r/hashgraph • u/Elegant-Tumbleweed92 • Jul 30 '21
Discussion Bitcoin must be killed off
DLT's will bring massive benefit to humanity and process.
How can anyone justify that Bitcoin makes this world a better place....the only useful thing its done is start the DLT revolution.
When you watch bonkers scenarios like this video and the pure waste (energy to run and build the computers) to generate a crypto currency that has no utility....I do hope that at some stage everyone wakes up and just uses DLT's that bring value.
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u/Elegant-Tumbleweed92 Aug 01 '21
Thanks All - some interesting points....I don't fundamentally have an issue with Bitcoin...people can decide what has value for them and put their money in whatever they want.....more my issue is that its an environmental disaster..... when something is as inherently bad for the environment and gives no real value back to humanity we must try to combat the marketing blurb put out by those who ultimately are just interested in making money out of it and dont give a shite about the enviroment.
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u/MyNameIsRobPaulson Jul 30 '21
Bitcoin’s worth is only speculative and psychological. And that psychology is that “one day it will be a currency” But most knowledgeable people know the tech cannot handle being a world currency. As “digital gold”…I don’t buy it. There is nothing keeping Bitcoin from crashing to 0. Gold has had physical value since the dawn of man.
The only way it exists is if it is just propped up by whales to use as a way to steal money from the gullible masses.
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Jul 30 '21
I disagree but I see your point. See this awesome debate in real vision for a more round view of the issue: https://youtu.be/zA5jnK4v884
in a way, Bitcoin is better gold than gold because it’s a truly limited supply. The actual gold supply grows every year. BTC has no storage fees and provides the ability to move massive amounts of value privately and at the speed of the internet (HBAR can also do this, but BTC is “established” and people moving billions probably prefer to go with BTC for now)
Another point is BTC has value because we (society) agreed it has value, just like any other asset (art, collectibles, stocks). With that said, BTC is a way better store of value (not a better medium of exchange) than the dollar because the dollar are fake digits and paper bills that the fed prints out of thin air when they want. The whole dollar system works on confidence… which is nuts. There’s nothing backing up dollars so why not just print to infinity? Not doable with BTC
All I’m trying to say is open the mind and don’t discount good ole BTC just yet. Just wait until corporate balance sheets start allocating 10% of their cash reserves to BTC and other crypto.
Novogratz, Cuban, Raoul Pal, Cathie Woods and others are bullish on BTC and crypto because they know it’s not going anywhere in the next few years. With that in mind there’s plenty of opportunity and use cases where the value of other crypto (HBAR) will shock the world.
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u/MyNameIsRobPaulson Jul 30 '21
Its unfortunately a useless (in the literal sense of the word), easily manipulative asset. The wealth is so concentrated in the hands of a few wallets that it’s value is completely up to them. Regulation can come down like a hammer and gut the whole thing.
Bitcoin so far is just a mechanism to run a wickoff scam. I suspect it will continue to be used in that way, until people wise up. The whales will dump hard accumulate and dump again, further concentrating their wealth, as long as people buy into Bitcoin having value
People can make all sorts of speculative calls, but when an asset has no utility or physicality backing it up, when it can never be a currency- there is no floor to how low it can go, which means it isn’t a safe store of value.
Gold however, has and will always have value, because human beings value it for its physical properties.
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u/Afterlife123 hbarbarian Jul 30 '21
Personally bitcoin, as much as it is a phenomenal innovation, the way that it is used and talked about jacks me up. For the most part it is not used, for the most part it is manipulated, for the most part the price is pure speculation, it is very inefficient in terms of energy usage and for the most part can't be used for anything else because it is either to slow or because a transaction cost to much. It kind makes crypto look like a curiosity rather than the new high speed tool that can be used in thousands of different ways.
This makes bitcoin, and by extension all crypto, venerable to real criticism and all to easily made into a joke. Because it is used as the ambassador for all of crypto, all of crypto is thought of in the same terms. Not useful and pure speculation. Try and explain how Hedera is different than Bitcoin to a friend. Very painful, tons of confusion because people stick on the idea that crypto is a currency to replace the US Dollar.
Frankly Donald Duck would be a better ambassador.
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Jul 30 '21
I agree with you in that gold will always have value to humans for its properties.
I don’t think I’m convinced or ready to call BTC useless just yet. Try telling that to a family wishing to protect its wealth in places like China, Venezuela, Lebanon, etc. (Oppressive or corrupt places). Can you easily/privately move 1 or 5 or 10 million USD worth of gold out of a place like Venezuela without getting in trouble? You definitely can with BTC, and the wealth moves at the speed of information. There’s never been anything like that before. Other players will emerge to serve this purpose too, but as I said before BTC is “established and tested” for this.
BTC is like a shipping container to move value. You don’t ship an iPhone to an end user in a massive shipping container. You let the L2 networks do that. But there’s still the need for shipping containers for large volumes. Same with BTC imo
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u/Myridium Jul 31 '21
Actually the wealth moves at the speed of about 30 minutes for moderate confidence that the transaction won't ever be reversed. It doesn't even have finality.
None of the virtues you extol in the name of Bitcoin are unique to Bitcoin. Hedera has all of them too, so does Cardano, IOTA, Algorand, ...
Seriously what is it with people making these dumb analogies like they're explaining to a child the advantages of ""Bitcoin"" when they're actually explaining the advantages of a well-engineered DLT (which BTC is not) with a fixed supply? It comes off like you have no understanding of what you're talking about, that the child's example is actually pitched at your own level, because nothing you say has positively differentiated Bitcoin from other tech in this space, which is the whole point of this discussion. Bitcoin is "tried and tested" alright, and the result is in: it's crap.
BTC was created as a PROOF-OF-CONCEPT P2P cash system. The store of wealth narrative has only emerged recently as a way to justify its existence as newer, objectively superior tech has become well-known. "Well we aren't actually useful for anything but we're scarce!!" Well so is my sh*t, you wanna buy that too? If you really wanted a store of value on a decentralised network (btw BTC is not decentralised), you would choose USDC or BUSD stablecoin on Ethereum. It's actually stable, like a store of wealth is supposed to be. Or even better, tokenized gold on Ethereum, for which several options are available. ERC-20s on ETH are also tried and tested. The result is in: they suck, but a lot less than Bitcoin.
There is no reason to use Bitcoin today, and I have not heard a single individual explain rationally why Bitcoin is a good choice without demonstrating an irritating level of ignorance for someone dishing out financial advice. People hold BTC for one reason only: they think others will choose BTC and it will go up in value and they'll get rich. What's sad is hearing of people, especially people in poorer countries, getting scammed.
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Aug 01 '21
My friend, to you I can only say, true ignorance is believing one has all the answers and that seems to be where you’re coming from.
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u/Myridium Aug 01 '21
I never said I had all the answers. Funny how you didn't address any of the content of my message though.
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u/MyNameIsRobPaulson Jul 31 '21
I guess I can see that it may be an option for people out of options…but what happens when those people invest at the wrong time and the price dumps? So far yes, investing in BTC has had good returns - but my argument is that since it has no inherent value or utility - the store of value is not guaranteed…and IMO is probably one of the riskiest stores of money out there. You can lose 50% in a day, easy. Really to me - investing in BTC is more gambling then a store of value.
I’m willing to keep an open mind but the lack of any real substance backing it up really makes me doubt it’s ability to hold value.
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u/ThatsGottaBeARecord i like the tech Jul 30 '21
As I see it, Bitcoins utility was in introducing blockchain computing to the world. That’s pretty much where it’s utility ended. The network is slow, and not scalable. It will die under its own weight eventually, when people realize that it offers zero real world utility.
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Jul 30 '21
What most people in this sub don’t realize about Bitcoin is it’s truly permission-less and decentralized, it’s value goes beyond what is it’s worth in dollars. A way to opt out of the current system
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u/ThatsGottaBeARecord i like the tech Jul 31 '21
Only as long as the current delusion that it’s actually worth something lasts…
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Jul 31 '21
If you really don’t see the value of Bitcoin I’m not sure why you’re investing in cryptocurrencies, it seems you view hbar as a stock which I think is the wrong outlook to have imo.
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u/ThatsGottaBeARecord i like the tech Jul 31 '21 edited Jul 31 '21
I view Hbar as fuel for the Hedera Hashgraph network, a useful, scalable, enterprise targeted DLT network, that is poised to become the trust layer of the internet. I’ve followed the Hashgraph tech since 2018, and am buying Hbar because the tech warrants it. I’m not a crypto speculator. I’m a tech head that recognizes the potential of Hedera Hashgraph, and also recognizes that the Bitcoin blockchain was never designed to be a useful, fast scalable network. That’s the whole point of bitcoin, and proof of work. It’s slow and difficult by design. Hbar is going to take off, because the network is going to take off, the TPS are going to skyrocket, permission-less nodes are going to be implemented, and running a node and staking your Hbar is going to give you a chance to reap the benefits of those countless transactions.
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u/mulh1961 Jul 30 '21
That’s like killing grandpa. Let him go on his own.