[peter422]

I have thought about this with Bitcoin: if the protocol and potential capabilities are so interesting, why is 99% of the conversation related to Bitcoin about the current price. It does make me believe that greed is the predominant driver of most Bitcoin holders, which to me makes the whole concept a lot less principled than people pretend it is.

[fallingknife]

Greed is definitely why I'm in it. I love gambling!

[webinvest]

Look at the message in the Genesis block of Bitcoin and you will understand it’s intended purpose. It is a speculative asset intended to be held for investment, speculative, or hedging purposes. It was released in response to central bank money printing that the creator Satoshi Nakamoto viewed to be excessive. If I remember correctly, if you held 1% of your portfolio in bitcoin in 2017 and 99% of your investment portfolio in a S&P500 index ETF, your investment portfolio would’ve doubled the performance of the S&P500 index without any work or effort on your part.

If you’re looking for cryptocurrency technology aspects that don’t include money or greed, look at cryptocurrencies outside of the top 10 or top 20 by market cap. The ones around rank 30 or more are less about the price and more about the technology and fun of it.

[matheusmoreira]

Bitcoin has expensive transaction processing fees. This makes transactions inconvenient. Centralized exchanges helped with this by keeping trading internal to their systems and out of thr blockchain. As a result, it turned into a speculative asset.

Better coins don't have this property. Monero is a better currency in every way and it's essentially a stable 200 USD coin.

[swiley]

The only reason I have some crypto is for paying for things.

The only way to do MMS over the internet that isn't completely crazy* or requires a google account is jmp.chat as far as I can tell. It looks like they originally accepted paypal and paypal did it's thing so now the default is bitcoin. For small projects like this bitcoin is one of the easier ways to set up payments.

My DNS provider also had a bug in their payment form when I went to renew the domain name (or maybe it was really my bank despite them telling me it was on their end, who knows.) I was able to just pay them with bitcoin and that solved the problem.

Whether you like it or not, crypto is here to stay and it's way easier for both users and developers.

*One of the providers I was looking at even tried activating my camera on the log in page (the browser didn't say anything but the camera on that machine is weird and if you don't use a special API it just spams the kernel log with errors, idk how they did it.)

[knorker]

It's a clever solution in search of a problem. It's like a guy I knew in school who when would suggest "oh, it's a visitor pattern!". No, sometimes a for loop is just a for loop.

Bitcoin looks like it should solve something, but it doesn't. Except makes crime easier. Just the tax evasion alone must be staggering.

[timdaub]

Actually, it's not. I tried to make a meaningful comment about building apps in this thread and it got downvoted... [1]

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26448222

[rawtxapp]

> why is 99% of the conversation related to Bitcoin about the current price.

Because of the circles you're in and the loud minority that's constantly talking about the price. There's a whole community of people just building stuff without wasting their time constantly arguing for price on social networks.

[verdverm]

Many still talk about how much money they will make despite not shilling on social media. There is still a focus on price inflation. Look at a16z investments and see how the bar for larger amounts of funding is different for crypto companies. They know they have earlier liquidity events with hype cycles and lack of regulation.

[hombre_fatal]

Making money and wealth is more interesting to more people than some nerdy engineering crap. Is this a surprise?

[bazooka_penguin]

Because most of the interesting solutions are alternatives. You have a strange focus just on bitcoin and not the larger crypto ecosystem.

[nprz]

Admittedly I got in from a greed perspective, but as I read more about the philosophy of bitcoin I stayed for a distributed, censorship-proof currency. Why do I need permission from a central authority to send and receive money? Why do we allow credit cards to invade our privacy and observe our purchasing history? Why store my wealth in fiat that's guaranteed to lose at least 2% of its value every year? It's way out of that system.

[vincnetas]

You dont need permission to send funds, provided they are legal and you can proove that. These checks are for reason. You dont want money loundering and criminal money flowing around unchecked. Pay income tax on your cash and send them wherever you want (legaly).

[WanderPanda]

Greed until Gold market-cap, idealism afterwards

[jerry1979]

>why is 99% of the conversation related to Bitcoin about the current price.

People like to talk about money. Reminds me of this: https://xkcd.com/1138/