That four-year-old submission has just two comments: one expressing doubt, one expressing optimism.
Interestingly, despite growing worldwide adoption of Bitcoin, comments about it on HN continue to be more or less evenly split between doubters and optimists. And I wouldn't be surprised if comments to this submission are evenly split between those same two camps.
No amount of evidence or reasoning seems to persuade either camp to change its views!
Selection bias. If you lack strong opinions you are unlikely to comment. As with almost everything; small number of doubters and supporters on the ends, huge number of 'meh' in center of bell curve.
While it is quite clear that Bitcoin has "value" as long as people are willing to trade it (i.e., indefinitely), there is still no reason to assume that it will ever stop having these extreme fluctuations.
To the contrary, I'd say that, as time progresses, we observe Bitcoin having the same problems that the gold standard had, mixed with an additional proneness to speculation.
What about the middle? I think bitcoin has a myriad of great uses, but is also addled by inherent problems that prevent it from being a standard currency.
Religious in outlook; faith based. If we must have faith based psuedo-discussion its more fun to talk about evolution.
One interesting observation about the two comments, is both authors are still occasionally posting to HN, if you click thru. Its a long lived community.
[2]: "During 2009 my exchange rate was calculated by dividing $1.00 by the average amount of electricity required to run a computer with high CPU for a year, 1331.5 kWh, multiplied by the the average residential cost of electricity in the United States for the previous year, $0.1136, divided by 12 months divided by the number of bitcoins generated by my computer over the past 30 days."
This was posted in May 2009. On October 5th, 2009, $1 = 1,309.03 BTC [1], so you'd have bought about 1.3 million bitcoin. Which means you'd have over $500M dollars in Bitcoin. I bet that spending $1000 back then would have considerably changed the exchange rate though, and selling $500M now would definitely aversely affect the economy.
Yeah, I think the lesson I've learned from not embracing Bitcoin sooner, is that I should spend more time analyzing a novel idea, and not be dismissive of one that might seem crazy initially. However, with all the information flow these days, it's kinda hard, but sure worth the effort.
"Why did you buy a bitcoin?" "Because I don't want to enter too late!"
The absolute problem with bitcoin is, is that it cannot be used as a currency. If one bitcoin can buy you one "x" today, two "x" tomorrow and in a week only half an "x", what is the point of spending it? Its value fluctuates way too much and that's why so many people are getting on board. They want to be in the elevation towards another all time high.
I am not saying that Bitcoin does not have a future, but key in this future is that all those investors and startups on the get-rich-quick-with-a-very-high-potential-to-loose-a-lot-scheme have to abandon ship. The value of Bitcoin has to stabilize because at this point it is not a viable currency. Currently it is just an asset so many people are interested in, which drives the price only further up.
As soon as it stabilizes or drops we will see what it will d o with Bitcoin its popularity and acceptance for other goods and services.
Bitcoin could revolutionize the foundation of the world's economy with a piece of software some guy wrote in a few months. You'd figure that would be the kind of thing that hackers would get excited about, as opposed to social-sharing startups (which are just a replacement for reality TV)
Can someone explain how the idea that every single transaction has to be stored in the ledger is scalable? Won't wider adoption mean that the ledger grows even quicker, to the point where it makes using btc harder and harder?
Technology evolves over time as does bitcoin's use. Hard drives are becoming cheaper and cheaper, for example. Bandwidth is also a non-issue, as the typical transaction size is less than a KB.
However, there's also the fact that a typical user doesn't have to download the whole blockchain in order to use bitcoins--they'll be connected to the nodes that do (that are dedicated for that purpose).
Hate when people use the tulips comparison. The basic protocol of bitcoin that allows people to send value anywhere in the world and solves the double spend problem must have some value unto itself. I don't know it's worth $0.10, $100, or $1000000 per bitcoin to use the protocol but to compare it to a plant seems kinda ridiculous.
BTC aren't quite tulips, but the criticism is well founded that it isn't yet a good currency. A perfect currency would possess the following qualities:
Perfectly Fungible
Perfect Liquidity
Perfect Stability
Right now bitcoins are commodities. Any bitcoin is equally valuable as any other bitcoin; bitcoin's value derives from its purchasing power and from its exchange rate to other mediums of exchange. It has great liquidity and fungibility. However it has inherent stability problems as well as ambient ones:
Currently it experiences volatility by virtue of transactions not being demoninated in BTC, and of its exchange rate to other mediums of exchange. A large part of this is because it is consistently attracting large pools of people who wish to acquire it. The recent price spike appears to be a consequence of Chinese interest in acquiring bitcoin rapidly increasing. Eventually the number of people who want to possess bitcoins will grow as a function of the population on the planet, rather than as a function of new groups of people deciding it has become appealing. This will introduce some stability.
However, there's a fundamental flaw in that the pool of bitcoins is fixed, and that possessors know the finite size of the pool of bitcoins a priori. This exerts deflationary pressure on BTC, and as others have noted, discourages its spending. BTC is vastly more liquid than gold is, for example, but the stability of its value will always be an impediment to its usefulness as a currency.
This doesn't spell the doom of Bitcoin; it doesn't need to be a perfect currency, just a better currency than other currencies. It is already the most liquid commodity on the planet. It is at least as fungible as USD; attempts by coinvalidation to ruin this notwithstanding. Should the deflationary pressure of bitcoin compared to its circulation become sufficiently small, it will have inherent qualities to make it the best currency available, which can lead to it becoming more widespread.
A currency with lower transaction costs in time, and which has growth characteristics which trend toward following the value of productive output of the human race will certainly be better. USD are inherently worse.
Fluctuation is somehow "upwards". That's not a fluctuation, that's normal exponential growth of something with network properties. If people discover a pile of gold and start grabbing it and selling, its price would also increase exponentially until everyone has a piece of that gold. Than we can talk about stability.
It just shows that many people are quick to be negative and for some reason unwilling to consider alternative possibilities.
Remember that negative and critical viewpoints are normally perceived to be from the the more intelligent person. Unfortunately people who are more accepting of new and novel ideas can at first seem like the less intelligent of the group. (Probably because they are not quick to dismiss and put down a thing, and thus have less to say at first glance)
The only solution is to think for yourselves and research the positions presented.
It just shows that many people think that if somebody won the lottery then his strategy is good, and the others are less clever. If you see what I mean.
(Should I give you a much-much longer list of posts where people expressed their doubt and eventually they were right?)
Well, yeah, but more like 97,89%, from what I gather. From time to time I fancy this idea of toying with some NLP package to calculate percentage of the HN comments that go like "Yes, but no", "Cool, but meh" or "Sure, but no way".
Mark my words: The US regulators will do to Bitcoin what they have done to the Internet ecommerce, i.e. providing strong incentives like reduced taxes and simplified rules.
There are plenty of new bitcoin merchant and users every day and the USA won't stand while the rest of the world adopts THE next store of value/currency/commodity/new category.
Perhaps it was posted during wrong time of the day or was crowd power pointed to front page.
It is also possible that people here on HN do not have enough intuition about ideas, which could possibly change the world just like bitcoin is doing it right now. It's fun to read retrospective posts here on HN, but apparently innovation starts elsewhere..
[+] [-] cs702|12 years ago|reply
Interestingly, despite growing worldwide adoption of Bitcoin, comments about it on HN continue to be more or less evenly split between doubters and optimists. And I wouldn't be surprised if comments to this submission are evenly split between those same two camps.
No amount of evidence or reasoning seems to persuade either camp to change its views!
[+] [-] njharman|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sentenza|12 years ago|reply
While it is quite clear that Bitcoin has "value" as long as people are willing to trade it (i.e., indefinitely), there is still no reason to assume that it will ever stop having these extreme fluctuations.
To the contrary, I'd say that, as time progresses, we observe Bitcoin having the same problems that the gold standard had, mixed with an additional proneness to speculation.
[+] [-] antr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etler|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VLM|12 years ago|reply
One interesting observation about the two comments, is both authors are still occasionally posting to HN, if you click thru. Its a long lived community.
[+] [-] soneca|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThomPete|12 years ago|reply
But it's ram1024 and he is hellbanned:
ram1024 1656 days ago | link [dead] | fold
i'm having trouble wrapping my head around the logistics of this... -----
[+] [-] mbetter|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] applecore|12 years ago|reply
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1532670 - Bitcoin P2P Cryptocurrency | 1217 days ago | 24 comments
Some other early, popular posts about Bitcoin:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1942708 - Imagine your computer as a wallet full of Bitcoins| 1088 days ago | 36 comments
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1998144 - How to Get Started with Bitcoins | 1072 days ago | 47 comments
[+] [-] pg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] applecore|12 years ago|reply
In late 2009, the most visible seller was NewLibertyStandard[1], who had a unique pricing methodology[2].
You could buy roughly a thousand bitcoins for $1. This was widely considered overcharging.
[1]: http://newlibertystandard.wetpaint.com/page/2009+Exchange+Ra...
[2]: "During 2009 my exchange rate was calculated by dividing $1.00 by the average amount of electricity required to run a computer with high CPU for a year, 1331.5 kWh, multiplied by the the average residential cost of electricity in the United States for the previous year, $0.1136, divided by 12 months divided by the number of bitcoins generated by my computer over the past 30 days."
[+] [-] jeffasinger|12 years ago|reply
1: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/History
[+] [-] r3m6|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plainOldText|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pearjuice|12 years ago|reply
The absolute problem with bitcoin is, is that it cannot be used as a currency. If one bitcoin can buy you one "x" today, two "x" tomorrow and in a week only half an "x", what is the point of spending it? Its value fluctuates way too much and that's why so many people are getting on board. They want to be in the elevation towards another all time high.
I am not saying that Bitcoin does not have a future, but key in this future is that all those investors and startups on the get-rich-quick-with-a-very-high-potential-to-loose-a-lot-scheme have to abandon ship. The value of Bitcoin has to stabilize because at this point it is not a viable currency. Currently it is just an asset so many people are interested in, which drives the price only further up.
As soon as it stabilizes or drops we will see what it will d o with Bitcoin its popularity and acceptance for other goods and services.
[+] [-] vinhboy|12 years ago|reply
I bet the list of failed companies and "haters" who called it accurately is much much bigger.
Although I do like the nostalgic value of these posts.
[+] [-] Sambdala|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crassus|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] steven2012|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kaoD|12 years ago|reply
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability#Storage
[+] [-] walden42|12 years ago|reply
However, there's also the fact that a typical user doesn't have to download the whole blockchain in order to use bitcoins--they'll be connected to the nodes that do (that are dedicated for that purpose).
[+] [-] pinaceae|12 years ago|reply
right now there is so much fluctutation within BC it might as well be tulips. maybe it will become a stable currency, maybe it won't.
[+] [-] mpg33|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aredington|12 years ago|reply
Perfectly Fungible
Perfect Liquidity
Perfect Stability
Right now bitcoins are commodities. Any bitcoin is equally valuable as any other bitcoin; bitcoin's value derives from its purchasing power and from its exchange rate to other mediums of exchange. It has great liquidity and fungibility. However it has inherent stability problems as well as ambient ones:
Currently it experiences volatility by virtue of transactions not being demoninated in BTC, and of its exchange rate to other mediums of exchange. A large part of this is because it is consistently attracting large pools of people who wish to acquire it. The recent price spike appears to be a consequence of Chinese interest in acquiring bitcoin rapidly increasing. Eventually the number of people who want to possess bitcoins will grow as a function of the population on the planet, rather than as a function of new groups of people deciding it has become appealing. This will introduce some stability.
However, there's a fundamental flaw in that the pool of bitcoins is fixed, and that possessors know the finite size of the pool of bitcoins a priori. This exerts deflationary pressure on BTC, and as others have noted, discourages its spending. BTC is vastly more liquid than gold is, for example, but the stability of its value will always be an impediment to its usefulness as a currency.
This doesn't spell the doom of Bitcoin; it doesn't need to be a perfect currency, just a better currency than other currencies. It is already the most liquid commodity on the planet. It is at least as fungible as USD; attempts by coinvalidation to ruin this notwithstanding. Should the deflationary pressure of bitcoin compared to its circulation become sufficiently small, it will have inherent qualities to make it the best currency available, which can lead to it becoming more widespread.
A currency with lower transaction costs in time, and which has growth characteristics which trend toward following the value of productive output of the human race will certainly be better. USD are inherently worse.
[+] [-] oleganza|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crystaln|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GeneralMayhem|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lcasela|12 years ago|reply
Hah!
[+] [-] marvin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkr-hn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josephagoss|12 years ago|reply
Remember that negative and critical viewpoints are normally perceived to be from the the more intelligent person. Unfortunately people who are more accepting of new and novel ideas can at first seem like the less intelligent of the group. (Probably because they are not quick to dismiss and put down a thing, and thus have less to say at first glance)
The only solution is to think for yourselves and research the positions presented.
[+] [-] sz4kerto|12 years ago|reply
(Should I give you a much-much longer list of posts where people expressed their doubt and eventually they were right?)
[+] [-] baby|12 years ago|reply
many people ? Are you generalizing over a single post ?
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hardwaresofton|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vitalique|12 years ago|reply
Oh wait, what did I just do?
[+] [-] chaostheory|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] conformal|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shocks|12 years ago|reply
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
[+] [-] singold|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neotrinity|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BrokenPipe|12 years ago|reply
There are plenty of new bitcoin merchant and users every day and the USA won't stand while the rest of the world adopts THE next store of value/currency/commodity/new category.
[+] [-] ghostdiver|12 years ago|reply
It is also possible that people here on HN do not have enough intuition about ideas, which could possibly change the world just like bitcoin is doing it right now. It's fun to read retrospective posts here on HN, but apparently innovation starts elsewhere..
[+] [-] tomasien|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kamjam|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] filipedeschamps|12 years ago|reply