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Comment by dadoge | Hacker News Reader

How could ANYTHING stand the test of time and be worth 440 billion if it has no utility? Genuine question.

It's not Berkshire Hathaway, Bitcoin's "test of time" was 3 years of media attention that is now coming to a close. Regulation and taxation is disincentivizing people from using it. Exchanges and liquidity holders are being ousted as scammers, it's basically The Reckoning for everyone who promoted a Laissez-faire economy.

I love the idea of a democratized currency, but Bitcoin's value is propped up by very little now. As I said before, you cannot run an economy on goodwill alone. Someone's getting fooled into holding the bag, and the longer you hold out for a payday, the greater the chance that fool is you.

14 years*

14 years is a lot different than 3 years.

That a whole decade more for people to learn about it, and especially since the main features has not changed. Yes, there are improvements to the protocol, but the main thing has changed little over the years

Betting on the stability of a protocol is a good way to lose your money when that protocol is obsoleted.

Edit: I'm coming right out and saying it; if we even have to talk about L2 chains, you might as well just admit that Bitcoin itself needs an update to be usable.

Paper cash was an innovation to solve the issue that gold is hard to lug around. And very much an analogy of a L2 network

It is arguably easier to counterfeit than gold (there is fools gold too…)

The base layer is very secure. L2s will be faster, but have a trade off of being less secure.

Note: the L2 Lightning Network is different than L2s for ETH like POLY, POLY has its own market cap (garbage idea IMO). Lightning is just a tool to make BTC more efficient

See, it's already over. If you have to explain that to a layperson, it's not going to get adopted. Furthermore, if people are taught to adopt this mentality, that puts them at pretty great risk for getting scammed.

Again - do whatever you want and invest wherever you please. But L2 chains are not catapulting crypto back into usability, and Lightning is living evidence that Bitcoin's bet failed. If you need auxiliary technology to transact the money you supposedly own, your protocol is broken to the core and needs replacement.

> See, it's already over. If you have to explain that to a layperson, it's not going to get adopted.

Does every layperson have to adopt stocks or commodities? Are these also dead if a layperson does not adopt it?

A democratized currency sounds kind of neat, but bitcoin was never this. It started out as an oligarchical currency with the halvenings (especially spaced the way they were). It became oligarchical at the transaction verification level (the level of taxation) when ASICs were developed for it.

It has accidentally utility: speculation.

That's only good until enough people get burned so bad they never touch it again. Then it has completely no utility.

Gold has survived as a speculative vehicle because it's been relatively stable over a much longer time period. That, and unlike Bitcoin, gold is actually a physical asset that is not held together by (wasting) electricity.

> How could ANYTHING stand the test of time and be worth 440 billion if it has no utility? Genuine question.

1) markets aren't rational nor are the people in them

2) BTC is a currency but is being treated like a commodity

3) a lot of big orgs, investors, and even governments bought in and now either hold and pray for growth, or else pray it doesn't drop. They have every incentive to hype up its value even though its use for most things is essentially moot; your Mom isn't going to use BTC to buy catfood, and its utility on the dark web is now overshadowed by things like Monero. You HODL and hype cuz otherwise you lose billions.

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