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Comment by young_unixer | Hacker News Reader

To the anti-BTC crowd:

Yes, the current price of crypto is based on speculation, not in their current utility.

But there also was a dotcom bubble 20 years ago. Does that mean that the World Wide Web is useless?

Cryptocurrencies will be highly useful as stores of value and maybe as currency. We're just not there yet.

This is just the Gartner hype cycle, with the addition that for the first time we have a global market completely parallel to the traditional one with much less regulation. No wonder people are going to speculate with it. It's our new toy.

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There is absolutely no evidence backing this.

The utility of the WWW was eminently visible to experts even before it existed.

I have yet to meet an expert in equivalent fields who complains that the core issues in finance can be solved by cryptocurrencies.

In fact I don't really see any issues that can be solved by crypto. Trust issues? Crypto users are as likely if not more to be scammed and the technology itself doesn't build trust any more than a webpage does; it's the backing of a legal system that does.

International transfers? Google for a few minutes and you can find plenty of places where you can get mostly decent rates. The only places I can think of where this is an issue are Argentina and Venezuela, but that's not a niche that corresponds with the current or future crypto market valuations.

Descentralized trust? If there's one thing I trust less than human institutions, it's "bug-free" code.

Purchasing controlled substances and illegal weapons is a problem it solves.

Mr. Ulbricht has been in prison for 8 years now, a lot has changed since the Silk Road

In 2000 have you seen experts in landline companies, who would see WWW as the core solution to their problems?

I saw experts in computing having seen it a long time ago. Finance cotrariams have had way longer and none of their claims have planned out.

existing markets by their very nature don't want to be disrupted.

Its like saying librarians didnt see any issues with the storage of information before the internet came along.

The ‘issues solved’ by programmable money are the opportunity for full automation of the finance industry and for businesses to interact with it via smart contracts (instead of accountants and lawyers)

Uniswap could be a replacement for all the worlds exchanges, real estate agencies, commodities markets (including livestock) and your business could buy items from these markets with a script.

Combine this with something like self driving cars delivering goods and you have a whole supply chain that functions with zero human involvement.

Which is of course complete bollocks because the cost of the IT infrastructure for a lot fo these businesses is already lower than the transaction costs for these decentralised finance platforms.

> But there also was a dotcom bubble 20 years ago. Does that mean that the World Wide Web is useless?

No. But the web's sole claim to usefulness wasn't as a "store of value". Just as well it was useful for other things, because it turned out that speculator driven bubbles aren't superior places to store value...

If anyone wants to update their mental-models, this is highly interesting: BTC019: Bitcoin's Layer 2 Lightning Network w/ Ryan Gentry

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbr3NC9oqp4&list=PL_xlkwLDH1...

Isn’t a better analogy to compare BTC to pets.com and crypto (the technology) to the web?

I would say pets.com is better for the environment than the web. :)

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