[acdha]

Bitcoin is a failed currency - see the original paper. After around a decade of failing to find demand the big holders started to market it as a commodity but since there’s no inherent value to it unless it’s actively traded it doesn’t really fit the usual meaning of that term.

[randomhodler84]

Oh please do explain why it is failed?

The only thing that has evolved over time, that is peoples time preference. There will always be demand for BTC. The software works as it was designed, and grows stronger every year. Gresham’s law might be the key to understanding this.

[acdha]

The original goal was to be a currency but over a decade later, statistically nobody uses it for normal transactions. If it shut down tomorrow, the few businesses which accept it would remove that option from the others they accept and that'd be it. Nobody other than speculators would care because it's never given them a reason to use it.

I realize you need to say there will be demand for it but your desire to sell your random numbers at a profit doesn't make that true. Demand has to come from somewhere and something which has many competing alternatives which are generally cheaper, faster, and easier to use does not have much lock-in potential.

[jron]

A little more than a decade to bootstrap an idea worth nothing to almost a trillion USD... Did you expect it to be valued at two-trillion USD instead? I can reach out to you when it gets there if you like.

[acdha]

How about you let me know when ordinary people use it for anything other than speculation? When a business would care about it shutting down because their customers can’t trivially switch to an alternative?

That’s the problem with multiplying the number of coins by the last sale price: it assumes a larger pool of buyers than we’ve ever seen. The number of people treating it as anything other than a lotto ticket isn’t anywhere near enough to support a valuation in the range of trillions of USD.

[Hjfrf]

If the price goes higher, it only gets worse as a transactional currency. Those are in direct opposition.

[wbsss4412]

Parent never claimed it failed to make money, only that it failed as a _currency_.

If you think failure is only synonymous with making money then certainly Bitcoin hasn’t failed, but at the same time it has hardly had much affect on the world outside of being a speculative asset for people to get rich off of.

[acdha]

Exactly: when it first launched, places like HN were full of optimism that it’d kill off things like PayPal, force credit card companies to offer better transaction pricing, etc. That sounds great to me but it definitely didn’t happen, and the design in combination with volatility makes that even less likely since it’s more like trading stock shares to buy a toaster.