from Hacker News

Cryptocurrency in the 2020s

by openmosix on 1/3/20, 9:33 PM with 266 comments

  • by aazaa on 1/4/20, 12:18 AM

    The trouble with this article is that the author doesn't seem to know what Bitcoin is for.

    Notice the vague treatment of actual cryptocurrency applications. There are lots of predictions about startup activity, "flippenings" and venture capital, but little about the goods and services customers will actually be buying, or what specifically startups will be building.

    It's this kind of thinking that leads people into the dark thicket that is "tokens": digital instruments bought and sold largely for speculative purposes. It's understandable. The ability to print money is a fantasy of many people from a young age.

    The last two years have seem a solid refutation of this notion. Almost every token has lost value against Bitcoin. It seems reasonable to conclude that the carnage will continue.

    So the money printing press ship has sailed. It's going to come as a shock for many people (some with economics degrees), but bootstrapping censorship-resistant money is a one-time deal. Any attempt to profit from the undertaking harms the credibility of the founders. Only the genuine scammers are left to continue the exercise.

    Here's a vision for the future of Bitcoin. Bitcoin will extend its role as a refuge from the growing foreign and domestic militarization of money. It will become an indispensable weapon against civil asset forfeiture, international sanctions, deplatforming, and mass surveillance.

    That's your application for Bitcoin in the '20s. And it's a doozy. It places Bitcoin on the side of personal freedom and on a collision course with some of the world's biggest governments, including the US. There will be many attempts to "ban" Bitcoin.

    Startups will play a marginal role at best because their ultimate aim of monopolization flies in the face of what Bitcoin was designed to do.

  • by asdfasgasdgasdg on 1/3/20, 10:32 PM

    Consider the source, right? How many people without a large vested interest in the propagation and uptake of cryptocurrency consider further growth likely?

    My guess is that governments will more and more realize that the main utility of blockchains is money laundering and speculation. As has been remarked over and over again, they don't solve any above board problem more efficiently or with lower expense than existing technologies. I predict we'll see growing regulation increased amounts of crackdowns on cryptocurrency and its applications going forward.

  • by jimhi on 1/3/20, 10:23 PM

    "Just like the dot com craze kicked off the idea of an internet startup (and a decade later, just about every tech startup uses the internet in some way), I believe that by the end of the 2020’s almost every tech startup will have some sort of cryptocurrency component."

    This literally already happened for a hot second, did you not notice the everyone doing their own ICO when bitcoin was 20k? Are you saying it will happen again?

  • by csscrack on 1/4/20, 6:36 AM

    I just wanted to write 'hey, could anyone give a brief overview/current status of the crypto space' but then I realized once again that I might get answers influenced by personal investments (I've got still quite some significant portfolio).

    This space is difficult, after the last years there's some stigma and trust-levels towards and within the crypto-community are super low (similar to the porn space) and I decided for myself, this sector is over. Main reason is: distributed DBs are hard, publicly distributed DBs are even harder, there are so little use cases that justify the effort involved (except currency & fund raising).

    Maybe I am wrong.

  • by dnprock on 1/4/20, 2:54 AM

    I have a different view of the 2020s. We don't need more tokens or programmable technology. Money is the dominant use case for crypto. We still haven't figured out how to make crypto money that people can use beyond speculation. Notable projects will be around money use cases. Currently, we see Bitcoin, Tether, and stablecoins. In the 2020s, there will be more coins that people can use as money. We'll spend the next decade searching for them.

    Tech-focused projects, like Ethereum 2, Algorand, won't be successful. Decentralized coins, Libra, corporate coins, government coins will be.

    For decentralized coins, I think the market needs to find a way to incorporate inflationary economics into the system. Bitcoin needs an inflating parallel blockchain. It's all about money. I put my focus there.

    I wrote a post on the topic: Emerging Markets of Cryptocurrencies

    https://bitflate.org/post/2019/11/10/emerging-markets-of-cry...

  • by Lerc on 1/3/20, 11:06 PM

    >Olaf Carlson-Wee and Balaji Srinivasan estimate that at a price of $200,000 per Bitcoin, more than half the world’s billionaires will be from cryptocurrency

    This misses a key piece of information. They take the price as an an assumption for their argument, but that is insufficient to draw this conclusion. When Bitcoin reaches $200,000 is also a factor.

    The worlds existing billionaires will not sit still. If it takes 70 years then it would be pretty easy to make better money elsewhere. I have no idea if or when it will happen. I'm inclined to think on average it will increase at a decreasing rate.

  • by yyyk on 1/4/20, 1:00 PM

    Cryptocurrency tries to automate away trust, but in the process ends up reestablishing centralization while taking up a ruinous energy and complexity cost.

    Perhaps one day, the tech community will understand that some problems require a political solution and simply cannot be solved by technological means alone.

  • by carleverett on 1/3/20, 10:55 PM

    The most important challenge cryptocurrencies face is capturing real world value. The ICO craze turned out to create basically 0 value on any crypto platform, and the more recent wave of tokenized securities will be very slow because there are lots and lots of regulations that need to be addressed by token issuers (for good reason).

    The value of our public goods however is not being captured by any financial asset, and is a huge market that can be addressed by cryptocurrencies. This is something I'm quite passionate about and have put a lot of time into thinking through how they might work (see link below). As an example, AirCarbon (https://www.aircarbon.co) is a Singapore exchange being built on an Ethereum token and will tokenize CORSIA-certified carbon credits for the airline industry. This is a fantastic example of a huge market ($100+ billion) that is right now extremely inefficient, and will benefit greatly from moving onto a globally accessible and permissionless ledger. It'll provide everyone in the world the ability to invest in the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions, and even better, since the tokens also work as stores of value, investors can sell their tokens in the future.

    This type of financial asset has enormous potential.

    "Tokenized Goods - A New Store of Value": https://medium.com/@tpgwhitepaper/tokenized-public-goods-a-n...

  • by dragonsh on 1/4/20, 3:10 AM

    This is a post written by a crypto company, which has all its interest in keeping it alive. Hopefully 2020 will be a watershed movement in crypto world and people will stop calling a peer to peer distributed exchange mechanism by names similar to money.

    Crypto is not money and company like coinbase thrive on that information asymmetry because a normal person do not understand that cryptocurrency is not really a money,but a network of computers trying to fix some arbitrary value to a sequence of string which are worthless in themselves if not widely used for exchange of goods and services.

    Hopefully in 2020 peer to peer exchange of good and services evolve and companies like coinbase don’t need to exist (this was the true purpose of distributed currency to get rid of companies like coinbase and being hold hostage by them by keeping wallets under their supervision without liability unlike the way bank maintains account with liability and protection).

  • by 4AoZqrH2fsk5UB on 1/3/20, 10:50 PM

    I’m pretty new to crypto in general, but it seems to me that the primary value of it in coming years would be anonymity/privacy.

    As I understand it Bitcoin has some problems in this regard, but others have solved it.

    I just can’t find it hard to believe we get to 2030 without a way to buy things anonymously online.

  • by waynecochran on 1/3/20, 11:23 PM

    How do you fix their No. 1 problem: scalability? The blockchain updating, and certainly mining, are inherently slow.

  • by sosuke on 1/3/20, 10:35 PM

    That was very optimistic. And $200k Bitcoin? Might as well suggest $2m Bitcoin and the odds will be about the same.

    I've become very pessimistic around cryptocurrency after a year of chasing coins.

    Wake me up when Turtlecoin hits $10.

  • by cryptica on 1/4/20, 10:24 AM

    The scalability constraint is a fundamental one. A single cryptocurrency cannot scale beyond a certain TPS without sharding. But sharding reduces the decentralization of each shard. Also, rebalancing existing shards when adding new ones also introduces its own decentralization problems.

    I think the way forward for acalability will be multi-chain. Each blockchain has its own accounts and own token but is connected to other chains via fully automated DEXs. The blockchains will form a hierarchy of chains with the most trusted and busiest one at the top. I think there will be a trend to make a consistent payment API so that any cryptocurrency can be used in the place of any other, online shops will use on-chain DEX trade price and volume data to determine which coins they accept and for what value.

  • by debt on 1/3/20, 10:45 PM

    Cryptocurrency does not have anything close to widespread consumer adoption. If the Coinbase’s of the world don’t fix this, cryptocurrency will be massively devalued.

  • by jrimbault on 1/3/20, 10:50 PM

    I was thinking with some friends recently (new year's eve) : considering a bitcoin model with a fixed finite amount of currency, won't every coin be lost at some point due to storage failure/lost keys/etc ? Statistically ? And rather sooner than later, if my thinking is right ? Like the birthday problem ?

    There is a maximum of 21x10^6 bitcoins, imagining a 0.01 chance of losing 1 bitcoin/day ?

  • by INTPenis on 1/4/20, 7:36 AM

    Like many have pointed out, this guy is clearly biased. But my own personal opinion is that people will always want drugs and as long as governments enable a black market of drugs, crypto will be used to trade drugs.

    I perhaps cynically believe that is what has kept, keeps and will keep cryptocurrency going.

  • by christopherbalz on 1/3/20, 11:40 PM

  • by yellow_postit on 1/3/20, 11:15 PM

    “Privacy” seems to be used as a buzz word here. I can assume but no concrete idea what the author means by blockchain with built in privacy features

  • by seibelj on 1/4/20, 4:42 AM

    Yet another thread for me to bookmark. Crypto is eating finance, and I can’t wait for a decade to pass to repost this thread. Good luck banks!

  • by notadoc on 1/3/20, 11:29 PM

    Most predictions of the future are wrong