Hacker News Reader

Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

I was real excited the first time that Bitcoin was explained to me. I saw it as the first real alternative to paper money. But what I soon learned is that most of the people associated with Bitcoin saw it as digital gold and were only interested in seeing the value rise and cashing out.

I've seen a few positive developments every once in a while that fail to get much adoption. So I keep waiting and waiting. It increasingly looks to me like whatever solution eventually wins will be built upon the existing banking system ;<(.

View on HN

> "But what I soon learned is that most of the people associated with Bitcoin saw it as digital gold "

Since it was basically designed to work like a pseudo-physical commodity, and most of the rhetoric to support its existence is warmed-over goldbuggery, why should this be surprising?

Because you could easily tweak the algorithms to make it act like stockpiling cheese. If you use a value time pair adding inflation that reduces the value of old coins is trivial.

Gold seems like it was always an odd thing to pin an economy to to begin with. A resource that isn't inherently tied to value that seems to have been "chosen" by centuries of evolution towards a scarce material that could be centrally controlled. What's more, it has become less scarce as better technologies have emerged for extracting it. And just like printing excess fiat currency, early gold rushes showed the same type of rapid inflation in local economies, with money made by those selling mining tools & services to miners, and those purchasing the mined gold to arbitrage it out to other geographical regions. It was still just an abstraction layer put on top of direct bartering to solve the liquidity problems inherent to direct bartering once the # of goods and services reach a high enough level.

The fundamental principal of economics that many people miss when they focus mainly on monetary supply is that the velocity of capital [0] is of equal or perhaps even greater importance.

[0] https://www.aier.org/article/what-is-money-velocity-and-why-...

Seems like adoption as a payment method halted when Bitcoin had scaling issues.

Now the community seems pretty split in two. There's people who are for Bitcoin and see it as a store of value and people who are for Bitcoin Cash who see it as a store of value and a method of payment.

The main contention seems to be around block sizes and wether to increase the block size to make it more scalable, hence the BCH fork.

They both want to scale transactions, they just disagree about how. Bitcoin Cash wants much higher transaction throughput at the base layer (i.e. the actual blockchain). While Bitcoin wants the high throughput lower value transactions to happen at layers built on top of the base chain, e.g. Lightning

Bitcoin is pretty much the modern gold, if you’re looking for something revolutionary as in “can be used for day to day transactions” you’ll have to check more modern cryptocurrencies that aim to be stable, regulated, and fast.

Same here. I thought it sounded great because I have zero knowledge of monetary policy, which has been at it in modern form since Isaac Newton. So naturally I thought it was a godsend. Truth is: financial institutions aren't just something a few hackers can whip up in a decade. The mill-billionaire bitcoin hackers were in the right place at the right time for lightening to strike. I think like ADAS/SDV, cryptocurrency has a looooong way to go.

Ethereum is probably more exciting from a tech perspective currently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com