How do you think bitcoin started ? You'd had to be crazy to believe in it 9 years ago, and spend time and energy in the community, nlt to lention monney, to foster the project.
My family and friends said i was stupid, utopist, being conned, wasting my time, and so lany things.
Btc was banana money at first, and only people believing it would be a great thing as a concept made it work. We didn't expect to make banks, it was a happy side effect of a mad naive bet.
All great things start like that. Comics are now the thing, but 20 years ago were still for pationate nerds.
> My family and friends said i was stupid, utopist, being conned, wasting my time, and so lany things. ... All great things start like that.
"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
Elizabeth Holmes, who is currently on trial for fraud charges for covering up the fact that her magic blood testing machine was too magic to work in the real world.
But they were right to laugh at Columbus. He was right for the wrong reasons.
Of course, if you don't ever try it, you can never be right for any reasons.
Bitcoin is IMO likely somewhere in between. It kickstarted a new concept in IT but money is a really simple (although powerful) usecase. I'm more interested what will be done with the concept in the future.
Bitcoin doesn't work in any meaningful sense. It can't be used for purchases in most contexts and you can't use it as a stable store of value. It is also controlled by dubious actors and mining is a horribly destructive practice, both in terms of environmental waste and the constant nuisance of people stealing CPU time. But you were saying?
If you're saying "Bitcoin doesn't work in any meaningful sense" you simply just haven't used Bitcoin. It works absolutely fine, even great most of the time, and accomplishes what I personally see as its purpose.
It can be used for purchases via services like Bitpay which can automatically give a fiat value for the cryptocurrency amount, hence shielding you from price volatility.
Generally though, merchants wouldn't bother accepting it. Alongside the fees and whatnot, adoption is too low, fees are too high, time to confirm is too high, and it can complicate some legal stuff (like issuing VAT invoices).
It does not really matter how it started but how it is now. I would bet that all these selfless visionary nerds who believed in bitcoin from day 1, now are less than 0.1% of the people who deal with bitcoin today. The rest 99.9% are there for the easy money. At least, this is what I see from my surroundings and the feeling I get from the internet. It might have started great, but it got alienated along the way.
Let's add this to the list of Bitcoin obituaries that countless people have declared over the past 9 years. Every year that goes on and the network is still kicking is just building its base value. Bitcoin network will out live Hacker News.
My family and friends said i was stupid, utopist, being conned, wasting my time, and so lany things.
Btc was banana money at first, and only people believing it would be a great thing as a concept made it work. We didn't expect to make banks, it was a happy side effect of a mad naive bet.
All great things start like that. Comics are now the thing, but 20 years ago were still for pationate nerds.