
Bitcoin will become the world’s single currency, Jack Dorsey says - thmslee
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bitcoin-will-become-the-worlds-single-currency-tech-chief-says-66slm0p6b
======
janandonly
Lightning is now running in Beta and will later in 2018 fix the high
transaction cost problem.

But I wonder how Jack comes to this very strong conclusion?

It took two world wars first to _slowly_ dethrone the British Pound Sterling
and than to push the USA Dollar down everyone's throat, with the help of the
Marshall plan and the Saudi oil deal (we protect you, and you sell oil only in
$ denominated contracts).

What similar strong reasons are there to think Bitcoin is going to grow this
strong?

------
gourou
Twitter stops advertising for cryptocurrencies but Twitter CEO doesn't

[https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/18/17136556/twitter-
cryptocu...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/18/17136556/twitter-
cryptocurrency-ads-bitcoin-ban-report)

------
pleasecalllater
Yea, and buying a bread would cost my daily salary. Bread will be cheap, the
daily salary will go to pay the transaction cost.

~~~
xutopia
Did you hear about the lightning network?

~~~
dvh
Did you hear about crypto currencies with instant transactions?

~~~
wyager
Every single one of them lacks critically useful properties of bitcoin, and
arguably don’t fall under the definition of “cryptocurrencies” at all. Usually
the way you get instant transactions is giving up
decentralization/trustlessness or giving up guarantees about transaction
permanence. You might as well just use a bank.

~~~
DrJid
Sorry but even the lightning network leads to more centralization. You still
have to open and close each end and not every individual can do that because
that’s already 2 on chain transactions.

~~~
wyager
Network topology centralization is not even remotely the same as concensus
centralization. Having a highly centralized topology is mildly bad (but
probably avoidable) whereas centralized concensus completely eliminates the
usefulness of cryptocurrencies over various trustful payment systems.

------
mpg33
Bitcoin is a store of value. Someone has yet to create to create an effective
medium of exchange out of a crypto-currency.

~~~
detuur
It's not a store of value. It's a speculation asset. A store of value is
something that is good at preserving the value that went into acquiring it. A
store of value is not volatile, runs no chance of losing all its value
overnight, can be insured against value loss at low margins, and has a long
history of being used as a store of value. Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency
is none of these.

------
bearjaws
No it won't.

------
madspindel
It will probably replace gold, but not so much more than that.

~~~
nkkollaw
Mmm... If you had a kilo of gold, would you really exchange it for bitcoins?

The only people who push for that is those who have bitcoins--possibly
acquired when it was worth nothing. If I had gold I would keep the gold, not
replace it with something that might be worth absolutely nothing overnight.

~~~
slowmotiony
What makes you so sure that you won't wake up one day and find out that
someone managed to synthesize gold, or found a gigantic cache of it somewhere?
I wouldn't be so sure about the chances of that happening being lower than
that of sha256 being broken.

~~~
petre
Gold can alredy be synthethised, but either all synthetic gold isotopes are
radioactive or you have to use very rare metals (like Pt or Hg196) to obtain
stable Au197. To do that you need a particle accelerator or a nuclear reactor,
both of which are very expensive.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#G...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals#Gold)

The solid gold asteroid crashing onto Eatrh theory is even less plausible. So
I'd venture to say gold is a quite safe store of value for the time being. A
lot better than Bitcoin or any other crypto currency that could be easily
wiped out in the event of a nuclear blast or rendered useless in the absence
of electricity.

~~~
nkkollaw
Forget it, there are "Bitcoin fanboys" that have abandoned all logic.

I'm not saying it isn't a cool technology an idea and one can't try, but a
little common sense would still help IMHO.

------
BenoitEssiambre
A deflationary currency cannot become mainstream without causing a huge amount
of instability.

Deflation at some point causes people, businesses and banks to build stashes
of tokens instead of investing in real businesses with real production
capacity.

When this trend becomes widespread enough, it causes global production
capacity to drop. That's right, when enough people do it, token hoarding
displaces investment in businesses and factories and lowers global production
capacity. This means token hoarding causes a future drop in things available
to buy with these very tokens.

Eventually when token stashes become too big and seemingly valuable, there
will be people who want to buy real things with their stock of tokens. These
tokens will be chasing fewer goods which will mean prices for stuff will rise
(tokens will lose value). This may happen suddenly when people with large
stockpiles of tokens notice that value is dropping and see that there are tons
of other tokens waiting on the sideline ready to make it drop even further.

Hoarders are likely to rush to get rid of their stockpile all at the same time
before they're worthless which will cause their fall to worthlessness. This
kind of drop brings the tokens closer to their natural intrinsic value of zero
and resets the cycle, which can then start again, such is aggregate economics.

The 1920s and 1930s suffered from this type of production drop but with gold
tied currencies instead of cryptocoins. It happened to a lesser extent in 2007
when western world central banks failed to keep inflation rates high enough.

It's important for the world's sake to not let deflationary currencies become
too popular. When savings or financial promises are insufficiently tied to
future production or to accumulation of real goods, there will be
disappointment when many people try to exchange them for real stuff. That is
true for crypto currencies as well as government currencies (that is why the
system is designed to make banks invest people's money in real businesses and
minimize the proportion of money that is stockpiled idly).

It's true that crypto currencies are currently not widely held enough to
significantly affect the aggregate economy but speculation already keeps them
volatile and the knowledge that as they get more popular, there will be more
macroeconomic pressures towards volatility will keep the speculation wild and
cryptocoins unstable.

Currencies that are not designed to lose value over time can not be stable.
Intrinsically worthless tokens engineered to have better than market real
returns (risk adjusted, liquidity adjusted,) compared to real productive
investment will always fluctuate increasingly wildly as they get more popular.

------
onion2k
While I think "digital money" will replace existing currencies eventually, I
don't think there's any reason to believe our first popular cryptocurrency is
necessarily the ideal solution. There'll be better currencies that come along
and replace Bitcoin (faster, more secure, more anonymous, more energy
efficient, etc), and the world will coalesce around one of those.

However, before any universal replacement of money with a cryptocurrency can
happen there are some _huge_ problems to solve, like the fact that fewer than
half the people on Earth have access to the internet right now. We can't
possibly have a global electronic currency if half the people can't use it.

~~~
OrganicMSG
I think any payment system that is dependent on a working network connection
to a 3rd party being concurrent to the transaction, is unsuitable as a primary
underlying monetary system. The chaos caused in a restaurant when the card
machines break is insane and that is while there is still cash to fall back
on.

------
mdekkers
Paywall. Also, Dorsey has a significant investment in blockchain, so he would
say so. Since the article is behind a paywall, I can't see his actual
justification for this, other then "I hope so", but on the face of things, I
don't think so. Crypto currencies are too much of a threat to the established
interests, and if you think that particular cabal of sharks is just going to
let this happen, you are wrong. They have the power, and will quietly fight
this tooth+nail.

------
thisisit
USD transacted electronically using your bank is also a technically "digital
currency". So, I don't understand why do people not think along the lines of
better solutions to transact USD faster and cheaper but in terms of how
cryptocurrency can improve.

~~~
candiodari
No it is not. That is debt, absolutely no doubt about it. That is emphatically
not even USD. It is contracts to pay USD to a named person at some future date
that are "changing hands", not USD.

There is a very big difference, especially in case of liquidity problems. But
there are more huge differences : for instance, exchanging money is not free
(someone's paying 2% or so). Thirdly, those transaction are legally required
to be reversible (just browse some online forums), and are reversed in
apparently 1-2% of cases.

If bitcoin has proven anything, it's that there is a huge need for a currency
that you can actually exchange over the network.

------
majewsky
Also Twitter will be the world's single social network. /s

------
CyberDildonics
Jack Dorsey the person invested in the lightning network that doesn't actually
work and runs on top of the a crippled 1.6KB/s chain?

~~~
andruby
How/where did he invest? I’ve been out of the loop for a while.

------
nkkollaw
He's heavily invested in it--so I'm sure he does believe that, but I doubt
banks will let that happen.

Banks are known to do some really nasty stuff to make money: deceively deprive
the US of government-controlled money and removing the gold standard, pretty
much sentencing Greece to never come out of their depression, etc. etc.

They have pretty good contractual power too: they have everyone's money.
That's pretty important in most societies.

~~~
IAmEveryone
even if your conspiracies were true, banks are still better, along most any
dimension, than any of the players in the crypto universe.

~~~
nkkollaw
If by conspiracies you mean conspiracies yes, otherwise I don't think those
events are disputed by anyone.

I don't think banks are bad. I have all my money at a bank, not a Bitcoin
exchange. I'm just saying that ethics are not their forte, and that's just a
fact.

------
tudorconstantin
I think he referred to Bitcoin as a generic name for crypto currencies.

There will always be more than one crypto coin and new ones will keep
appearing. And that in itself will solve the deflationary issue.

People will choose to buy and use them based on their name, their logo, their
ease of use, based on what their peers use maybe even on what it's promised in
their white papers. Almost all of the above enumerated properties look better
on crypto currency at the very present moment than those of USD, EUR, Yuan and
other fiat money.

------
45h34jh53k4j
Jack Dorsey is mostly correct here. While I still doubt that it will be used
for coffee (however lightning network payments certainly do make this
possible), it is difficult to escape the reality of deflationary currencies --
It is foolish to spend today what you could save until tomorrow.

Unlike a certain CSW who believes HODL'ing is evil
([https://www.pscp.tv/w/bYHNVjFheWpWSkpOTW9HanB8MXZBeFJWenZnVm...](https://www.pscp.tv/w/bYHNVjFheWpWSkpOTW9HanB8MXZBeFJWenZnVmF4bCq8nwrwmU5VaphIg6ZCUd7YAtj3MzvtVooh3BYnik4L)),
I believe that cryptocurrencies provides the ultimate reward to savers.

Save some coin today for your life tomorrow.

~~~
EGreg
If this is true, then everyone will spend electricity mining instead of on
actual people's needs because it will make them a lot more. Get ready for
blackouts.

~~~
aldanor
And then the most common minimum-wage job would be spinning the wheels on a
bitcoin-mining bicycle, kind of like in one of those Black Mirror episodes.

~~~
45h34jh53k4j
which is the reality for most minimum-wage jobs. its purpose is to keep that
wheel spinning.

Is the wheel of the cryptocurrency miner, or the wheel of the landlord or
business owner really that different?

~~~
detuur
No, very much the opposite. Most minimum-wage jobs are actually the one that
specifically create or add value. When you work as a fruit picker, for every
fruit you pick you just added value into the economy. With every figurative
swing of the pickaxe a miner creates value from where was previously a rock
wall. Every carefully-timed cycle of 43 seconds a Chinese factory worker turns
a box of components into its much more valuable sum of those parts.

Minimum wage jobs are exactly the class of jobs where we can be certain that
value was created. Much of the higher-level jobs is just making sure that that
value doesn't spoil, that it doesn't go lost, that it can make its way around
the economy to enable further value creation (at the hand of another minimum
wage job) as soon as possible. Some higher-level jobs like engineer can
amplify the value creation by designing new tools for the job, but the value
itself still stems from the actions of those manual labourers.

~~~
gus_massa
[Slightly off-topic]

> _Some higher-level jobs like engineer can amplify the value creation by
> designing new tools for the job, but the value itself still stems from the
> actions of those manual labourers._

This is a nice variation of the Chinese Room argument
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room)

Who is creating the value, the one that is writing the instruction or the one
that is following blindly the instructions? [In real life it's more
complicated because the designers have feedback from the operators and also
because usually the instructions are underspecified.]

