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0 pointsanonporridge4y ago0 comments

Or gold. Or any other property.

Bitcoin is simply digital property. And like real world property, you can mess up and lose it irrevocably.

If you give your gold to the wrong person or drop it to the bottom of the sea, you're probably not getting it back.

If you under fund your military, and someone else comes in and takes control of your land, you're probably not getting it back.

If you send your bitcoin to the wrong address, or mismanage your private keys such that they are stolen, you're probably not getting it back.

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6 comments · 1 top-level

babypuncher4y ago· 5 in thread

But bitcoin isn't being billed as a value-store like gold, it's being sold more as a replacement for payment systems like credit cards, ACH transfers, or PayPal.

There is a reason nobody goes around trading tiny bits of gold for goods and services. It is useful to have an abstraction that makes transactions easier and helps mitigate risk.

goldcd4y ago

I don't think that's true.

Credit cards, paypal and all the rest existed before bitcoin. I mean it's nifty that I can do it without a single intermediary authority, but it's not that special.

I think the lack of revocation available to bitcoin is a (and I had myself for saying this) 'a feature'. If somebody sends me payment in bitcoin, I definitely know it can't be charged-back for example. It's like sending cash in the mail. Now that comes with the flip side, that they are putting all their trust in me.

babypuncher4y ago

But there are far more consumers than there are sellers. Any system that is tilted in the seller's favor as opposed to the consumer is naturally going to have a hard time becoming the standard. This is at least in part why PayPal has been so enormously successful. It puts the customer's mind at ease.

The way I see it, people with money want to drive crypto adoption because it will tip the balance of power further in their favor. A fully unregulated currency and transaction system can be much more easily controlled by the people with the most capital without having to let that pesky democratic process getting in the way by letting the poors have a say.

ryanbrunner4y ago

As a consumer though, chargebacks and disputes are an important feature for me, particularly when exploits and bugs exist and I can't and shouldn't have perfect trust that bitcoins will only leave my wallet when I intend for them to.

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anonporridgeOP4y ago

You're exactly wrong in my experience.

Maybe some people were hyping it as a PayPal replacement back in the pre-2017 days, but that narrative has largely failed to gain followers and is now very out of favor.

The digital gold narrative and layer one of the new global, open, permisionless, and fair financial system narrative have been big and growing ever since I got involved in 2015ish.

In fact, it was only the emergence of the lightning network that proved the layered system approach that has made me consistently bullish for these past 7 years. If we had to scale payments on the base blockchain's 7tps limit, it would absolutely be an absurd, silly speculative bubble doomed to collapse.

Luckily, the layered approach is proving itself and winning.

exdsq4y ago

> But bitcoin isn't being billed as a value-store like gold, it's being sold more as a replacement for payment systems like credit cards, ACH transfers, or PayPal.

This used to be the case years and years ago but it's been understood that without some additional layers this will never be the case. It is being billed as a value-store like gold by large institutions on and off of Wall Street though, so that's far more likely (and to be fair has proven to be fairly stable for a few years now).

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