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Comment by RichardHeart | Hacker News Reader

I did an debate with the author 6/4/2018. He lost. https://youtu.be/I9Pxv1i9W7M?list=PLN0RF11rNdP0kkklAiif2pBLv... By the way Bitcoin was at $2530. Ethereum was at $590. Bitcoin went up $69,000 since then. Ethereum went to $5000. But pundits and critics seem to be immune to educate from years of progress, and now history.

Quote from his article: "So why this hype? Because the cryptocurrency space, at heart, is simply a giant ponzi scheme where the only way early participants make money is if there are further suckers entering the space. The only “utility” for a cryptocurrency (outside criminal transactions and financial frauds) is what someone else will pay for it and anything to pretend a possible real-word utility exists to help find new suckers."

The gentlemen that invented and host this forum don't believe that. Disclaimer: I've founded a few cryptocurrencies.

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> By the way Bitcoin was at $2530. Ethereum was at $590. Bitcoin went up $69,000 since then. Ethereum went to $5000.

This is not a convincing argument to me. It tells me that the real utility is just speculation.

Shiba Inu has a market cap of 10B. But you’re an idiot if you think Elon musk dog money is valuable to society. If I make a 1000000% return selling magic beans, does that mean the beans have actual utility?

Best performing asset in the history of mankind. Removes counterparty risk. Removes middlemen. Privacy (if you work for it.) Better uptime than your bank and credit card network. Is a better way to login to things, self sovereign usernames and passwords, which are easy to use across all platforms (if they would stop with the lock-in.) The most transparent trading in the world. The highest yields in the world for those that want to just provide liquidity and have less risk.

A platform for things I don't like, but others love, customer rewards programs, collectibles, proof of ownership, timestamping. Removing the government money printing press from free war funding, and perhaps requiring a war tax, would reduce military globally. An impossible to fake record of the past, if you pay to write to the db.

You can get loans 24 hours a day with no signup that allow you to pay less tax by not selling the asset and paying capital gains, and just living off the borrowed money (like the wealthy have been doing for decades.) Shall I continue, or will you be ignoring all these features and benefits anyway?

> Removes counterparty risk.

Bitcoin does not remove counter-party risk. The counter-party is there, and it's risky:

* miners (can ditch Bitcoin; can censor your transactions)

* Bitcoin software (wallets; miners) (can have bugs which get your coins stolen)

* Bitcoin protocol (can have bugs which get your coins stolen)

* internet infrastructure (can censor Bitcoin)

I like this game. Security can't exist because you didn't compile your own keyboard controller firmware. Then just go all the way up the abstraction layers. Didn't audit and compile it yourself? I guess we're all hacked forever. Yet in fact it's a parade of imaginary horribles and the vast vast vast swathes of noobs remain unhacked for decades.

1. You can mine your own transaction, and the chance that some miner somewhere is happy to do so is extremely high (Which is why no transaction has ever been censored to the best of my knowledge.) 2. You running the code of your own choice is not a counterparty risk. It's your own problem. It's the same problem you have when with physically securing your seed words. There's no reason to break the word counterparty. 3. The protocol never had that kind of bug, some mobile wallets did with bad RNG though. 4. Yes and? The network routes around that, see China banning mining, etc.

I will help you trash talk bitcoin though. It's fun. Uncensorable? Ask Ross Ulbricht how the Federal Marshalls auctioned off his bitcoin to Tim Draper. Inflation bugs twice where anyone could mine as many coins as they like, one executed, and one responsablity disclosed about 2 years ago. Have a list of vulnerabilities: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Common_Vulnerabilities_and_Exposu... Have a list of weaknesses: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses Summary: The vast majority of users have no hacks at all, and far less problems than their banks give them, in my experience. P.S. Using your definition, is counterparty risk reduction even possible at all, and if so what would that look like? If you take the time to answer that, I think you'll see you're just trying to break a quite useful word.

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