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Comment by rglullis | Hacker News Reader

And Friendster was once the largest social network and the first successful one. Your point?

Bitcoin was a good first prototype, but it is clearly a failed experiment. It's not used as a currency, the "store of value" narrative is bogus. All it took was the first asset bubble to pop to demonstrate how BTC is only correlated with other stock prices.

It already loses to Ethereum in many metrics: transaction volume, number of wallets, decentralization (number of nodes participating in block validation) and so on. Layer-2 systems in Ethereum hold more Wrapped Bitcoin than lightning by orders of magnitude. Even if you really want to use BTC, the best way to transact bitcoin today is by wrapping it and using it on Ethereum.

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The point being the criticism of crypto as a whole as a tremendous waste of energy will still be valid until bitcoin is a small fraction of crypto.

Bitcoin is not going to go away just because lots of people criticize it. Bitcoin is only going to go away when we build an alternative that has (most) of its (perceived) benefits and fewer of its drawbacks.

IOW, stop criticizing "crypto" and start focusing on criticizing "Bitcoin". Be specific about your arguments, otherwise everyone will feel like they are on a Mexican standoff and you will never get the support to win the good fight.

The chief perceived benefit of Bitcoin is its speculative asset value. We may try to unseat this with a new, less environmentally harmful speculative asset, but it's unethical to deliberately attempt to suck people into a negative-sum scheme, plus it won't work: crypto coins move in tandem with each other.

You are reversing cause and effect. The original promise of Bitcoin was to become a p2p payment system that could be an alternative (not a replacement) for cash. All of the speculation around it comes from that.

The unethical thing is to keep BTC around just because there are so many sunk costs associated with it.

Friendster isn't currently the largest social network. The point is that people associate the biggest product of the category with the category itself. Like web search is synonymous with Google.

Ether market cap alone is about 50% of Bitcoin's (~230 vs ~470 billion USD).

Look at Coingecko's list of ERC20 tokens, all of the top 60 tokens have a market cap above $1 billion. You can go ahead and remove Tether if you want, there is still another ~$100B there.

Bitcoin is not so dominant as the maxis would like to believe. It won't take much for Ethereum (as an ecosystem) to catch up, and when it does the flippening will come fast.

Android has a far larger market share than iOS. And yet people still voice their dislike of Android without dismissing smartphones in general.

the problem though is that the argument is unhelpful and disingenuous at that point: people--apparently including yourself--argue against "crypto" painting a broad brush because of how a handful of projects work. Are you against the concept of chat applications as a whole due to the privacy issues of the dominating players? If so, that would suck, as there are certainly projects in the space of chat that don't exhibit those properties. But when you just go around yelling "crypto is bad because X" when X isn't really a property of crypto you might emotionally feel justified but hopefully you know that intellectually you are holding back progress with FUD.

One would expect that association at a sports bar, not on hacker news.

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