Incredible to read how dismissive people in the thread are about the shortcomings of decentralization, up to the point where it feels like people are just praising gospel without ever having given it a critical thought.
There is still quite a valley between feasibility of crypto currencies in real world settings, and the current state of affairs.
Yes, there is a gap, but that will be closing quickly. What I hate to see is people using this gap as a reason against crypto/ blockchain as if every new technology is ideally perfect and meets every demand. This is the type of mindset that would have prevented us from having computers, laptops, and cell phones because computers the size of record courts don't make sense, computers take too much energy to be portable, and nobody wants to carry around a suitcase all day to make a phone call.
> Yes, there is a gap, but that will be closing quickly.
Bitcoin is more than 10 years old. That is almost as old as 1st generation iPhones. How much longer do we have to wait to fix these deeply fundamental flaws in the stack?
> It's all part of technological maturation.
An alternative interpretation might be that Bitcoin is fundamentally broken and isn't a useable technology.
Bitcoin is 10 years old and may or may not be broken depending on the end use case, but that isn't the only crypto/ blockchain project. For you to center the conversation around those arguments shows you're not very informed on the topic.
A lot of developmental progress in the ecosystem with models/architectures, tools, and infrastructure hasn't happened until recently (past year, give or take).
> For you to center the conversation around those arguments shows you're not very informed on the topic.
I've been following Bitcoin for almost its entire life and am probably vastly more informed than most of the shysters who show up on sites like HN to shill their coin.
> A lot of developmental progress in the ecosystem with models/architectures, tools, and infrastructure hasn't happened until recently (past year, give or take).
I've heard this line forever. Lightning network, for example, has been "just around around the corner" since forever. So far, it is still just as "just around the corner" as it was 5 or 6 years ago and ranks among the top all-time vaporware software projects out there.
The attempt to refocus on "The Blockchain" is only done to distract from the fact that Bitcoin, poster child of "The Blockchain" has no lawful use. It doesn't scale, it isn't free, it isn't trustless, it isn't censorship resistant, it isn't a good store of value, it isn't instant and it isn't anonymous. It isn't even deflationary (as if that is a good thing) because it has been forked and cloned thousands of times. Oh yeah, it also requires more energy than small nations to secure. (And don't feed me the line about it being "green energy" or "less than conventional banking"–we both know that is a laugably horseshit argument)
The whole space is a joke. Aside from self-driving cars, Bitcoin will be the biggest overhyped pile of complete nonsense this decade.
> So far, it is still just as "just around the corner" as it was 5 or 6 years ago and ranks among the top all-time vaporware software projects out there.
The paper was released April 2015. Progress is definitely slower than I'd like, but wanted to correct this claim.
[ Disclaimer: lightning developer and specification guide ]
Lightning was talked about before the release of the whitepaper, along with a number of other side-chains, off-chains, etc. None of have really been the magic bullet they claimed to be.
Again, I'm not talking about Bitcoin. There are many other projects in the ecosystem. It's like using shortcomings with Windows to represent Linux,mac, and any other OS that's out there.
I didn't downvote but the tone here is pretty patronizing:
>For you to center the conversation around those arguments shows you're not very informed on the topic.
The "it's too complicated for you to understand" tact is a tired, overly-used canned response from cryptocurrency evangelists, who seek (intentionally or not) to derail discussions about very real issues.
Bitcoin is yesterday but look at Ethereum. You can now trade dollar backed tokens issued by fully regulated banks for the cost of an Ethereum transaction. This lets you use smart contracts backed by US dollars, or write contracts to trade US dollars for other currencies. The writing is on the wall, more regulated tokens are on the way. Public stocks to municipal bonds. Why wouldn't people want to cut out the middle man?
If these tokens are truly regulated by the state and the ledger is editable by the courts, then there's nothing decentralized about it and it provides no advantages over the current system. All of this talk about decentralization and cutting out the middleman is a mirage.
Decentralized isn’t a binary. The courts can’t edit the blockchain but a federation of private keys can. It still allows an alternative to transferring money without Visa or PayPal.
There are clear guidelines about civility. This is not reddit. If you're being downvoted it's not because people disagree with you. It is though very likely that many people disagree with you.
The ecosystem is gathering a lot of contributors and researchers. A lot of the issues revolving around tools, infrastructure, scaling, security, user experience have various solutions in development, which are expected to come to fruition in (roughly) the next 2 years.
> A lot of the issues revolving around tools, infrastructure, scaling, security, user experience have various solutions in development, which are expected to come to fruition in (roughly) the next 2 years.
This line has been the standard party line in Bitcoin land since time began. Everything about bitcoin is "just around the corner".
All of your talk is a thin veil around the hidden message: "don't sell your Bitcoin or it will crater the value of my stash!" and of course layered under that message is "buy my Bitcoin!!!!".
Again, its been like 10+ years now of 'cryptocurrencies' and its failed to provide a use case apart from 'speculating' and getting yourself uninvited from family Christmas.
They're not and that's my point. Id following these publicized roadmaps then these items would be either completed already or completed next year. Realistically they'll be completed in roughly the next 2 years.
Cryptocurrency is feasible and is being used in "real world settings" right now. So many things are ruined by people preferring safety over freedom so I don't thinn this sort of thing bothers a freedom loving person.
Where is it actually being used in "real world settings"? Other than opening a Coinbase account and doing some speculative trading, I don't see any of these "real world settings".
Do you have any examples of companies that offer VPS or domain services that accept bitcoin and also don't require some other type of personally identifying information?
Well yes, but if they accept bitcoin as payment without requiring a credit card on file then its at least possible in theory to setup hosting and a domain without anyone's real name attached. I doubt many businesses offer such a service.
It is unlikely anyone lost 200 BTC, we can't say for sure because Bitcoin wallets are pseudonymous. But what happened is that someone received a lot of BTC from a lot of different wallets.
I would hope that someone who owns 200 BTC would put a little thought into how to secure it and would not be affected by this hack.
And this is why BTC will never be mainstream. All it takes is a single misstep to lose all of your money forever. Why would average citizens take that deal over the security guarantees provided by the incumbent financial institutions?
The problem with your hypothetical is it will never happen because the system in place works much better than Bitcoin. Our current system doesn't have the flaw that you have to distribute your wealth in hundreds of wallets or you get perma-fucked and booted into the street.
What's your point? The nature of cryptocurrencies make them easily lost or stolen compared to money in the bank. Banks are regulated and insured so customers never risk losing their money due to ineptitude. They get nothing in exchange for the hassle and risk of cryptocurrency.
Raw Bitcoin is the equivalent of cash, not bank money. Bitcoin can be (and often is) regulated and insured.
It's possible to implement chargebacks on a smart-contract platform, or even at layer 0 as EOS and XRP do. What's so bad about the possibility of marrying the benefits of cash with the convenience of electronic money ?
> Cash in the bank already is "electronic money". Cryptocurrency doesn't add any benefits [...]
Why bother replying to comments in threads about cryptocurrency if they don't have any benefit ? Clearly now that cryptocurrency long speculators have pretty much all died, cryptocurrency should just disappear by itself if it doesn't have any use over fiat. Or do you not believe in your own opinion ?
> Why bother replying to comments in threads about cryptocurrency if they don't have any benefit
Am I not allowed to post if I think cryptocurrencies are useless?
> Clearly now that cryptocurrency long speculators have pretty much all died, cryptocurrency should just disappear by itself if it doesn't have any use over fiat. Or do you not believe in your own opinion
Why don't you just articulate some of the benefits instead of invoking bloviated sarcasm? The argument that "bitcoin exists so it must be useful" is pretty obviously fallacious logic.
You are the one making the sweeping claim ("CryptoCurrency doesn't add any benefit"), so unless your name is Donald Trump, the burden of formulating precise criticism actually falls on you.
It seems like you don’t want to hear dissenting opinions because you have a vested interest in crypto and it’s unpleasant to consider that you may be wrong. His opinion is just as valid as yours, and HN exists for such discussion. So, in the interest of hearing both sides, what benefits do you claim crypto provides that aren’t already provided by fiat currency?
I'm not making a sweeping claim, I'm asserting something more akin to a null hypothesis. The extraordinary claim is the one that suggests cryptocurrency has lots of benefits when all the available evidence points to the reality that it is mostly a toy.
Posting a page full of quora answers as your response is not a practical way to have a discussion. If you have a point to make I encourage you to lay it out here so that I can address it, I am not going to spend time constructing a response to a page of quora answers you took 30 seconds looking up on google.
Most of those are either bugs, not features, or just have nothing to do with cryptocurrency and can be (and have been) implemented on top of our existing banking infrastructure (or it's reasonably non-trivial to create new infrastructure for it).
Given how hard technology is at the moment, and how many issues people have with it, I highly doubt we're going to get to widespread literacy around bitcoin best practices.
I think the tide is turning on this one. The overall feeling definitely seems to be shifting away from positivity about cryptocurrencies. It's a slow change (naturally) but noticeable.
There was only 1 dotcom bubble. Which crypto bubble are you referring to? Because there seems to be one every 2 years and every time you hear the same talk about the bubble is over, it's all worthless, etc and yet it recovers, surpasses, and diminished previous highs.
There is still quite a valley between feasibility of crypto currencies in real world settings, and the current state of affairs.