Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

_Any_ database can be foundational, digital money if you get the enough people and their governments to agree that it is. The database part is not the hard part.



No, the agreement and trust part is.

Bitcoin is the trust machine. That's the problem it solves.


Bitcoin is trustworthy in the way that gold or beads or shells in a vault are trustworthy - if you have it, you have it, and if you give it to some else, they have it and you don't[1]. That doesn't make it easier to get people and world governments to agree to construct value (and accept payments and taxes) in terms of Bitcoin, or to trust that Bitcoin will continue to be exchangeable for a predictable amount of real goods and services in the future.

It's a sort of stable system if everyone already measures value in terms of bitcoin, since the database itself works well enough, and users are incentivized to make choices that sustain it as a store of value. That's true of _any_ unit of account though, nothing inherent to bitcoin makes it more stable in that regard; the energy usage, transactions costs, and distinction between miners and users probably add risk on that account.

Also (and this is not directed at you personally, but the arbitrary bitcoin maximalist) its hard to take one with millions of glass beads seriously when they argue the world should measure value itself in terms of glass beads, which then by pure happenstance will make them fabulously wealthy.

[1]: and I do appreciate the social and software engineering that allows a purely abstract quantity to have those properties.


> Bitcoin is trustworthy in the way that gold or beads or shells in a vault are trustworthy

Sure, if you abstract away the whole "who owns the vault" question...

But that seems facile.

I'm hardly a crypto stan but I'd love to see actually cogent critiques.


That was underspecified, apologies. You own the vault. Everyone has a vault. The vault is your key.

Would've been clearer to say 'pocket' or something, but that doesn't imply the level of physical security I attribute to Bitcoin.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: