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Comment by Ma8ee | Hacker News Reader

That argument is equivalent with the argument “Ignaz Semmelweis was rejected by his peers and eventually placed in a psychiatric ward, and he was a genius. I’m rejected by my peers and placed in a psychiatric ward, therefore, I must also be a genius.”

Most technology that is rejected is rejected for good reasons, but few remember those technologies. In a few years Bitcoin will only be remembered in footnotes like the tulip bulb craze.

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Yeah, people keep saying that.

And year after year it sets higher lows, and new highs.

Transactions go up, users go up, dollar value goes up. New technology like lightning gets developed, it gets cheaper/faster (https://bitcoinvisuals.com/lightning).

But hey, the price is down 50% this year, so we can call it a failure.

Oh, no one is questioning its success as a pyramid scheme. In that regard it is extraordinary successful. It is all the widespread actual use that still is missing. (And I’m sure you can provide some anecdotes about someone using it a lot, but that doesn’t change the data.)

Here's a coinbase user graph, looks like nice growth to me. https://backlinko.com/coinbase-users#coinbase-users

One use case is digital gold. Gold is a ~$12tr market. While gold is a nice conductor and looks good in jewelry, most of gold's value is attributed to store of value and hedge against inflation.

Bitcoin does what gold does, but better. It simply needs time to catch up, but yes, the use case is ironically buying Bitcoin and sitting on it to preserve monetary value from debasement.

What, that they have 6 million active users per month? Is that supposed to be a high number? And those are the number of people who trade with bitcoins, not people actually “using” them for anything.

Gold is also volatile, but not nearly as bad as cryptocurrencies. And since gold actually has uses, it exists at least some kind of backstop for its value. I expect Bitcoins value to eventually become zero.

So how is Bitcoin doing better what gold is doing?

- Bitcoin has a better stock to flow ratio

- Bitcoin is cheaper to custodially secure than gold (no warehouses, security)

- Bitcoin is nearly impossible to counterfeit

- Bitcoin is cheaper to transfer (try flying gold to another country)

- Bitcoin travels magnitudes faster

- Bitcoin is more transparent, can prove its existence via proof of reserve.

These are the advantages of being digital. But only since the blockchain structure and decentralization have we ever had a provably scarce asset, it always previously depended on a trusted party.

Yeah but Bitcoins expected value is 0 as Nassim Taleb recently argued here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDnwT5h472c . Gold has uses in industry, art which give it a positive value.

And BitCoin also has a often unacknowledged effect of planetary centralisation making crypto mining on other planets in our solar system infeasible.

The market for gold's practical use pales in comparison to the market for its monetary use. Remember that central banks still hoard billions of dollars of gold bars in safes guarded by soldiers. Gold is a $12 trillion dollar market cap, and not because people love using it in electronics or showing off bracelets.

All value is human made. A painting is not worth $800m until someone decides to pay that much for it. Fiat dollars are only worth anything because we trust that other humans will take it from us in exchange for stuff we want. When we stop trusting this system, it ceases to have value. This happens for example in hyperinflation events where whole currencies die.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XMFEUNut18

Watch this and tell me they're not about to run out of greater fools.

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