can demand legal tender, unless there are other agreements in place.

I still don't understand why you are mentioning legal tender in this discussion. Legal tender is cash, credit cards are not legal tender.

Therefore Amazon does not accept legal tender.

Yes, businesses like Amazon could demand payment in legal tender (or credit cards, or Bitcoin) but they are under no obligation to accept any of those forms of payment.

Bitcoin is no different than credit cards with respect to legal tender.

Ah yeah, the OP is arguing elsewhere that Bitcoin is legal tender in some European countries, and here he is trying to say you can use it to pay your employees and Amazon etc. I can see how I am confusing things, sorry.

You can use a service to pay Amazon shopping with bitcoin.

https://www.cryptocompare.com/coins/guides/how-to-buy-on-ama...

Sure, maybe there's a service that allows you to pay with live chickens for Amazon gift vouchers. By your definition that makes live chickens money, I guess.

Chickens could very well be money, at least bones have been used before.

edit:https://www.bbc.com/news/av/business-18827269/a-brief-histor...

You're missing the point. Again. He countered your argument. You reply ignores that fact, and just tries to derail the conversation.

If that is true for you, I'm impressed. Could I see the properly redacted receipt from any of these listed places showing you paying in crypto? Maybe a pack of gum would be easiest. It'll be like 0.0000000001 BTC.

Could also show 1 mBTC but that's a UX question imho.

Again, you're missing the point, and trying to derail the conversation. He called you on your outrageous claim, asking for proof. You dodged and tried to derail, instead of providing the proof he requested. But that certainly proves his point, that you're not sincere about your extraordinary claim "YES on all accounts" that you can't even provide any ordinary evidence to support when asked to, instead you suddenly try to change the subject to UX.

I agree if such a receipt from a corner store could be shown, it could have many ways of displaying the amount of BTC paid for the pack of gum. I would love to see such a receipt.

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