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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate the feeling, but the problem is that Bitcoin just isn't very useful for the original vision, "a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash". [1] It's fine for a little light crime, where people are willing to put up with slow transactions, high costs, inconvenience, and significant risks to e.g., buy some mail-order LSD. But when you compare it with things like debit cards, Venmo, and M-Pesa, it's just not competitive.

I think Bitcoin was a really interesting idea in the pre-iPhone era, but for a variety of reasons it just didn't pan out. Which is why the space was so readily colonized by scammers, grifters, criminals, fraudsters, speculators, and loons.

[1] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

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It was supposed to be cash without the burden of nation state oversight. Instead, it turned into a giant casino ecosystem of unregulated securities involving more and more layers of abstraction (exchanges, stable-coins, NFTs, bundled transactions, hedges, subchains, ...)

> It was supposed to be cash without the burden of nation state oversight

While convenience remains the core point under contention, the secondary point of debate with crypto is the one you raise here: why is this a good thing?

Why would I want an unregulated currency, free of consumer protections or government oversight? If someone steals my credit card I call the bank and reverse the charges. When a bank gets robbed or collapses, the FDIC ensures consumers are unaffected.

Governments aren't a power independent of their communities, they're not aliens from outer space interfering with natural human ways of life. Government is how we the community organize ourselves to ensure our collective protection. They're, obviously, deeply imperfect, but a system completely severing itself from those organizing principles is fated to replicate them with even greater imperfection.

Your last paragraph is spot on. The right know that government intervention is what holds them back from consolidating power over the less fortunate in society, so it has been a central plank of their strategy to present the government as indeed being 'aliens from outer space', and so to neuter its reach.

> Why would I want an unregulated currency, free of consumer protections or government oversight

And why would I believe that it has value compared to gold, or a cow? And while the value of a dollar is an abstract of those physical trades, at least it has the backing of the nation’s resources, its people, and its military ability to plunder. Bitcoin has all the backing of …

If you read about the history of nation-state oversight of finance, you can learn that going "without the burden of nation state oversight" is approximately equivalent to "a giant casino ecosystem". Not always, of course, but often enough. E.g., the South Seas bubble, the wildcat banking era, and the US stock market leading up to Black Tuesday. An awful lot of financial regulation comes into being because financiers working in some unregulated area create such a giant disaster that there's enough popular anger to override government's normal tendency to suck up to people with money.

> I think Bitcoin was a really interesting idea in the pre-iPhone era, but for a variety of reasons it just didn't pan out.

It’s panning out just fine. Everyone who thinks Bitcoin is old news presupposes that you can do something like Bitcoin, but better. There’s no evidence of this in any non-Bitcoin cryptocurrency.

This also ignores that Bitcoin is improving every year. Tools like Liquid and Lightning are incredibly sophisticated, first principles based approaches to real problems in finance, banking, and fungibility. That fly by night securities called "cryptocurrencies" with shallow liquidity claim that they can do better, but always fail to deliver, hasn't undermined anything about Bitcoin.

I agree with the parent post. This is great for crypto. Maybe all the web developers who think they can do cryptography better than cryptographers can go do something else now.

> Everyone who thinks Bitcoin is old news presupposes that you can do something like Bitcoin, but better.

For most people's everyday purposes, all those things the parent mentioned are doing something like Bitcoin, but better.

The one technical problem that cryptocurrency unquestionably handles better than any other technology is solve a problem that is only experienced by people who choose to use cryptocurrency.

This is patently false, many crypto currencies have done what Bitcoin has done much better, Fantom, Monero, Ethereum to name a few off the top of my head

I was an early adopter of bitcoin (2012) and I'm pretty over it at this point.

It hasn't managed to do much more than be fancy digital gold. I don't find gold very interesting. It isn't a productive asset. It's just a shiny rock that people lock up in a vault. It doesn't benefit society.

And as financial instruments, both bitcoin and gold are deflationary, which seems quite bad.

I still have a bit of hope for some actually useful stuff to come out of the defi / smart-contract space. But I'm still fairly skeptical. There is a lot of noise and little signal.

Monero.

Yeah, the original vision was never plausible. BTC has absolutely never been viable as a currency and never will be.

Totally. Why would I want anyone I pay to know exactly how much I’ve spent on all my other transactions?

Not a problem thanks to CashFusion [0], easy privacy for P2P electronic cash.

[0] https://cashfusion.org/

What do you mean "pre-iPhone era"? Bitcoin was released in 2009.

2009 is well before the iPhone was the default computer

iPhone is at 15% global market share; when was it ever a "default computer"?

iPhone and iPhone-like devices.

The iPhone era describes mobile computing, touchscreens, app stores, etc.

Exactly. I'm not a big fan of Apple, but in the same way they defined the user experience for desktops via the Mac, they defined the user experience for mobile computing with the iPhone. So much so that most people don't even remember that there were plenty of smartphones previous to the iPhone.

2009 seems to be the start of what I'd call the iPhone era. 2011 would be the latest.

Sure, but that was really the beginning of the smartphone era. In 2009, the iPhone had ~15% market share for smartphones. [1] Counting 2007 and 2008, Apple sold ~15 million units, about half of those in the last quarter of 2008. So when the Bitcoin paper was first published, Apple had sold something under 10m units. And that paper was of course based on earlier work.

My point is that conceptually, the peer-to-peer, proof-of-work thing was much more suited to the desktop era, a sort of SETI@Home for money. It wasn't until a few years later that we truly began to see what the mobile era would look like (e.g., Venmo was August 2009, Uber was May 2010). The peer-to-peer aspect is basically a failure, as the rise of mining pools and centralized exchanges demonstrate. As do the relatively small transaction volumes for Bitcoin compared to things that are actual modern cash substitutes. If somebody were inventing cryptocurrency today, it would not look like Bitcoin.

[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/02/04/idc_apple_iphone_...

I think its one saving grace will be that it is used for non-recreational drugs that will soon become illegal or functionally unobtainable, for example Plan B and HRT.

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