
Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling - prostoalex
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-01/bitcoin-s-use-in-commerce-keeps-falling-even-as-volatility-eases
======
TACIXAT
A currency with no mechanism for monetary policy is not going to be adopted.
Bitcoin is purely deflationary for more reasons than just people losing their
keys.

For example, a fixed reward split between a growing group of miners will also
cause a rising price floor. The miners will not sell for less than their
electricity costs, which makes the smaller piece of the block reward they
receive have a higher price.

So you have this asset you call a currency but it is always deflationary. No
one will set prices in that. Think of it in terms of setting a salary. One
month you are paying the equivalent of 1000 dollars, the next you are paying
2000. Since this has no way of stabilizing it will never become a true base
currency.

Instead, at best, it serves as a pass through to a fiat currency. So it is
acting as a payment processor but very inefficiently. Slow transaction speeds,
expensive, difficult to acquire.

The price is driven by speculative demand. It honestly is more like a digital
collectible than a currency (sign up to receive one of 21 million e coins, be
part of history).

~~~
jstanley
> The miners will not sell for less than their electricity costs, which makes
> the smaller piece of the block reward they receive have a higher price.

That's not how it works. If you spent $100 in electricity and you have an
asset that's worth $50, you can either sell it for $50 and only be down $50 on
your electricity, or you can not sell it at all and be down $100 on your
electricity.

Electricity cost of mining does not set a price floor. The price floor is 0.

~~~
klodolph
> That's not how it works.

Obivously, the meaning of the original sentence is that miners will turn off
the mining equipment when they decide that it's more profitable to leave it
off than leave it on.

> …you can either sell it for $50 and only be down $50 on your electricity, or
> you can not sell it at all and be down $100 on your electricity.

This is a false dilemma, the question is not just whether you sell the coins,
but also how many, with what timing, on what markets, and in exchange for
what. The “either sell it and make some money back, or don’t sell it and eat
the loss” is only true if you are paying for your electricity in Bitcoin to
begin with, or if you know that the asset you have will only depreciate in
value. If I spent $10,000 on a car that I don’t need, selling it for $8,000
might be a good deal because if I wait I will only get less. For Bitcoin, the
exchange rate fluctuates, and you can divide it and sell parts at different
times.

~~~
jstanley
Are you claiming that the cost of electricity sets a lower bound on what the
price of 1 BTC can possibly go to? If not, you haven't really disagreed with
what I said.

~~~
klodolph
You said,

> …you can either sell it for $50 and only be down $50 on your electricity, or
> you can not sell it at all and be down $100 on your electricity.

This is what I disagree with.

------
socrates1998
It sounds weird, but I think a big part of Bitcoin's, and other crypto's
value, isn't in the day to day ability to use it to buy and sell things, it's
the inability of the government to devalue it.

This isn't as big a problem in many richer countries with relatively stable
currencies, but I sure as hell would prefer Bitcoin to anything the Venezuelan
government or the Argentinian government would issue.

The kinks are still getting worked out for Bitcoin, but I still think it is a
big game changer.

~~~
bobthepanda
I mean, what advantage does it have over gold?

Advantages of gold vs. Bitcoin:

\- gold is pretty easy to find, not that hard to buy for the average consumer;
BTC is anything but

\- gold is physical in form and securing it is not hard; BTC is not physical,
exchanges get hacked with losses to accounts, in the event of a natural
disaster or some event where power generation and internet is lost you lose
access to BTC. (Someone can come break in and loot your gold, but people could
also do that with your BTC wallet credentials, and if people are doing that
you have worse things to worry about)

\- gold at least has some kind of floor value, since it does have uses other
than a currency store; the same is not true for BTC

~~~
deevolution
Maybe its a generational thing, but i have no clue how i would go about
buying/trading gold and i dont think anyone in my friend group does either.
Bitcoin is far more accessible.

~~~
bobthepanda
You can literally go to a gold dealer shop; it's like forex for gold. Even in
my moderately sized American city there are twenty that show up in Google Maps
within a twenty minute drive. And you buy gold and it's physically in your
possession; verifying it is easy, and the best part is you can verify it at
some other gold dealer if you're super paranoid.

With BTC, you have to find a trusted exchange and a trusted wallet. The
average consumer doesn't really know anything beyond a google search and the
first two results.

~~~
lisper
> verifying it is easy

Actually, it's not. It's nearly impossible to non-destructively distinguish
gold from tungsten wrapped in gold.

~~~
raziel2701
Any SEM with an EDS system will tell you non-destructively if you have
tungsten wrapped in gold. X-Ray diffractometry would also do the same.
Rutherford Backscattering spectrometry too. All three of these techniques are
non-destructive and the first two are quite common to find at universities.

~~~
detaro
That's quite a leap from "you can verify at some other gold dealer" though.

~~~
evgen
It is also a very large leap from “let’s just drill it at random locations”
that an actual gold dealer will try first if they suspect something like this.
The drill bit not going through the bar like butter at the location will
probably be the first tip-off.

------
briatx
It has been clear for a while now that Bitcoin is an inferior payment system
for the consumer:

* The fees are higher.

* The risk to the consumer is higher.

* The difficulty of use is higher.

* It is accepted at an extremely low amount of vendors and even that is falling.

So you really how to wonder why people ever thought consumers would use it en
masse.

~~~
chrismorgan
One of your points is of dubious validity: fees may not be higher.

Fees went very high when the network became congested; but when it’s not
congested, they’re much lower than credit card systems are for normal
businesses.

[https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/](https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/) suggests that
right now, what equates to about nine US cents is sufficient for a basic
transaction. And if you’re happy to wait an hour, then two cents ought to do
you fine.

I’m not sure whether this is a typical rate; I haven’t been keeping an eye on
it, and [https://core.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#30d](https://core.jochen-
hoenicke.de/queue/#30d) is hard to read casually. But by the looks of it, a
very substantial fraction of transactions have been going through at what will
be under ten cents if they’re simple transactions.

Your standard sorts of base rates for accepting credit card transactions are
30¢ + 1.75–2.9%, depending on certain conditions like country and card type.

~~~
ttoinou
Yes. But don't forget credit cards offer others services, such as charge
refund and fraud protection

~~~
chrismorgan
I am only quibbling on the statement about fees, not the rest.

~~~
oopsman88
The point is that credit cards offer very valuable services in exchange for
fees. Bitcoin offers nothing for a higher fee.

~~~
keymone
really? nothing? do you even know what bitcoin is? the ignorance in this
thread is baffling sometimes.

------
smsm42
I am not surprised. I am a programmer with decades of experience under my
belt, and I have no idea how to install bitcoin in a way that would allow me
convenient use of it. No, I _can_ install the apps, and I can spend a month or
two waiting until it downloads the whole 40+G of current blockchain, or I can
trust some site that says it'd fix it for me, or I can open an account on any
of the exchanges and pray to cryptogods it's not the one that is going to be
robbed or go bust next. But why would I?

Now, if I would plan to trade in commodities that local government is frowning
upon, or speculatively invest in assets that make Las Vegas look like index
funds, it would be worth my while. But I don't, so it isn't.

Now make a step from myself - the experienced professional who actually knows
what Bitcoin is and can probably explain how it works without wading too far
from the truth - to a person who doesn't know the difference between "browser"
and "internet". Why on earth would they go through this trouble - and more
importantly, why on earth anybody who cares about them would advice them to go
there at all? My advice to anybody who is not an agressive risk investor or a
person with interests misaligned with current law would be "not with a ten
foot pole". Right now it's so ripe with opportunities for both unintentional
screwups and intentional skullduggery that I don't see how people can do
consumer commerce with it.

~~~
keymone
exaggerating a bit? bitcoin syncs within couple hours unless you run it on the
computer you'd gain your decades of experience on :)

every mobile bitcoin app is a lightweight client - it only syncs block
headers, much faster but not great for large sums of money.

so for a person that can't tell "browser" from "internet" there's no
difference between introducing them to paypal or to bitcoin - it's just an app
on your phone and you can press the "send" button.

~~~
andrewmcwatters
> it only syncs block headers

I think what the parent comment is trying to say is: who cares about this? Not
even many of us technical people care.

It's like saying, "Just get the mobile app, it just synchroaligns the ledger
manifest distributable intra-block metadata! Duh! Simple!"

It's not accessible to people, and not even engineers who aren't familiar with
the tech.

I don't need to understand the minting process to know how to use a dollar,
but for some reason the Bitcoin community expects you to understand blocks,
difficulty, ledgers, exchanges, and many other concepts that are relatively
advanced and take _time_ and _effort_ to understand. A dollar is a dollar.

This continually seems to fall on deaf ears.

~~~
keymone
this is just weird.. i was addressing GP's concern about performance of
syncing. of course i wouldn't bother explaining how bitcoin works and what are
the modes of operation and performance differences between them to a lay
person. they don't care. they care that it's just an app.

so what exactly did you want to say?

~~~
andrewmcwatters
It's missing the forest for the trees.

------
ttul
When I was starting a BTC ASIC company (don’t worry - it failed to attract
investment) in 2011, one of the things that always spooked investors was the
slide showing transaction volume. Even in those early days, one had to really
stretch one’s imagination to believe that Bitcoin could one day take over from
Visa/MasterCard as a payment method of choice.

But we did understand its value as an alternative store of wealth, and
potentially as a way to transfer money across borders more cheaply. I think
the former utility has been somewhat dented by the steady drop in value since
its peak. And the latter isn’t really all that amazing of a value prop when
you consider that regular old PayPal isn’t that expensive and the set of
situations in which it does not work is really small.

Not to mention that SWIFT is really ancient but also works well and can be
endlessly improved...

~~~
amelius
What does it take to actually make BTC ASICs?

In my understanding, the hash functions are quite simple and just do things
like XOR, and SHIFT, and perhaps ADD/SUB, but not multiply or divide. So the
main difficulty would be to do everything at the lowest possible amount of
power.

But I could be wrong.

~~~
ttul
You are correct. The ASIC engineering was routine. It was all about justifying
the enormous NRE costs... back in early 2011, BTC was a curiosity and not well
known at all. Investors were not easy to convince.

------
jonny_eh
When can we call Bitcoin a failed experiment? And don't tell me it was "always
about storing value", that's not in the original paper.

~~~
err4nt
A failed experiment to me would be one that wasn't able to run its full
course, or from which no information can be gleaned. Bitcoin has run for a
long time, we have gleaned a ton of useful information - as far as experiments
are concerned this seems like it went bigger and better than expected, so it
should be a very GOOD experiment!

~~~
redisman
I think it's really unfair to call Bitcoin "failed". It has unarguably changed
the world. There was way too much hype about it changing everything.

~~~
fstanis
> It has unarguably changed the world.

How so? I see nothing in my day-to-day life that's different because of
Bitcoin.

------
gammateam
First, use in commerce peaked when transaction fees went too high in 2017, and
consumers didn't try the shitty user experience again

okay, temporary problem

the payment processor's user experience kind of sucks and the network didn't
help that

better UX and lightning network will help with that. There are also some BIPs
regarding signing transactions differently, as well as smaller transactions
coming. This year, 2018, more people already use another form of smaller
transactions and also combine them. Bitcoin would handle a lot more load this
year.

Secondly, M1 is a tiny fraction of the supply used for goods and services, M2
and M3 are illiquid stores of value. Bitcoin isn't functioning differently to
currencies in this regard so its a weird standard to put it at to proclaim it
isn't a good value transfer mechanism.

~~~
Nursie
> better UX and lightning network will help with that.

Lightning appears to be a bit of a joke - routing payments is almost
impossible, lots of attempts seem to fail, and there also appear to be
requirements like keeping a node up constantly.

~~~
gammateam
yeah I read and repeated all of that stuff without investigating too, at one
point.

they aren't fundamental flaws to the concept. just like with tcp/ip packets,
routing will improve with robustness of the network. I saw a couple of work in
progress efforts to address the full node requirements.

they'll be growing pains but bitcoin is interesting because the protocol
doesn't go away, even as the payment processing companies themselves run out
of money. so a different company or group of efforts will implement it with
merchants when its better.

~~~
CryptoPunk
It's different than TCP/IP in that every transaction changes the topography of
a payment channel network, by changing the maximum amount that can be sent
across various channels. This is a fundamental difference.

Moreover, even if LN worked as a full substitute for on-chain transactions
(all indications point to only a very centralized hub and spoke LN model
working efficiently), Bitcoin's three transactions per second limit makes the
maximum proportion of the global population that could participate in a LN
very limited.

Afterall, LN payment channels do still need on-chain transactions to set up,
and do need to be replaced from the time to time. Given every user would need,
at the very least, a few payment channels, the math for global adoption of the
LN with a 3 tps limit doesn't work.

~~~
gammateam
Yes this is something I'm following too.

So although Bitcoin has a low transaction per second limitation, the database
Transaction objects can contain hundreds of transactions between users. This
is what batching does. Segwit further helps lower the size of Transaction
objects. And further proposals also lower that further.

~~~
CryptoPunk
>>the database Transaction objects can contain hundreds of transactions
between users.

Can you elaborate or provide a link?

If you're referring to off-chain transactions through LN that are 'batched' on
chain: these cannot set up payment channels. On-chain transactions for payment
channel set up are the necessary minimum for the LN, and even to do just this,
Bitcoin's block size limit doesn't come close to being adequate.

As for Segwit, it's a one time limit increase to something like 1.67 MB per 10
minutes (~2 KB/s). The limit needs a couple order of magnitude increase to
make Bitcoin viable as a global currency.

~~~
gammateam
A "transaction" on the bitcoin blockchain can contain many peer to peer
actions which are also colloquially called transactions.

I'm not referring to lightning. This is basic day-one functionality of
bitcoin. I don't feel compelled to provide a link to this at this point. Many
popular services' implementation of bitcoin wasn't doing this, and now they
are, this is called batching.

------
jfaucett
The primary utility of money is this: it is the good that best lends itself to
exchanges for other goods.

Its been clear to me for some time now, and I'm not alone in this, that as the
properties of Bitcoin have moved further away from its primary function as a
useful unit of exchange that its usage would decline.

There are other crypto-currencies which are now much better suited as a medium
of exchange, which ones people will prefer as time progresses remain to be
seen, but unless Bitcoin takes a major corrective path, I would be quite
surprised to find Bitcoin in that final set of widely utilized currencies.

~~~
andrewmcwatters
Isn’t this issue inherent in its design? If you can only have 21 million
Bitcoins, the value will skyrocket until the currency is worthless.

~~~
ttoinou
It's more than 21 millions since bitcoins can be divided. And no, it could
serve as a digital gold / long term investment, and others crypto currencies
could be used for day to day transaction

~~~
andrewmcwatters
What? That's like saying it's okay if there's only 21 million US dollars, they
can be divided into pennies.

Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. Gold does. There's no long-term investment
there when even pizza places and Steam think the "currency" is bunk.

It's one thing if Goldman Sachs thinks the currency is worthless, but another
issue entirely if the digital equivalent of Circle-K won't accept your virtual
dollary-doos.

Let's see, would I rather invest in a company like Intel whose processors are
in every American home, or McDonalds whose an international brand, or in
Bitcoin whose sole usage is relegated to druggies and sole investment limited
to grandmas and millennials who think they're going to strike it rich?

It's pogs for adults.

~~~
ttoinou
I didn't say it was "okay". It was not an argument. The fact that there are
max 21 millions bitcoins is known to everybody but doesn't say much about the
total supply since it can be divided. And it cannot be divided into infinity,
the smallest unit is the satoshi, so why not talk about the max number of
satoshis if you want to make an argument about the max supply of unit of
currency ?

------
wgerard
By no means am I a bitcoin-enthusiast, but I've shared this story before:

> We had to send a payment to someone who lives in a commonwealth country -
> what a pain in the ass that was. For the first time I actually saw a use for
> bitcoin, but the volatility and my general desire not to run afoul of any
> weird money laundering laws got the better of me.

I do think there's a legitimate case for bitcoin as a means of getting around
FX and just the general inaneness of international banking.

That being said, I'm sure that there are plenty of reasons why that'll never
come to fruition (e.g. as I noted, AML rules).

~~~
wslh
> We had to send a payment to someone who lives in a commonwealth country

I use it for that purpose all the time. In general, People in developed
countries don't have a clue about how painful and time consuming an
international payment can be. Even with credit cards banks put very low limits
that are unrealistic for someone who travel often and consume cloud services
like AWS or Google Cloud.

That is why I think the Bitcoin narrative is misleading, the main point was to
make P2P transfer, not holding. In this context stable coins like DAI are
currently one of the killer use cases.

~~~
wgerard
> I use it for that purpose all the time.

Not to dig into your business too much, but: Any weird tax/legal implications
around that? I didn't want to dig into it too much (just because often these
things are rabbit holes with unclear answers), but I'm really curious about it
for the next time we have to send a payment.

> In general, People in developed countries don't have a clue about how
> painful and time consuming an international payment can be.

I can definitely say I had no idea until I had to do it myself. Trying to
figure out how to do a wire transfer to someone in another country was a huge
boondoggle (and expensive).

~~~
tom_
In the UK a capital gain (or loss) may occur when you use Bitcoin to buy
something, whatever that thing is. (Buying something with Bitcoin is
effectively selling Bitcoin for that thing. The thing has a value, and that is
some evidence that the Bitcoin is worth that much.) This is a taxable event
and if the gain is large enough then you'll need to pay the tax on it.

I imagine many countries have rules that are quite similar.

~~~
wgerard
Interesting - so wait, if I send someone in the UK bitcoin and they sell it
immediately for GBP, does that count as a capital gain?

Or just if the price changes between when they receive it and convert it to
GBP?

EDIT: I guess it doesn't really matter in this case since presumably short-
term capital gains rate is similar (or equal) to the income tax rate, but just
curious for my own sake.

~~~
tom_
The gain is the difference between the value when they got it and the value
when they sold it, so probably nothing if they do both on the same day. I
guess you may have made a gain when you gave the Bitcoin away, since it's
treated as a disposal at the market rate... maybe? I don't know the rules for
this.

(Regarding speed of selling - there's no short-term CGT rate in the UK, but
there are rules about quick turnaround that may apply. Consult an accountant.)

------
joering2
_Bitcoin advocates have long suggested the virtual money would one day replace
fiat currencies as a means of doing business_

That's not the case anymore either. We have few powerful miners than own more
than 50%. Sure they separate entity per se, but if they talk and agree
together, they can do whatever they want.

They whole premise that crypto is free and decentralized and "banks cannot
control it" is a good idea.. unless you quickly realize the flaw that biggest
miners can get together and form a "crypto mob" if you will, and control
currency future anyways.

~~~
lern_too_spel
The whole system consists of flaws the authors would have forseen if they
understood economic thinking. Instead, they pretended that all the tenets of
economics magically go away if you apply a little cryptography.

The flaw you're pointing out is that whoever has access to cheap electricity
and scale will be able to control the system. There is not sufficient
incentive for others to jump in to a money losing proposition.

~~~
dnomad
I propose Bitcoin and most other extra-legal (ie non state supported)
currencies are going to zero. That said we can be grateful that the experiment
was done and data was gained.

------
CryptoPunk
This is a totally expected consequence of Bitcoin Core abandoning the original
plan of raising the block size limit in favor of 'the Lightning Network',
which is a technology that does not even work at the conceptual level, let
alone being production ready.

A blockchain limited to 3 transactions per second cannot be a global currency.
Before Bitcoin came up against its 1 MB per 10 minute (1.67 KB/s) limit, which
is its life from launch to 2017, its daily transaction volume was growing
exponentially, yoy.

------
vasili111
Cryptocurrency will never replace fiat money. Corporations will never put
their money in a system that is controlled by only one password and that uses
transactions that in case of error can't be undone.

~~~
jobserunder
Keep dreaming. You will see.

------
talkingtab
My thinking, probably wrong goes like this:

what is money? It is a messaging system that allows people to decide what to
do in a decentralized fashion. We need more food, the price of food goes up,
more people grow food. What happens when you make money from money?
Dysfunction. World currencies are increasingly dysfunctional - the most profit
comes not from productive economic activity but from speculation, arbitrage,
etc.

Bitcoins are completely dysfunctional because they are not tied to any
productive economic activity, they are completely speculative. The idea of
cryptocurrencies is great, but without being tied to real economic activity,
they are ... well speculative.

Would love some explanations on why this thinking is wrong.

~~~
empath75
They’re tied to economic activity — buying drugs, money laundering, paying
ransoms, funding intelligence operations.

Just nobody is using them to buy legitimate products.

------
KasianFranks
Bitcoin (and crypto) is not a currency, commodity, stock or bond. It's a
combination which makes it a completely new and different kind of asset class.
It's a programmable asset that primarily serves as a 'trading vehicle' in the
mind of traders and Wall St. Understanding this helps to understand why
Goldman and others are stepping over themselves to setup trading desks for
most crypto now and in the future.

~~~
glup
I totally agree with the assertion that it doesn't fall into existing asset
type (or-- maybe that it can move between asset types in a novel way), but
what do you mean by "programmable"? Isn't the simpler explanation or
enthusiasm on the part of Goldman et al. just classic FOMO?

~~~
KasianFranks
When you can engineer sophisticated scripts or wrappers around a globally
accessible immutable tradable asset it increases functionality and innovation
in financial products which includes autonomous machines trading crypto with
one another in exchange for data. I think we're in for a world of fun.

------
BitcoinIsCash
With the small-blocker and big-blocker schism, BTC is not Bitcoin, and is not
meant for commerce.

If you want fast, cheap, settled transactions, use Bitcoin (BCH).

------
mortdeus
I think what people need to realize about cryptocurrencies is that they aren't
going to derive their value from being convertible to fiat currency.

Rather cryptocurrencies are going to be revolutionary in the sense of how they
can be combined with other technologies.

For example, what if World of Warcraft used a cryptocurrency based system for
ingame currency? Where the ingame money was actually finite and that in theory
the players in the game could suffer from an economic depression. Or a few
players could hoard all the wealth in the game. etc. etc.

The game would be way different than it is now, which is to say that it just
emulates an economy, not actually implements one.

This is probably a bad example to get what I am trying to say. So lets imagine
a different scenario. Let's say we wanted to build a social network, where we
didn't actually want everybody to just be able to say whatever they want
without a threat of consequence. What we want is a social network where you
have to do something to earn the ability to speak, and once you speak you lose
the currency to be able to speak again until you do something once again to
earn the ability to speak.

What you have to do in order to earn the ability to act depends on the service
in question, but the same basic concept of a cryptocurrency is what underlying
the system. In that the platform only has value when the ability to act is a
limited and highly valued resource.

~~~
TheDong
> For example, what if World of Warcraft used a cryptocurrency based system
> for ingame currency?

Why would they need a distributed system? They already have an in-game
currency with a central authority (their trusted servers) and can already
limit the rate of currency creation (reduce monster's gold drop rate to zero
or whatever).

EVE Online shows just how well a central authority can manage a virtual game
currency. No crypto or blockchain needed.

> Let's say we wanted to build a social network, where we didn't actually want
> everybody to just be able to say whatever they want without a threat of
> consequence

Cool, so like a reputation system on old forums where you have to have a
certain number of positive comments to participate in other private forums,
and there's heavy moderation?

Oh woah, no crypto, no blockchain. I don't see how cryptocurrencies make the
fundamental problems of building such a system any easier btw. Attaching a
value to someone in a database is easy, and even distributed social networks
like mastodon trust the participating servers (and if you don't, you block the
whole server).

Cryptocurrencies are a problem looking for another problem, and it turns out
rubbing two problems together doesn't make fire.

A central database is usually better (the WoW example), and they're often
orthogonal to other ideas they're shoved into (reputation system, file
storage, whatever).

------
mr_theopolis
The problem with bitcoin as a currency or a store of value is simpler than all
these comments.

It is not secure.

If I own gold, I own the gold, nobody can take it from me without physical
access to it.

If I own bitcoin, I own a transaction on a ledger. I don't own that ledger.
The majority miners control the ledger.

A miner who has 50% of hashing power (actually less, when selfish mining)
completely owns and controls the ledger. They can erase any transactions they
want, block transactions and double spend.

You don't have that with gold, you actually own the gold.

Bitcoin Gold was the same source code and same ledger as bitcoin (no extra
words) and it was double spent in exactly that way.

The whole system was designed to make the people who created the fake money a
lot of money, it wasn't designed to run forever. They've made their 100s of
millions+ and more. Beyond their wildest dreams. It's a simple pyramid scheme
designed to run as long as possible.

It is not a currency. It is not a store of value. It is a worthless asset
being traded back and forth by people losing money in a less than zero sum
game. Less than zero because money is going to miners and exchanges who
facilitate the game.

~~~
jobserunder
Selfish mining with less than 50% does not exist. False

Also.... see how they confiscated gold in the USA.

You cannot confiscate bitcoin, anymore than you can confiscate "internet"

Both are networking protocols

~~~
davidgerard
> Selfish mining with less than 50% does not exist. False

Incorrect, and this has been well known for nearly five years:
[http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/04/bitcoin-is-
broken/](http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/04/bitcoin-is-broken/)

~~~
jobserunder
Yes, Emin has been pushing that narrative for a while.

But we have not seen an instance of this yet

------
PoespasAR
So many initiatives are currently in development to make it easy to accept
crypto. Just wait 2 or 3 years...

------
opticbit
>And Bitcoin-based transactions can’t be reversed, an issue when a merchant or
a consumer comes up against fraud

That's the fucking point. Use multisig/escrow if you need it.

------
octopod
Bitcoin != despite the wearisome and over-blown emotional 'bitcoin is bad see
i told you so!' mentality on HN.

------
superkuh
Bloomberg's use in news keeps falling too. They have set up computational
paywalls to prevent people from reading their articles. But for some reason
people on HN just keep posting them. It's a weird exception to the no-
paywalled article status quo.

~~~
paulpauper
ditto. used to be ok but now too much clickbait, low quality content, and now
paywalls

------
agorabinary
It's pretty remarkable that the transaction layer (Lightning network) on top
of Bitcoin hasn't garnered any discussion in this comment section - I would
expect this to be the primary topic when talking Bitcoin commerce! It's not
possible to have an intelligent discussion on Bitcoin commerce without
discussing its most relevant tech.

From my experience, I see that most apolitical or politically averse techies
(a lot of HN) are drawn heavily to Ethereum, which has been falling relative
to Bitcoin ever since the January highs. Pretty sure there is a strong
correlation between this and HN crypto frustration in general.

~~~
CyberDildonics
> It's pretty remarkable that the transaction layer (Lightning network) on top
> of Bitcoin hasn't garnered any discussion in this comment section

I would say it's pretty encouraging since it barely works, doesn't deliver on
any of its promises and much more convoluted to use that normal crypto-
currency.

~~~
agorabinary
I can send less than a satoshi to someone across the globe for virtually zero
fees, anonymously and without any need to wait for block confirmations? And
all of this works right now on mainnet?

Bitcoin progress has always consisted of overcoming allegedly insurmountable
problems, Lightning dev is no different. Next up is solving efficient routing
and intermittent nodes.

~~~
CryptoPunk
>>Bitcoin progress has always consisted of overcoming allegedly insurmountable
problems, Lightning dev is no different.

Bitcoin's founder solved one allegedly insurmountable problem: the Byzantine
Generals' problem. It's irrational to believe this means Bitcoin Core's
development team, who had no part in the original design of Bitcoin, will
solve more problems of this class.

Bitcoin Core should have fully exploited the existing breakthrough in
decentralized consensus, by simply raising the block size limit to provide
enough space for the world to use Bitcoin, instead of pushing Bitcoin's luck,
and premising its success on an uncertain technology like LN.

~~~
agorabinary
Ever since LN was first proposed, skeptics have asserted problem after problem
as an insurmountable obstacle. And time after time they have been proven
wrong.

If you really think that big blocks solve anything, then by all means just use
Bcash - though of course Bcash itself is melting down into separate forks as
we speak..

~~~
CyberDildonics
> If you really think that big blocks solve anything, then by all means just
> use Bcash - though of course Bcash itself is melting down into separate
> forks as we speak..

Try to look beyond all the censored /r/bitcoin propaganda - bitcoin cash and
other cryptocurrencies scale fine with increased blocksizes.

Bitcoin cash is not melting down in separate forks at all. The increased
blocksize obviously works without problems and has nothing to do with forking
in the first place.

There was never a reason to restrict the blocksize of btc except to sell a
complicated and unnecessary promise of a solution to a non-problem. Everyone
outside of the /r/bitcoin censorship and propaganda bubble can see this.

------
Tim_cas
How Google is entering the crypto space is
[https://blog.usejournal.com/google-entering-the-
blockchain-s...](https://blog.usejournal.com/google-entering-the-blockchain-
space-f418793e1cb4) very telling. Bitcoin is not going away. Get over it.

~~~
jeromegv
Crypto space doesn't necessarily mean Bitcoin, could be another better
technology that eventually becomes mainstream.

~~~
shawnz
And when someone claims that they support Bitcoin or see a future for Bitcoin,
chances are they too are talking about cryptocurrencies in general and not
specifically Bitcoin.

~~~
droidist2
True, it's just often easier to say Bitcoin because many people have heard of
it.

