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Comment by tal8d | Hacker News Reader

> It's closer to digital beanie babies than any sort of serious currency.

And then he flushed any possibility for a good faith argument away. What, are keeping your powder dry on the tulip mania line? I'm long past the evangelical phase on bitcoin, but back when I was doing that (when it was trading in the double digits) - I heard the exact same thing. Merchants would adopt and then quickly abandon, money transmitters would welcome and then ban... and banks would just ban. I was de-banked before it was cool. I mourn the opening of crypto trade desks at the likes of Goldman Sachs more than most, because my first exposure to bitcoin was on the cypherpunks mailing list, but that doesn't mean that bitcoin failed. The comparison to beanie babies is laughably moronic.

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It's absolutely failed as a currency because nobody actually wants to accept it as payment for services. Digital gold? Sure, complete with late-night advertisements -- and nobody actually owning actual gold. The fundamentals of bitcoin are completely orthogonal to its current purpose as a speculation vehicle.

Oops, that is the other one - "digital gold". The litecoin people really latched onto that one, declaring themselves to be silver. There was already a digital gold a few year before bitcoin (something about an eagle, or the Liberty Bell...), it was a gold backed paypal that was quickly destroyed by the feds. So no, bitcoin isn't "digital gold".

According to Hayek fed wont ever allow such thing as long as they have power over it, so I'm not suprised. Maybe they don't have enough power over bitcoin?

They definitely don't, and it is no accident that they've maintained a state of uncertainty. After the B-cash hardfork created a potential taxable event, the IRS refused to release any kind of guidance or warning for how they'd classify things - and there is a massive difference between short and long term capital gains tax. But they can't outright ban it, because development would continue outside the country. It would be a crippling self inflicted wound, because there will be a strong need in the near future for what bitcoin provides. In a world of autonomous software agents (short of self aware AI), meat space money won't work - due to clawbacks and human deceit. They'll eventually try a push for some kind of Fedcoin, but that will turn out the same way it did when the Canadians tried it. Until then they'll continue mounting their resistance at the fiat interface points.

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