[hypnotist]

I am just surprised how much negativity is in HN towards Bitcoin. This is the first case of decentralised open source tech winning against big established powers - governments/faceamagoos. We should be celebrating this. I sure hope that Bitcoin is going to be Linux of money/finance.

Lightning might not be at the scale it needs to be now but it will improve greatly. maybe it is good enough already? Like Ruby on Rails. People keep talking about it being slow while massive web applications are being built with and billions of dollars being processed.

[chaostheory]

I'm not. Bitcoin has stagnated, and it hasn't delivered its promise of being used as a DeFi currency.

I bet if it was Ethereum that El Salvador had chosen, the opinion wouldn't be as harsh. Proof of stake doesn't have the same energy consumption concerns.

imo this is still a great development for all of crypto and DeFi. It will also help protect people who aren't connected and wealthy from losing their value due to ever higher levels of inflation (it is currently much higher than 3%) http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

[keymone]

Proof of stake doesn’t use the energy because it doesn’t solve the problem that bitcoin solves.

[chaostheory]

Yes, but what's your point?

[keymone]

it's part of the larger argument: proof of stake systems give up explicit and transparent cost of decentralized permissionless currency for obscure and hidden costs of centralized and permissioned currency. and that cost is generally higher, because proof of work is the most efficient known (or possible) solution of such problem.

[Apocryphon]

If BTC used proof-of-stake or some other scheme that was less energy-intensive/made graphics cards a scarce resource there would probably be less hostility towards it.

[GaylordTuring]

Just a small correction: You can't mine BTC using graphic cards, so BTC mining has nothing to do with the shortage of those. Ether on the other hand...

[ausbah]

by comparing it to Linux do you mean where the backbone of finance is run by Bitcoin (like Linux running servers), or where <1% of users directly use Bitcoin themselves?

[beambot]

Linux's Unix predecessor originated in the mid-1960s and into the early 1970s. It's almost 50 years old at this point. It didn't even get POSIX compliance until the 1980s, and it was 20-25 years old (2x BTC) when Linus got around to building the Linux kernel.

Bitcoin (and blockchain generally) is only 12 years old. Time will tell how well this comment ages... but it's a bit unfair to compare the two directly at their respective ages.

[hypnotist]

well, Linux is hugely successful open source project. Virtually everyone is "touched" by it directly or indirectly. It is one of core components of internet infrastructure. Bitcoin could be that.

(of course I am aware that desktop/direct usage is really small)

[barnabee]

Android users all use Linux. The fact they don’t know is one way it might feel like if most people “use” bitcoin and other decentralised tech.

[AbrahamParangi]

More people directly use linux today (in the form of Android) than windows.

[dodobirdlord]

I think a lot of the negativity comes from the fact that this is largely a forum of technologists, and Bitcoin is objectively inferior technology. That's not necessarily a knock against Bitcoin, it was revolutionary when it was introduced, but it was the 1.0 cryptocurrency and it's already essentially fossilized and become legacy technology. Miners hold sway over the community and they're not really interested in changing anything significant about Bitcoin, so now people are talking about absurdities like Lightning layered over Bitcoin to try to mitigate some of the flaws. We can save the effort and fix the flaws of Bitcoin by just moving on from Bitcoin. It's as though we were stuck with SSL 3.0 forever or something.

The only reason the vast majority of people advocating for Bitcoin are advocating for Bitcoin specifically is because they have invested in Bitcoin specifically, and they want the price of Bitcoin specifically to go up. Seeing people advocate for us all to be stuck with inferior technology forever because they have a financial stake in the inferior technology is exactly the sort of thing you should expect negativity about on HN.

[keymone]

Inferior to what? It’s the first and arguably best technology that brought digital decentralized ownership to humanity. How is that not enough?

Personally it seems all the negativity comes from people who don’t get it or those who are salty because they missed the boat.

[Kbelicius]

> Inferior to what?

Not the GP but probably to crypto that followed it.

[keymone]

well would be good to clarify, because there's no project that followed that is better on fundamental level. lots of solutions that trade decentralization and independence for performance, lots of hype and marketing, lots of bells and whistles of questionable value, lots of money being made in scams and rug-pulls.

[Kbelicius]

> well would be good to clarify, because there's no project that followed that is better on fundamental level.

This is also a statement that need clarifying. What do you even mean when you say "on fundamental level"?

> lots of solutions that trade decentralization and independence for performance, lots of hype and marketing, lots of bells and whistles of questionable value, lots of money being made in scams and rug-pulls.

All of this can be said about btc too. Except the part about trading decentralization and independence for performance. Btc has really bad performance and decentralization and independence (from what?) can be questioned.

[keymone]

> What do you even mean when you say "on fundamental level"?

Fundamental properties of bitcoin are its decentralization and security achieved via and expressed in, very transparently and using very simple formula, in terms of energy expenditure, tying it unambiguously to the real world physics.

No other project has such properties or comes close to the level to which those properties are achieved in bitcoin.

> All of this can be said about btc too.

Nope.

> Btc has really bad performance and decentralization and independence (from what?) can be questioned.

Only if you don’t understand what performance of a cryptocurrency is, or what decentralization of cryptocurrency means. And independence is from marketing campaigns, politics and other shenanigans that crypto world is full of.

[Kiro]

> The only reason the vast majority of people advocating for Bitcoin are advocating for Bitcoin specifically is because they have invested in Bitcoin

And people only hate on it because they missed out. It doesn't matter how hard they try to justify the negativity with technological argument. Everyone still knows it's just jealousy speaking. I'm guilty of this and so are you.

[haskellandchill]

You are blinded by greed. Not everyone thinks that way. Some of us care for things in dimensions orthogonal to money.

[loceng]

To add to this the blockchain solution that's likely to be adopted will ultimately be multilateral agreements between democratically elected governments deciding to use a technology not designed to align with financial incentive/greed for its adoption, unnecessarily transferring wealth from later adopters weighted tiara towards the earliest adopters.