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Comment by kungfooguru | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this may take the cake for most hilariously absurd bitcoin article.

Let's see who laughs in 5 years. Do you have an economical counter argument?

I'm pretty sure you will reject "Bitcoin is just a fad" out of hand.

Before you throw too many numbers back at me, realize that billions of dollars were spent on Beanie Babies, even back before the last decade of US fiat erosion.

I keep hearing about these beanie babies as a comparison - is there a whitepaper describing how that revolutionary payment system worked?

Otherwise it would be really stupid to use it as comparison to Bitcoin.

It seems he just wanted to draw a parallel between two "manias". I have no idea what will happen to Bitcoin, but it sure does look like a mania. I do see the benefits too, of course.

Most Bitcoins are purchased as a speculation, expecting their value to go way up. It's possible that the gold rush is already over, but it's also possible it's only beginning.

I wasn't really drawing a comparison. I was pointing out that fads can involve a lot of money (so arguments about lots of money being involved are not good arguments against something being a fad...).

Hopefully you will at least concede the logical possibility of a stupid or wrong or meaningless whitepaper.

In five years the world will be exactly the damn same as it was five years ago (2008). What is it about tech that makes people believe that sociological change happens at absurd time scales?

I'm a fan of bitcoin but I don't think it's scalable enough yet to make such a large change, since every full peer has to see every transaction. A possible solution is for most people to use offchain transactions, with service providers who use onchain transactions to settle balances periodically. But then you have centralized services that can be attacked by governments. Or you put them behind Tor but then it's pretty scary trusting them with your money.

Then again, I'm not a millionaire because in 2009 I thought bitcoin wasn't scalable. Maybe they'll solve it before it's a problem.

It's already not a problem. Look at all those wallets on mobile phones: they never store the whole history and yet the keys they keep are completely safe.

You forgot to mention , in detail, all sorts of attacks nation states could make on bitcoin itself and how would bitcoin respond, realistically.

>> Let's see who laughs in 5 years

Hah :P

It's nice to see yet another sane person on HN, by the way.

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