4 CommentsWe’ve been arguing about bitcoin for about that long — I first wrote about it in 2014, and was hardly the first.
So, what has bitcoin actually, you know, done?
The answer, of course, is: basically nothing. And that’s why the world’s most-traded cryptocurrency is worth basically nothing.
…Sure, we got some things wrong then — plenty of them. A telecom equipment company called Corvis was more valuable after its July 2000 stock offering than General Motors, before Corvis notched its first dollar of sales. (It ended up selling for pennies on the dollar.) And plenty of web software companies were not unique enough to hold up when the real competition from bigger technology companies began.
But they all did something, or tried to, better and cheaper than any other way that real tasks had been done by real people before. Cryptocurrency doesn’t. Sorry.
It’s still accepted basically nowhere — and if there are five stores online that accept bitcoin on more favorable terms than the US dollar, I don’t know of them. Name a single business process made more efficient if it’s paid for in bitcoin rather than dollars. Now do it with a business process that’s legal.
…Don’t even start on the notion that bitcoin is a currency or a store of value, or a hedge against inflation. The unstable price chart belies all of those notions, as does exposure to bitcoin advocates, none of whom will be running the Federal Reserve soon.
…Really, about the only thing you can do more or less easily with bitcoin is trade it. The ultimate buyer is likely to be one of the greater fools on Robinhood or Reddit, all of which are basically just updated versions of the Yahoo Finance message boards, which loved Overstock 17 profitless years ago. And they, in many cases, want bitcoin partly because Elon Musk gave it an aura of the new.
So, you say you want a revolution? Well, you know, you got to tell me what your revolutionary technology does in the real world. Amusing Elon doesn’t count. For crypto, t’aint much.
Eulogy made by Tim Mullaney
What I read is “I’m just salty that I chose the wrong side in 2014”
MADE ME LAUGHT HARD!
What an idiot.
Absolutely hilarious and completely untrue unless maybe your argument is because Bitcoin was the pioneer of a world-changing technology which you completely fail to acknowledge along with failing to acknowledge all the things that crypto does and can do not only better but in many cases for the first time because of the technology. It also makes other processes much better and soon many, many more things will be based on this technology. It’s blockchain technology (which includes cryptocurrencies, and Bitcoin which invented the Blockchain and began to explain just a few of the many rhymes and reasons that trustless blockchain payment and/or other blockchain data networks and blockchain technology as a whole is extremely valuable. We’ve now seen that flow into the main stream world. There is no turning back now. Someone that declares Bitcoin dead is just someone hoping you’ll sell and ultimately drive the price down. They are not only stores of value, cryptocurrencies which run on blockchain technology, but they are what can be stores of value among many, many other things which are not limited to financial services in the least. There are too many industries to even bother listing them out because its the entire world and literally every industry will eventually be impacted by blockchain technology in some way. Bitcoin is the founder of that technology along with cryptocurrencies which along with blockchain technology have a lot of uses as well but I would say more of them are financial-based and they are at least generally stores of value if the community and investors that believe in the blockchain project underlying the token believe in it enough to invest in the project and ultimately whether or not the project succeeds. We know that blockchain will succeed though. This seems like a purposely misleading way of getting people even more worried during the so-called bear run and the author likely hopes weak hands will sell Bitcoin by claiming that because it does nothing that it should not be used as a store of value and has no value as the first blockchain asset which as a technology will go on to change the world for the better in many ways. You can even look at NFT’s to see why its pretty cool and you don’t need to spend a lot of money to put a bunch of them on your wall and hopefully eventually they’ll be able to play music through high quality sound systems using the video-frames that I would assume have speakers in the back and are meant for putting on your wall, sort of like a futuristic poster that’s interactive media and that you have a proof of ownership of and that may or may not be rare and/or collectable. That’s just one tiny, cool use-case for crypto and blockchain technology out of many millions. Even if the author genuinely thinks that BTC is not worth anything because it ‘doesn’t do anything’ (which isn’t true, even for BTC,) then perhaps he means that ETH is the best investment. That’s a sentiment that I think long term may come true meaning the price of ETH and BTC may come closer together eventually. Proof of stake may be largely replaced by proof of work, eventually. But this is all in good time and it can literally be done by editing the code it’s not as if it cannot be changed ever no matter what if the many miners (or main miner groups,) agree on such a change and they surely would if there was a good reason to do it whether now or in the future.
When I say author, I refer to the source listed above.