It's so weird to me that here, on hacker news people have such a hatred of coinbase.
Coinbase is a YC company, and if some of the predictions are accurate, will be the highest valued YC company so far.
Coinbase is a YC company, and if some of the predictions are accurate, will be the highest valued YC company so far.
It usually seems far more nuanced to me. People seem somewhat skeptical on some finer points of cryptocurrencies, blockchains and distributed ledger ideas.
But then they see supporters trumpeting 'this is good for Xcoin' on every piece of news, good or bad, and can't help but get a snake-oil-salesman-y feeling from that. Everything in life has many ways in which it can or does suck, and you won't want to trust people who handwaive away or dismiss the sucky parts.
So... partially reasonable technical and idea concerns, and partially a PR problem that anything with a particularly large and vocal fanbase will have.
Many (most?) of the conversations I see on here around crypto are copiously littered with straight FUD. Very little arguing on the actual nuances and intricacies of crypto. Seemingly low understanding / imagination of the possibilities allowed by the underlying concepts. Histrionics about power consumption in every thread.
Disclosure: I liquidated my crypto positions last year, and currently hold $0 worth of cryptocurrency.
So when I see someone advocating for Bitcoin specifically they come off as transparently self-serving and having no real interest in the technology. I see a lot of parallels to projects refusing to migrate off of Python 2, except in this case Bitcoin enthusiasts are compelled to actively evangelize the inferior technology instead of just sticking to it as the rest of the technology space moves along.
It's already the leader by a long shot on network effects, stakeholders would be insane to squander that by letting other projects beat it technologically.
Obviously it can't move as fast as a smaller project (just like a large co vs a startup) but it will absolutely die if it doesn't move at all.
I view Bitcoin a lot like a company. Right now network security is paid for by inflation (issuing new coins), similar to a startup operating with VC money.
At the very least bitcoin must increase transaction volume so it can increase fee revenue without ridiculous individual transaction fees.
Because ASIC vulnerability has led to the concentration of the majority of the world's mining power among a small number of organizations in China, and because the amount of power consumed securing the blockchain with PoW is silly and ever-increasing.
> There are other crypto projects that can fill in the holes that Bitcoin leaves (tx fees, slow, etc).
It's not just about filling holes, other cryptocurrency projects are superior technologically in every way. And since Bitcoin has been demonstrated to be impossible to modernize this gap will only become more extreme over time.
Bitcoin remains the locus of the cryptocurrency movement through network effects alone, which is why evangelists are so adamantly in favor of Bitcoin specifically. If it loses its throne as the "main" cryptocurrency it will never increase in price to the value that Bitcoin speculators are hoping because other than its network size it has no advantages.
> It needs to WORK, and work very well, which it has demonstrated.
I think it has categorically demonstrated that it does not work, at least not for the purpose that the original Bitcoin paper laid out. The fact that Bitcoin transactions are slow and expensive has so compellingly demonstrated that Bitcoin cannot be a useful cryptocurrency that even Bitcoin advocates admit this and have fallen back to claiming that it will instead be a store of value and that an effective currency layer could be built on top of it.
It doesn’t replace mail, it isn’t used mainstream for anything but illegal activity and casino speculation, and I’m not sure what productivity boost we are talking about here.
At some point you don’t get to make the internet or the “Henry Ford said they’d ask for a faster horse” comparison.
At some point you have to deliver the goods. Has coinbase made a shitload of money, sure. Has blockchain done any of the things its prophets have promised? Nope.