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Comment by jsloss | Hacker News Reader

Right, 10 years in and bitcoin has proven it's value as a digital alternative to gold.

Ethereum is 4 years old, and the vast majority of "tokens" even younger. Crypto is very much still early. I don't mean this as a "cop out" but rather a sober reality of how much further the tech has to go.

Would it not be more fair to compare crypto progress to that of the early internet? It took most of a decade of development before the modern internet was born, another decade before the bubble burst and a few more years before pundits stopped calling it a fad, and recognized the business value.

We should all be skeptical of those who would over promise and under deliver on new technology, but I can't imagine why we wouldn't assume an optimistic stance towards it.

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No, the Internet, even before it was called that way, always had more demand than capacity. For various reasons, not all of them commercial, the Internet was a thing that was very much desired. Even before that, people wanted to build the Internet's predecessors: Connecting computers (long before they were common!) to foster easy and quick communication and exchange of data over any distance was something people have always been working towards.

The Internet was always growing in capacity, size, population and applicability. At no point was there anyone ever saying anywhere "gee, we have so much Internet, what shall we ever do with it". Even during and just after the dot com bubble the Internet itself still continued growing.

Comparing cryptocoins to the Internet, the thing that massively changed virtually all aspects of human life in the past few decades, is...

proven it's value as a digital alternative to gold

I wouldn’t expect to be taken seriously after leading with that...

You’re right I should have included a “so far”.

>Right, 10 years in and bitcoin has proven it's value as a digital alternative to gold.

Meh, it's far more volatile than gold. What it has done is proven it's value as the cash-equivalent of the internet for illicit trade.

It is hard to say how much bitcoin (and other cryptos) are used for illicit trade but one simply has to log onto a darknet market and look at the number of reviews for specific product listings, or for entire seller accounts to see that likely tens of millions of dollars a day in exchanges are occurring across 'publicly known' darknet markets, the bulk of that for drugs although still a decent amount for digital services like credit card dumps as well as fake identification/documents/coupons, weapons etc.

I even found human remains for sale on a darknet market while attempting to get a rough idea of how much commerce is taking place on them early last year. Multiple sellers had basically every major bone in the human body for sell including dozens and dozens of skulls . Now, you can buy skulls on the clear net but they're often well-handled medical specimens. I got the very distinct impression these were absolutely grave-robbed remains.

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