[RexRollman]

My viewpoint is that things like Bitcoin are little more than cryptographically engineered Monopoly Money. That said, I do believe that eventually, paper money will go away (if for no other reason than to track every purpose for government surveillance).

[marcell]

Tongue in cheek: I believe this attitude proves grand parent. Of course, only if Bitcoin actually succeeds :)

[adrianmacneil]

This viewpoint comes up a lot on HN, but it's missing the point. Don't think about bitcoin as an alternate currency, think of of it as a distributed protocol, like TCP/IP or bittorrent, which supports arbitrary value transfer. The media tends to focus a lot on the price of bitcoin, but in the long run the price is irrelevant.

[api]

I deliberately said cryptocurrency not Bitcoin, since I view Bitcoin as an alpha version of distributed digital money.

[gnaritas]

> My viewpoint is that things like Bitcoin are little more than cryptographically engineered Monopoly Money.

Exactly like USD and all other first world currencies. Bitcoin is simply the next step in money.

[rhino369]

It's not a next step because the US dollar is monopoly money forced on you by the government. Also it's supply is controlled to keep the value steady.

Bitcoin has nobody forcing you into using it and nobody controls the price. Bitcoins are just bits on a ledger that maybe someone will buy from you tomorrow, maybe.

Even in the niche roles where bitcoin is superior to bank accounts, credit cards, and cash, there is nothing beyond momentum keeping people from switching to another type of cyptocurrency. That's why it's monopoly money.

[empath75]

I wouldn't discount network effects. I think a lot of people are going to build more and more services on top of the bitcoin blockchain rather than creating their own blockchain, just because it's convenient in terms of adoption and development and so on. And once those services are there, it's going to be hard to migrate them off. And that will eventually create some sustainable value to the coins.

As to what that value will be, I have no fucking idea. I don't imagine that it will be a major currency. But it'll always have some use cases, imo.

I mean your argument is essentially like saying: TCP/IP is just a protocol and anybody can switch to a different protocol any time. Well, sure. But they haven't. And they won't unless it breaks completely.

[rhino369]

Switching from bitcoin to litecoin seems trivial. I don't think the networking effects are that strong for bitcoin, especially since the current number of big users is pretty small. It seems like 99% of businesses who actually accept it are just using a payment processor, which could migrate to a new system overnight.

You can point to TCP/IP, but we've seen other protocols come and go. Back in the late 90/early 2000s's AOL messenger was dominate. Now nobody uses it. And that had very strong network effects, it was a messenger system.

[gnaritas]

> there is nothing beyond momentum keeping people from switching to another type of cyptocurrency. That's why it's monopoly money.

That statement demonstrates you don't understand cyptocurrency at all. You're absolutely wrong, the difference between them is security, and that's something people value. And no, you can't trivially just substitute another crypto in place of bitcoin, other cryptos have neither the liquidity nor the security (which comes from the size of the network) to effectively move around the amount of money bitcoin can move around.

> I don't think the networking effects are that strong for bitcoin

Which means flatly you don't understand how cryptos work; no one who does would make that statement.

[Frondo]

It's not the next step because it's anti-democratic. It's a step away from democratic government engagement in the money of a country.

Bitcoin encodes a lot of economic assumptions and values into its design, but there's no practical way for the people affected by those decisions to work to change them, unlike money backed by a democratic government.

I don't need to know how to code to vote in the regular elections that decide how the Fed operates, all I need is to be a registered voter.

The next thing after USD and other first world currencies will be something that gives more power to the people, not less.

[gnaritas]

> It's not the next step because it's anti-democratic.

As that statement is wrong, so is everything else that follows. Democracy is built into the protocol, it is the very core of how bitcoin works.

[Frondo]

Bitcoin is absolutely anti-democratic. There's no way for users to engage with the policy decisions implied in the design.

No bitcoin advocate has ever said anything about my point other than "Just code up your alternative and get 50% of the network to adopt it," which does not mesh with any definition of democratic engagement anywhere in history, and doesn't even make sense in the context of democratic governance.

I'll just note that you didn't even say that, you just said "yes it is! yes it is so democratic!" ... which, of course, it isn't, at all.

[gnaritas]

Bitcoin is a consensus network, to call that anti-democratic is just absolutely absurd. It is the very definition of a simple democracy, whoever controls 51% of the network wins.

> Just code up your alternative and get 50% of the network to adopt it," which does not mesh with any definition of democratic engagement anywhere in history

Nonsense, winning in any democracy requires gaining the support of the majority. If your idea has merit, it'll be adopted when the majority of of the network agrees it has merit by adopting it.

[Frondo]

Thanks for trying, but that's not democracy.

"You have to code, and then you have to get your changes distributed to more than half the world" fits no definition of democratic governance ever. The two are so far removed, I'm having trouble really understanding how you can conflate the two.

But I'll be charitable, and try and make sense of it, because you seem genuine (and genuinely confused).... I guess if you take a concept like "majority rules" and interpret it to its most shallow, then you can bend what you just described up there into a kind of democracy, but democracy isn't actually that shallow an idea.

It's about the distribution of political power to the people, not just "majority rules". That's why people get to vote on things that influence them, even where they're not subject-matter experts. Your typical bitcoin user is affected by Bitcoin design decisions, but has no say in them and no means to change them.

No, "just code it and get it adopted by 51% of the network" doesn't count. That's a far, far, far higher barrier to participation than a poll tax or a literacy test, and those have been dismissed long ago as crude methods of taking democratic power away from the people.