[Ologn]

The difference is the dot-com stocks had some theoretical value - even Pets.com, people buy pet supplies online after all.

Unlike commodities, equities and so forth, cryptocoins have no value whatsoever. So to try to make it sound like it has worth, its pushers have to cast about for anything they can and finally come upon the only thing they can - the dollar. In fact, they say, it's even better than the dollar.

It would take too long to explain here why the Bitcoin is not like the only thing they have left to compare it to, the dollar. Also, an explanation won't sway anyone who has already had a drink of the kool-aid any how.

May I recommend another message board for all those high on cryptocoins here - 4chan ( http://boards.4chan.org/biz/catalog ). 4chan /biz/ is filled with uneducated, poor kids all looking to get wealthy with little work on the cryptocoin get rich quick schemes.

I think it's a much better message board for all of you of this bent. Here on HN there are still some people who believe in studying math and science and engineering and CS at universities, and then going and doing a lot of hard work and creating wealth. 4chan is mostly filled with your types - the get-rich-quick scam artists. Go read 4chan /biz/ right now - it's filled with no work, no study, get rich quick types like yourself. Leave and go there. HN will be stuck with those "out of it" old fogies who actually believe in study, hard work, that commodities need value to have worth in the long-term, and old-fashioned, out of touch ideas like that.

[jpatokal]

Bitcoins are saving this Venezuelan guy's family from starving. I'm pretty sure that qualifies as value: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6d2w1b/bitcoin_is_...

This is not to say that there isn't an absurd amount of hype and froth right now, but if nothing else cryptocurrencies will continue to serve a purpose for anybody who needs to send money outside capital controls.

[sanswork]

If you read the thread you find out that the Venezuelan guy lives in the US has never done what he described and knows no one who has used it as he described.

He gets called out by someone in Venezuela here https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6d2w1b/bitcoin_is_...

[rayuela]

See this is why I really appreciate this community sometimes.

[DennisP]

I'm pretty high on crypto; my full-time job is writing and auditing smart contracts on Ethereum. Which message board do you recommend for me?

[ethanwillis]

If there's any overload of work, I would definitely be interested to talk with you.

[DennisP]

I don't think my employer is hiring Solidity devs at the moment but there's definitely lot of demand in general.

[lobster2]

/biz/ has been great for me, I bought some MOONCOINS at 1 satoshi and I will sell next week at 5 sat at least once the current sell walls have been broken. There also is a very active community behind MOONCOIN.

Why are you so dismissive of this new technology? Can you expand on your idea?

[Ologn]

> Why are you so dismissive of this new technology?

I'm skeptical of the idea that Bitcoins have value in the way commodities and other things which can be traded and exchanged have value.

People might find some use for blockchain technology, but the speculation around the value of Bitcoins is ridiculous. It's a bubble like any other bubble. The notion that a Bitcoin can remain at a $2000 value is absurd.

The current top comment says "Internet companies during the dotcom bubble had market value of several trillion dollars. The total market cap of crypto-currency is still only ~$70 billion. I agree with the principle, but this boom is still pretty modest." Well there you go. I have an old worn sock with a hole in it that I am throwing away. It is worth $500. It is worth $500 because I am willing to pay $500 for it. I am capable of creating a bubble of that size. Even a $70 billion bubble can be created apparently. Once it reaches a certain point it will pop. Your point about Mooncoins points to it - as a Bitcoin is worthless, clones like Mooncoins can be created as speculative bubbles. Eventually it will no longer be a micro-economic oddity like my $500 sock, but will bump up against the market as a whole and collapse like every other speculative bubble.

It's not blockchain technology, which may or may not have worth at some point. It's the speculative bubble on cryptocoin choice.

As I said, Pets.com and Webvan made sense on some level. Just not the valuations they had at the time. And Bitcoins valuation is even sillier than theirs, since Webvan was not a bad idea, it just had a few problems including being ahead of its time.

[FabHK]

I agree with your skeptical sentiment, for the most part.

However, dismissing Bitcoin as a bad commodity (because it cannot be used for anything) misses the mark. Instead, look at Bitcoin not as a commodity, but as money. Money (particularly paper money) has no intrinsic worth. What makes it valuable are its properties, and functions bestowed on it by consensus: counterfeiting resistance, fungibility, medium of exchange for payments, storage of value, unit of account.

Can Bitcoin fulfil those functions? That remains to be seen, and I'm skeptical on storage of value (too volatile) and unit of account (too volatile, nothing is denominated in it), but it works to an extent as a payment mechanism (though worse and worse now, with the increasing transaction fees).

[Ologn]

If we look at the past 10,000 years of history - commodities are useful things, objects with utility. Currencies are commodities which people begin to favor for use in trading. Currencies are commodities which have properties that make them good currencies - they have properties such as uniformity, durability, divisibility, portability. This is why precious metals like gold have been favored as currencies through history - gold is uniform, durable, divisible and portable.

The paper dollar bill is, and always has been, completely worthless in and of itself. It is just a piece of paper. Just like Confederate bills were and are pieces of paper, just like the Papiermark was and is a piece of paper. US bills have a history, just as German bills do.

In 1914, the German Mark, or "Goldmark" was redeemable for gold. The Mark/gold link was broken in 1914 and the Mark became the "Papiermark". By 1923, hyperinflation had made the Papiermark near worthless and it was replaced by the Rentenmark and then in the next year this was replaced by the Reichsmark.

Swinging back to the USA, the words "redeemable in gold" were removed from the hundred dollar bill in 1934, and then by 1971 Nixon had closed the gold window entirely. Sort of. Because if he really had, he could have just taken the thousands of tons of gold in Fort Knox and paid down the US debt. But he couldn't. Because that gold still backs the dollar. The dollar was an abstraction of gold before 1934 and 1971, a promise. Then it became an abstraction of the abstraction. It's still on some level backed by the gold in Fort Knox, Trump and the Fed chair could just reopen gold/dollar reconversion if need be, and a hard floor would suddenly appear under the dollar.

Bitcoin has no such floor. There are no thousands of tons of gold waiting in the wings for Bitcoin, no nuclear armed #1 (going on #2) world economy with the power to tax and receive tax payments backing it. We don't even know who created Bitcoin.

It's an odd argument - the only commodity people can find which has no apparent value is the dollar (or euro), so that's what people compare it to.

If this was 1917, you might be asking me why the Papiermark had worth when it was not backed by something, and thus Bitcoins must have value. What people found out was that the Papiermark unhooked from gold did not have value, as the German government of the time didn't give a damn about its value. It's kind of the same argument - Papiermarks in 1917 had value, so Bitcoins must have value. People found out in the 1920s that Papiermarks didn't have value as the implicit promise of government gold conversion went away.

[dmichulke]

Papiermark got printed. BTC gets ...?

[kodfodrasz]

I believe that the deflationary nature of cryptocurrencies is the real problem in replacing money. Also the fact that a trail is left behind transactions is unlike it is with cash. This property is cool for the government, but the users may not want to have it.

On question that bugs me, but don't have enough knowledge bout Bitcoin: are the transactions public? (I believe they are). So anybody could map the wealth of the members of the bitcoin network? If it were used instead of cash my money movements could me monitored by anyone, eg. my employer?

[stult]

I think you're right mostly but missing a key point. Crypto's value is inversely proportional to faith in government backed currencies in places with high internet penetration. So in the US, it's actual value is quite low because we have an extremely strong currency and well developed payment systems. In China, faith in the government-backed currency (renminbi) and the investment options available in that denomination are relatively low. Coupled with reasonably high access to internet connections and government restrictions on expatriating capital, crypto becomes a valuable alternative denomination.

Crypto has no inherent value except as a policy failure. At least so far. I have yet to see a large scale proof, but potentially at least block chain tech has value for reducing transaction costs in shipping or other fields.

[Ologn]

> China...government restrictions on expatriating capital, crypto becomes a valuable alternative denomination

Money is expatriated via Bitcoin from the PRC to, say, Vancouver. The point is that with a currency, people would be comfortable leaving it as Canadian dollars or US dollars. This is not what happens though, the Bitcoin is converted to Canadian dollars, and is then perhaps converted into other things, such as real estate.

It is more like a concert ticket or gallon of milk in this case - something which might be valuable for a time, but then loses its value. The Papiermark in the early 20s could be used to move money around as well.

[stult]

>Money is expatriated via Bitcoin from the PRC to, say, Vancouver. The point is that with a currency, people would be comfortable leaving it as Canadian dollars or US dollars.

No one is OK leaving their money in hard currency. That's why we invest it, or put it in interest bearing accounts. Leaving it under your mattress leads to losses to inflation. In that sense, currency is very much like a gallon of milk or a concert ticket, though it loses its value much more slowly in a healthy economy.

With BTC, we actually have the opposite problem, deflation. It is increasing in value every day, whereas with a normal fiat currency it is more efficient to have a low, stable rate of inflation (where the individual unit of currency loses its value over time).

So I don't disagree with you completely. You're right that BTC should be more like a concert ticket than it is. The important question is why it isn't.

[askafriend]

Why do diamonds have value then? They have no intrinsic value. They are not a scarce resource. They don't have many industrial applications. Labs can grow diamonds that look pretty much identical to the real thing. Yet people still pay a ton of real money for diamonds.

Diamonds have value because we all have agreed that they have value. That's a really powerful concept to internalize. Similarly why does Gold have any value? Why does the American Constitution have any power?

[dageshi]

I have no personal position in bitcoins or any other cryptocurrency but it seems to me bitcoin is the first internet native "money like thing". Based on how powerful and distruptive the internet has been to various industries in the past few decades I'm not sure I would bet against an internet native version of "money".

[ardivekar]

Actually, only the -coin currencies have no actual value aside from transactions, which as can be shown, is very easily duplicable. I would say that Ethereum is an application platform, and that does have value (see WordPress, AWS etc).

Ripple also has value for ForEx settlement, which currently can take on the order of days. Also, it can function as a universal liquidator.

The -coins though, are ephemeral. Only the underlying Blockchain tech is of any use.

[someSven]

One value of Bitcoin is keeping money save from the authorities. For anonymous donations and microdonations it is also usefull. Speculation or insurance against the Fiat money economy is another usecase.

[gnarcoregrizz]

Uneducated poor kids? The ironic thing is a lot of people have become rich from /biz and are now millionaires. Seems like your version of hard work is to pay out the nose for a degree to be a debt serf in this stagnant, corrupt economy... suddenly buying into this crypto meme sounds like a much better alternative. Once again, 4chan is prescient. Sure things will probably return to earth soon and some crypto-memers will be holding some heavy bags, but in the long term I think this hype has created some real value, and cryptocurrencies may end up being a real way out of the fiat scam