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Comment by ALittleLight | Hacker News Reader

I think this is less about growth factor and more about "killer app". The killer application of Google is that it actually finds what you are searching for really well (well, it did). That's what set Google apart from other search engines. The killer feature of crypto is...?

DAOs, NFTs, smart contracts, random tokens all seem less like good features and more like transparent scams or terrible ideas that don't work. It's fine if adoption is slow - but there should actually be something beyond Ponzi schemers and hackers stealing from each other. Drugs and tax evasion, sure, but how far does that take you?

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What was money's killer app? Bitcoin is money from the ground up. It's going fantastically fast. As for smart contracts, these are the basis of Bitcoin. A permissionless ledger inherently requires smart contracts. Their killer app is a a distributed ledger. There are already a few different contracts that can be made on Bitcoin that allow for different custodial schemes.

What people are selling as far as DAOs, NFTs, and "smart contracts" where they mean are better and more sophisticated than Bitcoin, can all be favorably described as the application of Bitcoin's critique of money to the issuance and governance of other tokens representing other forms of property, and are inherently more complex. Least favorably described, they are scams to boost leverage powered attacks. The middle of the road might be that they're the naive notion that building more complex constructs on top of what Bitcoin defined is immediately achievable without compromising invariants that matter for useful money.

All to say that the "killer app" critique of Bitcoin probably ins't the best lens, and that if it's more complicated than custody and payments, especially for people where that isn't readily available, it's probably further out than is survivable for a single company requiring the kind of trajectory of those that create "apps".

Money's killer app is that it can be exchanged for goods and services and is a standardized unit of exchange. Bitcoin can do that too, albeit slower, less secure against the risks most users face, and less throughput, but the problem Bitcoin has is that anything it can do fiat can do better. Or, if that's not quite true, the things that separate Bitcoin from fiat are trivial or make Bitcoin worse.

Bitcoin is basically a kind of musical chairs for money. People buy in and try to get out and maybe they make money and maybe they lose money. People will play this game, clearly, but that doesn't mean Bitcoin is the future of money anymore than casino chips are the future of money.

>What was money's killer app?

Medium of exchange or rather the division of labor. Bitcoin doesn't do it. In fact, most people who like Bitcoin want it to be a terrible medium of exchange. Everytime you hear people talk about Bitcoin on Reddit there are HODL memes, aka people openly proclaim that they don't want to use the money for anything other than speculating that it goes up in value.

The speculation is on that the alignment of central banks globally is towards savings debasement and non-custodial property. HODL is a rallying call to exit the current monetary infrastructure into the next one, one that specifically allows for a free market for money. Bitcoin is a bet on that transacting with bitcoins will ultimately be cheaper and with a vastly better security model than all existing infrastructure, from the concerns of a nation state down to microtransactions.

They're not speculating that it will go up for no reason. The investment thesis is that it solves real world problems, and that everyone who thinks it doesn't sounds like someone comparing fax machines to the internet in the 90s.

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