This article is delusional if it thinks the swings have anything to do with the bitcoin civil war. Bitcoin has always been volatile, and will continue to be volatile. It's a gambler's currency.
People always try to assign a reason to things. We don't like accepting that there just aren't any reasons. But as someone who has seen bitcoin go up and down and back again over years, there really isn't a reason for it besides "people decided to buy or sell." And those people aren't operating with logic. It's speculation.
People were saying the exact same things about Silk Road. If Silk Road closes, bitcoin will go down! Nope, didn't happen.
I think you're underestimating just how big a deal the split was. It could have lead to Bitcoin being split into two distinct currencies, and this was happening on a very short and defined timeline (July 21st and August).
The swings absolutely were caused by anxiety/relief around this event.
I've been watching this closely, and the price seems to be driven by the Segwit2x signaling rate. We're close to the %80 activation and when it looked like we weren't going to make it we saw a decline, and when hash power switched signaling and the price recovered.
The reason the hash power signaling is not so stable right now has a technical reason-- Bip-91 is rushed, the Segwit2x proposal was rather late in the game and this is a system which, by design and prudence, should not be changing with quick untested commits.
This comment is as simple (in thinking) as the article. You said bitcoin has "always" been volatile. Well, everything is volatile. But the volatility of bitcoin is not constant, it is changing and bitcoin has gone through periods of stability making it less volatile than gold and closer to normal currencies.
It just looks like market manipulation (which is not illegal in an unregulated market). Pump the price up to make huge profits shorting on the next big dump (August 1?), then buy a lot and pump it again.
It's a gambler's {x} could be understood to mean, "prioritizing the desires of players of games of chance." A casino that has many rigged games (beyond the tuning of the odds in favor of the house) wouldn't be considered to be a "gambler's." If you're saying that buying bitcoin is "a gamble," then this may be true, contingent on how much information you're operating on. I'd say that things are happening to Bitcoin, and the more information one has on these things, the more you can narrow down what will happen to the forks.
Many times you can't know the reason, and in an investing sense this is perhaps functionally equivalent to there being no reason. But that doesn't mean there is no reason.
Nope, it still seems as hostile as ever. Every top voted comment on a thread concerning crypto will be people cheering its inevitable demise and mocking its naive supporters.
I can only imagine it's a mixture of jealousy and sour grapes from missing out on crypto's rise, but it feels strange that a forum dedicated to tech is so angry and dismissive towards a really interesting new technology.
I think it's incredibly interesting and the the tech / concept is extremely impressive. (We still don't even know who thought this up, do we?)
That being said, I'm one of the people who have always mocked bitcoin. There are so many obvious problems with it, and some of the people in the cult built around it lack a hilarious amount of self-awareness.
Congrats to those who speculated successfully regardless. I'm not salty about people who jumped on $AMD over a year ago, or any tulips throughout history.
> That being said, I'm one of the people who have always mocked bitcoin. There are so many obvious problems with it, and some of the people in the cult built around it lack a hilarious amount of self-awareness.
Don't lump supporters in with a "cult." Just observe: it's been here for a long time and if there were a way to turn it off it would've happened by now.
IMO it's never going away. ICOs will come and go. Altcoins will come and go. Bitcoin is here to stay. It's not tulips, it's not a ponzie scheme.
Will it obsolete credit cards or cash? No, that's unlikely.
Will it obsolete precious metals? No, that seems unlikely, too.
Will its value stabilize against fiat currency and become a real safe store of money? That's unlikely to happen soon IMO but maybe in some decade or two?
Bitcoin is new and the use cases don't completely 100% overlap with cash, credit cards, bearer bonds, stocks, precious metals, contracts. But it does line up really well with some uses of each.
The defeat of bitcoin would only happen if its mathematical or functional model collapsed. For example: transactions execute Too Slowly, disk space required for node operation became Too Large, node operation became Too Expensive, hashing algorithm no longer considered Safe. Transaction speed, disk space, computation -- for the most part these are all fairly negotiable/reconsiderable by the humans who see some value from bitcoin's continued operation. If global changes make these things not work, the market will find a balance. See all of the recent pushback regarding transaction speed/cost and how best to solve the problem. Even if we end up with Bitcoin[0], Bitcoin[1], Bitcoin[2], I would argue that each of them Are Bitcoin and individually and collectively continue to illustrate bitcoin's success.
EDIT: actually one huge risk could be united global censorship by treaty -- this would destroy a lot of its value and utility (but the network would never stop, it would serve the black market exclusively).
shrug, difficulty adjusts, asics get smaller, cooler, enclosures designed differently, miners hide them in drywall or wherever we hide prohibited stuff these days.
So now law enforcement has to shut down every Bitcoin node in the world, including the ones that are run exclusively on tor in 3rd world countries, AND shut now any new ones that pop up?
This must be infuriating to you. All these ideologically driven libertarians, creating the future of finance and trade, while making a ton of money - and totally not caring what Statists think. #WINNING
Edit: Crypto works because people opt-in. People see value in voluntary trade that can cross borders without being shaken down. The petro-dollar works as long as the US has a gun big enough to threaten the world with. That won't last forever.
Consider that those "obvious problems" (which you don't name) may be misunderstandings on your part, of the technology, or how economics works on a global scale.
Bitcoin is a very well designed crypto-economic system. It took smart work from people with backgrounds and understanding in both.
It's easy to mock because it's different from the standard quo and Statists seem to think that Only government can do money properly (which is kinda funny when you think about it) and so the criticism of bitcoin that I've seen has never been very good.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are extremely interesting, for sure.
Technologically, they're interesting because they're a clever solution to difficult problems, and there's a lot to learn from how they work.
Sociologically, they're interesting because they seem to attract a lot of "move fast and break things" people to an area where that attitude works poorly, and the result is an ongoing stream of scams, heists, and other failures. There's a lot to learn here in terms of what not to do.
The technological side seems to be fairly well understood at this point, but the sociological side constantly comes up with new ways to be ridiculous, so naturally the discussion now focuses on this.
I didn't name the obvious problems because they've been talked over to death at this point, typically in that most-upvoted first post you mentioned initially.
I think the largest issue with Bitcoin is precisely what you probably admire it for, judging by your description of its detractors: I don't think the average consumer wants an unregulated currency. People like having a central authority that enforces laws around their currency. People enjoy the benefits of a dollar that doesn't fluctuate wildly in value. People enjoy the conveniences of modern banking systems.
There's a tendency for libertarians to ignore very obvious examples of contradictions in their world view, because any of these examples can be dismissed using random ideological purity tests. Namely, the idea that the market is entirely separate from the government, or that a government formed by (often very imperfect) representative democracy or even brute force is any less pure of a "force" than market forces.
Modern financial systems developed largely because people wanted them. Consumer protections laws were implemented because people voted for them and would be very upset if they were taken away. People who step into voting booths are still "rational actors". People who disagree with your world view (just about literally everyone) are still rational actors.
At the end of the day advocates of cryptocurrency have tried everything to get people to start using or accepting Bitcoin and no one has, despite no real government intervention. Hell, the whole point of your original post was to lament that the most popular opinion is that cryptocurrency is dumb. The market has said no, why have you not started listening?
(Also: Mining is massively wasteful. Transactions are expensive. It's overtly complicated and unpleasant to handle. A lot of people lose all their money because sites get hacked. Also, all the issues brought up by this whole forking incident.)
> I don't think the average consumer wants an unregulated currency.
Ok, so it will continue to apply to just the niche that's okay w/unregulated currency.
> People like having a central authority that enforces laws around their currency.
I will concede that this is a risk. Every time a theft occurs, there's temptation to try to "solve" the problem of thefts. Once a powerful state endorses a black/grey list of coins tainted by theft (even if it's offered as a "hey this is opt-in, we won't legislate this list"), it will start us on a slippery slope towards centralization and perhaps prohibition/censorship.
> People enjoy the benefits of a dollar that doesn't fluctuate wildly in value.
Yes, bitcoin may continue to be stuck in a niche like equities or something other than currency.
> People enjoy the conveniences of modern banking systems.
Yes, and bridging the gap between human/trust/legally secured systems with mathematical ones like bitcoin is a challenge. And yet, businesses have arisen to handle this challenge.
Ultimately, the "but it's not really suited for what that guy Fred said it could do" arguments are orthogonal. It doesn't matter that what Fred said was an exaggeration or completely false. Bitcoin will keep churning out new blocks regardless. And yes, people may eventually say to themselves "oh hey if it will never do that then I should sell!" And the value will drop. But what if it were back to USD parity? Would that be bad? Or just the new norm? I contend it's the latter.
> People like having a central authority that enforces laws around their currency.
I think most people don't give a damn about this or think about it one way or the other. It's too abstract for them to think about. Most people use dollars without thinking about what they are or where they come from.
> People enjoy the benefits of a dollar that doesn't fluctuate wildly in value
Yes, this much is true. Of course, if you hold bitcoin constant, you could claim it's the dollar that fluctuates wildly. If reality itself is unstable, than a stable currency starts to look more like a clever trick than something that is real and maintainable.
If you told people "the dollar is stable, but at the small cost of rapid centralization of wealth under the control of extremely powerful actors who aren't accountable to the law", they might see things differently.
What if all our political stability has, at its root, become a result of volatility moving out of the financial sector and into basically every other facet of human existence?
> . People enjoy the conveniences of modern banking systems.
I think you underestimate how much people hate modern banking, which does not give a shit about consumers. They're sick of paying fees to access their own money.
> At the end of the day advocates of concurrency have tried everything to get people to start using or accepting Bitcoin and no one has, despite no real government intervention.
I don't think you really understand the goals of this group. Many of these people don't give a damn if others use bitcoin for transactions, and they have no real interest in using it themselves. Yes, some people want it to replace the dollar in day to day transactions. Others are content for a store of value that has a tendency to appreciate over the long term.
> The market has said no,
Transaction volume has grown tremendously in the past few years. How is this the market saying "no?"
Do you think "there's just a bunch of greater and greater fools, all passing around a potato that surely will blow up any day now?"
It's honestly hard to understand your perspective here. If it's still around in a few years, will you still think it's all fools speculating? What kind of evidence would change your mind on this?
The central problem is non reversible transactions and storage on PC's. Computer security means the value can drop to zero at any time and using a 3rd party to store your value means you A lose any benefit of coinX vs. WoW gold or whatever, and B run the same risks as their security can fail at any time.
Now sure people can and have made (and lost) a lot of money, but in terms of actual usage it's never going to see mass adoption without first solving the computer security problem.
PS: However, what I think bothers people is it promotes people pumping coinX in the same way they would time shares. That's simply a drag on any online community.
The vast majority of fiat currency are 1s and 0s stored on computers, the only difference being:
1) Bitcoin is tracked by a global, immutable ledger, whereas you have no idea what kind of potentially krufty, in-house software your bank is tracking your money with.
2) There is a finite number of Bitcoins that can ever exist, whereas 100 trillion new units of your fiat could be created at the push of a button.
Note to other readers: The comment in question only used the term "statist", this poster just implied the usage of the 4chan ad hominems for increased effect.
Your bias is strong, it's far more likely you're the one with misunderstandings than the OP. The unbiased don't go around calling people statists; nation states are the norm in the world, they're properly just called people. As the anti-statist and the one who isn't the norm, the label more appropriately belongs on you. Humans are tribal animals, always have been and always will be, nation states are merely the current expression of this normal natural human behavior.
Bitcoin is simply not attractive to the ordinary person because they don't have this anti-state bias that makes it so attractive to you. The dollar is incredibly stable, that stability comes from a central authority who actively manages the currency to keep it so, and people like it that way. As a currency, Bitcoin is terrible and doesn't come close to approaching the utility of the dollar. Bitcoin is little more than a speculative tech commodity attractive to a small minority of people who think they can either make money or escape the state. It has a place, a small one.
Murder is also a "normal natural human behavior", especially when one has a strong tribal bonds and are dealing with those outside the tribe. Suppressing or sublimating some normal natural human behavior with culture is probably a good thing. Choose wisely.
I've been exclusively working with Bitcoin related startups since 2011. I do not find the HN discussion hostile. Cryptocurrency is barely at beta quality. Skepticism is healthy.
It seems mostly positive to me. Stories about cryptocoins get upvoted. Good discussion is generated, it seems like the audience is much broader than /r/bitcoin (and related subreddits). It's a great opportunity for HN to learn more about cryptocoins.
IMO it's totally appropriate to talk about: worthless altcoins, worthless ICOs/assets/tokens, skepticism about ethereum (especially wrt centralization).
I wouldn't say hostile, more skeptical. I think bitcoin and some altcoins (siacoin and ethereum in particular) are really cool technology. But I don't have faith in cryptocurrency as anything more than a digital remittance system with side applications in money laundering, the drug trade, etc. And as of right now I have yet to be proven wrong about this. Bitcoin in its current state won't be able to replace normal transactions due to fee and speed issues.
I've also seen a shifting of goalposts within the bitcoin community from the utility of bitcoin being a censorship-free digital currency to a digital store of value. Personally I am not at all interested in the concept of "digital gold" because there's nothing inherent about bitcoin that makes it better digital gold than other altcoins.
Of course, there's also the fact that new altcoins seem to constantly be improving on each other. This is good in general, but as a side effect it makes comitting to one single coin seem like a short-sighted move.
That said, I would love for a cryptocurrency to be able to scale to the point that it becomes a viable part of the global economy. It would be amazing for privacy and anti-authoritarianism. At present, bitcoin cannot scale to this level, though.
Opposing opinions make for good discussion and having such opinions does not make you a jealous sour grape. Yours is likely the first hostile comment I've seen surrounding cryptocurrency on HN.
Look further then. These comments are abundant, and they aren't intelligent discourse so much as celebrating failures in crypto and mocking its supporters.
I feel like I've seen a lot more "why are we wasting huge amounts of electricity calculating *-illions of SHA256 hashes for an imaginary currency used to buy drugs and guns" type comments lately. They're almost as annoying as the "Bitcoin will replace fiat and bring about the new libertarian-formalist era!" people.
Completely. I also see more coverage in media and I think it it related. Also, beyond the hype there are technical issues that are important to discuss here.
I think it's implying the argumentative state when currencies are brought up. There's a lot of emotions wrapped around all the nonsense of forks, the random thefts, and general new but somewhat difficult to understand technology.
For most people it doesn't serve a purpose outside of what they're reading (I own a few bitcoin that I mined back in 09, but I'm never really compelled to use them for anything due to headaches and fees trying to spend them).
I've never quite understood the argument that bitcoin are difficult to spend. I have bought things with them and it's so much easier than credit cards! You open a wallet app, point your phone at your computer and tap yes, done. Credit cards you have to (optionally) make sure the site won't steal your number, go get your physical wallet, fill out a rather long form (that sometimes throws an error and makes you fill it out again) and then occasionally call the issuer because they decided someone might have stolen your card and won't let the transaction go through because it's big.
Bitcoin has problems but spending UX for online transactions really isn't one of them.
None of your criticisms of credit cards seem valid.
> Credit cards you have to (optionally) make sure the site won't steal your number,
Nope. If it's stolen, you get issued a new card and all the old transactions are refunded.
> go get your physical wallet, fill out a rather long form
Browser integration makes it easy to fill out these forms. I don't use it, but I've seen people who do.
> and then occasionally call the issuer because they decided someone might have stolen your card and won't let the transaction go through because it's big.
In my experience card companies let the transaction go through even if it's big. Then they call you. Mine sends me a text saying "Was this you? Type 1 for yes" and that's the end of it. I like that. It's a good thing.
I go to a website and click a "Pay with Bitcoin" button and am taken to a page where I have to send X BTC to Y address. Ok, easy to copy and paste them, I've done this plenty of times in the past.
And then I see "don't pay directly from an exchange!" because they take longer to send transactions or don't pay enough in transaction fees or something. I used a regular local wallet for a time but have been using Coinbase as my wallet ever since, and now that won't work. I've normally been able to pay via Coinbase very easily. Let's just download the blockchain...
120 GB? Well, better grab an old external hard drive...
26 hours to sync, despite my 200 Mbps cable connection? I guess I'm not paying with Bitcoin today.
I can definitely see how paying with Bitcoin could be annoying to an average consumer nowadays.
I guess the payment wouldn't go so smooth if the bitcoins are sitting in 8-year-old files. You'd have to add to your description the steps necessary to install that wallet app and import the private keys. Whatever happens when you "point your phone at your computer" (OCR?, QR code?) might also not be fully reliable, so add the hassle of troubleshooting that. I can see how someone might not bother with it, if they have no real need to.
Personally, I'm relatively sure I will never use bitcoin, because I pay my groceries with cash and my rent per wire transfer, and other than that I buy stuff off the internet maybe twice a year, so entering my credit card details isn't quite that annoying. I realize my spending habits are somewhat unusual, though.
I feel like a few years ago there was some issue with etherium and it was generally considered to be inferior to bitcoin, I can't remember what that issue was now though.
People always try to assign a reason to things. We don't like accepting that there just aren't any reasons. But as someone who has seen bitcoin go up and down and back again over years, there really isn't a reason for it besides "people decided to buy or sell." And those people aren't operating with logic. It's speculation.
People were saying the exact same things about Silk Road. If Silk Road closes, bitcoin will go down! Nope, didn't happen.