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by final_approach 2559 days ago
I'm just going to add to this: it's been 10 years. Hacker News is still hoping very hard this so called libertarian wet dream cryptocurrency called Bitcoin will soon be out of the picture, replaced by something proper, that is fair and doesn't make you feel angry. And yet, it's still here, angering a whole bunch of people who didn't buy early and think the distribution is unfair & the political ideas behind it are awful and yet, Bitcoin is still #1 and widely used. "Blockchain not Bitcoin" hype is gone (remember how big banks invested millions blockchain projects?). Ethereum scammy ICOs hype is gone. This big-corp-coin thing will soon be gone too.

And all the issues people talk about here - like solving micropayments - are already being successfully solved by Lightning Network. Quietly.
1 comments
simiones 2559 days ago
Except next to no one is using Bitcoin, not to mention Ethereum or Lightning Network.

It's very much like the Linux Desktop - it exists, some people love it, it's never going to disappear, but it is very much a niche interest that will never be mainstream, for a multitude of reasons.

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snitko 2559 days ago
It is absolutely clear that every year Bitcoin is being used by more and more people or the price wouldn't be going up consistently over the years.
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Nursie 2559 days ago
The price is heavily manipulated and volatile, most of the volume appears to be fake, and the only major 'use' anyone is making of it is speculation.

Also it hasn't gone up consistently, it's still at around 50% of its peak almost two years ago.

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snitko 2558 days ago
Look at 10 years chart. It's been going up consistently.
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SI_Rob 2558 days ago
Well, sure, but then the 4 year chart of returns on my high school summer lawn moving business went up 13,500%, from $5 net my first week, to $675 on my last. Behold my 15 year old financial genius. /s

Any asset that doesn't crash back to a penny likewise goes up astronomically from the day trackable value is first created. Bitcoin's chart appears to have outperformed the market so dramatically, percentage-wise, because its chart tracks price from effectively zero (depending on how you would price a 1/10000th slice of pizza) or a dozen or so pennies (if you're starting from the first BTC-E numbers). But this is really not any different from what happens to shares in a private company, which also start at effectively zero as well.

Publicly-traded share values aren't visible to the public until they have already risen a hundredfold or more from their inception (in terms of percentage gains). Sure, Bitcoin was visible to "the public" but only if you happened to be in the right place at the right time and knew the right people - which in practice are opportune circumstances no different than those available to people who happen to be close to the founders of a privately owned company.

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Nursie 2558 days ago
Sigh.

No, it hasn't, unless you've got some sort of alternative definition of "consistently".

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