No it isn't. It has two use cases, a stablecoin platform and a platform for token scams. It's losing market share all the time to other rubbish like Solana. Why would anyone in their right mind hold chuck-e-cheese arcade token Ethereum as actual money. Hint: they won't.
You're basically describing Bitcoin in the same words. I despise Vitalik Buterin like nobody's business, but pissing down on Ethereum as a Bitcoin holder is too funny to not call out. Both of them are monopoly-money investments, with the L2 joke altcoins trailing close behind.
You think that all the Bitcoin believers who buy relentlessly each week without question will suddenlly stop if they can now get 3x as much BTC for their fiat? Oh my sweet summer child...
>Good, I hope they dump it suddenly and without warning.
Aww do you? :'(
A record amount of BTC not moved on chain for the long term has reached all time highs, "wash trading" or not, that can't be faked, it's being held as it's primary value proposition, a store of value.
I can't believe the Tether FUD is still widespread after all these years, all completely unproven and wrong time and time again.
If the USG stopped to think for just a second maybe they'd ask themselves why they'd sell absolute digital scarcity for something they can just print out of thin air for themselves.
> A record amount of BTC not moved on chain for the long term has reached all time highs, "wash trading" or not, that can't be faked, it's being held as it's primary value proposition, a store of value.
How much of this is due to people losing access to their wallets and the BTC being lost forever?
The number of BTC lost forever was already pretty high from what I remember. My suspicion is post-FTX there was a surge in self custody and many of these people likely lost access to their wallets from any number of the issues self-custody can bring. Or they just can’t figure out how to get it out.
Self-custody is completely impractical for 99.999% of the people walking around. The UX is horrible and the entire process overall has the most foot guns anyone will ever see.
It’s also worth pointing out that the “primary purpose” as a store of value now claimed today is only a result of bitcoin failing at the other claimed “purposes” over the years.
This one is especially entertaining to hear from crypto/BTC advocates as the title of the BTC paper is “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”.
>Self-custody is completely impractical for 99.999% of the people walking around. The UX is horrible and the entire process overall has the most foot guns anyone will ever see.
As usual on this site, the assumption that 99% of people are complete drooling idiots for anything remotely tech-related runs firm. Believe it or not, a surprisingly large percentage of the population can rather quickly learn to manage relatively non-complex things like holding their own crypto and so forth without having to be specialized devops or top-tier tech workers.
Not everyone outside a certain bubble is blindly stupid just because they do other things with their lives.
What I am saying is that everyone forgets things and makes mistakes. Have you ever had to do a password reset? I know I have. Have you ever messed up a backup or deleted something accidentally? I know I have. HNers are in many cases lifelong technology professionals and all of this and more still applies to us. Just like how even the best and most brilliant physicians in the world still carry malpractice insurance. People mess things up all of the time. This is basic and fundamental being human stuff.
Extrapolate this to large numbers and the general population with varying levels of technical proficiency. Bank of America has over 60 million customers. How many times a day do you think they click a password reset link? How many times a day do you think someone calls customer service because they can't get in their banking app or account online? How many times do you think someone ends up walking in a branch to get it figured out? How many times a day do you think someone does an "oops" transferring funds, etc?
The answer is almost certainly a staggering number of people, every single day. Even 100k is just 0.16% of those 60 million customers so I would put that on the low side. Banks like Bank of America don't operate call centers, branches, etc because they're running a jobs program and like to waste money on unnecessary payroll. They have these resources because they're necessary. In the real world people forget things, lose stuff, mess things up, and occasionally need help.
The crypto self-custody mantra combined with irreversible transactions essentially depends on never make a mistake, never forget, and never lose anything. Combine that with the poor UI and UX I mentioned and it's a recipe for disaster.
It fundamentally goes against everything we universally know about human beings.
Until crypto FINALLY realizes it needs to bend to the real world and not the other way around it will continue to have some of the poorest adoption numbers of any technology from the past 100 years.
I think rather than looking to theoretically arguments about this, we can just note how many putatively sophisticated actors have messed this up at some point and how costly it’s been for them. Mark Cuban, Prime Trust (we think) , and a whole lot of BAYC early adopters have all lost real money due to either forgetting, misplacing, or trusting the wrong party with their credentials. Each time, there’s been no recourse. My bank, by contrast, has mechanisms for returning money when things go wrong.
I generally don't reply to comments like this, but
> I can't believe the Tether FUD is still widespread after all these years, all completely unproven and wrong time and time again.
is false.
Tether knowingly falsified documents when applying for bank accounts [0], lied about its backing [1], and is the currency of choice for pig butchering scams [2] and Hamas [3].
Overall, a really bad, obviously criminal org, and someone who responds to that with "FUD!" is generally either on the payroll [4] or soon to be in for a very rude awakening [5].
Goats would be terrible money. A unit of account that is "goats" would be subject to birth- and death-rates.
Sports game tickets would be terrible money - they're significantly more valuable before the game, and after the game, they're far less valuable.
Mountains would be terrible money. How could you exchange them, unless you were able to keep track of who owned the mountain?
Dollars are actually pretty good at all three. They don't die. They're pretty stable in terms of value. It's pretty easy to give someone Dollars.
Bitcoin are... ok... at some of these. It's pretty good as a unit of account - if you can secure your wallet. It's... ok... at being a store of value - there have been some very high-profile sudden value fluctuations that left people holding a bag. It's pretty easy to give someone Bitcoin, but not trivial. It looks like it costs about $1 to make a bitcoin transaction happen, where I can transfer a few dollars for free.
I'm not a Bitcoin supporter, but I don't think it's fair to malign the tech for things it actually can do.
Regarding mountains as money. There has actually been a case in history where a group of people used hard to move large stones as money. The bigger the stone, the more value. While these would initially be transported, once on the island where they were used, they wouldn’t get moved around, while ownership would change.
1. Great source, great story. You're absolutely correct.
2. Yeah, I was trying to come up with a simple "can't be exchanged easily" things and I (pretty obviously) failed. Got any ideas of "can't be exchanged easily" stuff?
The Rai stones are just a curious example of how creative people can get with their ledgers. And by extension - what happens when people who can manufacture your unit of account out of thin air come along.
Anything else you want banned just because you don't like it authoritarian? If you don't like it just don't use it. You're financially privileged, just stick to your transactions your bank let you do and let other people do what they want.
The problem with letting people do what they want, is that you will inevitably have bad actors ruining things for the rest of us.
That's where regulation comes in, where government comes in, where centralization comes in.
Do you seriously believe, that if Bitcoin becomes the global currency, that crime won't skyrocket due to people getting robbed relentlessly? You just need the PK dawg, and it's very easy to tell if you were told the truth - access to the wallet opens up.
I think you are just naive about the nature of mankind. We need rules, structure and order - the key question, is how do we create the environment that allows enough structure to not interfere with the creative process to allow us to continue growing and developing new technology?
Bitcoiners have a sad, yet fascinating trend to talk about nothing but Bitcoin. Take a look at your comment history.
You've said a lot without making any real points there.
How does allowing people to send small tipping amounts of Bitcoin for fun from their hot wallet mean "bad actors ruining things for the rest of us"?
>Do you seriously believe, that if Bitcoin becomes the global currency, that crime won't skyrocket due to people getting robbed relentlessly? You just need the PK dawg, and it's very easy to tell if you were told the truth - access to the wallet opens up.
And if people have geographically distributed multi-sig cold storage for the bulk of their wealth? Will they be getting "robbed relentlessly"? If you follow best practice and take self custody seriously you'll be fine so no I don't seriously believe people would be robbed relentlessly.
So I'll ask you too, what's your problem with other people sending small amounts of money P2P in a fun way to each other in a currency they prefer? Just don't use it if you don't like it.
>Bitcoiners have a sad, yet fascinating trend to talk about nothing but Bitcoin. Take a look at your comment history.
Again, what's your point? I'm stirred to reply to fiat brained financial authoritarianism, that's what I find weird and sad.
Except he compares Bitcoin's irreversable final settlement transactions per seconds metric to Visa's tps which is more akin to the lightning network. Apples to Oranges.
Power centers have to contend with the largest source of power, the human population of the world. They go to great lengths to prevent it from being coordinated by dividing populations, and they do exercise true power, but at the end of the day they still have to react to what people want and do. If people begin to use bitcoin and the like, they'll find a way to preserve what they can of their power in that environment. They're not omnipotent, they don't win every fight they take on.
There are all sorts of ideologies (including the one you describe) contingent on the masses spontaneously, and effectively, coordinating in pursuit of a common goal.
However, they never describe how this will occur, except by some miracle. Practically, you'd need to control a sizeable chunk of the global media, internet, etc.
It's especially ironic coming from libertarian circles, because hyperindividualists pride themselves on not participating in mass psychology.
PoW is the only way to secure a decentralised ledger. It's literally the magic that makes it valuable as money. Thank God it'll never move away from Proof-of-Work.
