Why bitcoin is worthless

[pereira4]

The price tag disagrees. Bitcoin is worth as much as the next buyer is willing to pay, specifically $10945 right now, or in any other equivalent, but we use USD because it's the most widespread currency.

These people are so full themselves. They could say "in my opinion, bitcoin is worthless" but they speak as if they have universal truth. Just ignore these scammers, they can't even form a valid argument for their claims.

[bryan21]

For me bitcoin is very great investment, is not worthless at all. When bitcoin came to my live, it help me to paid some bills, help my family etc.
Bitcoin is profit is good every years is increase. I hope bitcoin in the future is good assets for everyone, especially investors.

[imapessimist]

I'd say if you think Bitcoin is worthless then it is to you.  If you don't think it's worthless then it obviously isn't to you.  But if fiat is rubbish why is Bitcoin always valued in Fiat. 

[Palmerson]

Bitcoin is worth a lot of money and it's easy to check. If it was possible to offer the journalist who wrote this article to buy 100 btc for 1000 dollars. You think he'd refuse? Lol. He'd love to do it and ask me to sell him more coins. This means that even he doesn't believe in what he writes.

[wriizo]

I wouldn't agree with anything written in that article besides the explanation of the ICO. Bitcoin is definitely not a safe investment and is of high risk but personally I think that its not that risky and its a good long term investment. Crypto is not going to fall off, in fact crypto is the next big thing because its mainstream, its the future.

[bitcoinstress]

I don't agree bitcoin is worthless even I'm agree there is have a risk if you invest in bitcoin but for me that the way for earn profit.

[ktabb]

The benefit of decentralization is not nearly large enough to outweigh the massive costs.

What does this even mean? How do you determine the value of decentralisation and what's its fair cost? Why do people (miners?) bear those costs then?

It means that the only "pro" of crypto over, for example, Visa or Mastercard or Venmo or any other means of transferring money/value is the fact that it is decentralized. You don't have to trust anyone, whereas with Venmo, you're giving a company control of your funds. The cost of crypto vs these systems is that it is WAYYYY slower, not scalable, more expensive in many cases, and requires the use of a massive network that consumes stupid amounts of energy even when it is less than 1% of the size it would need to achieve the dream of replacing fiat currency. It's just not worth it.

Furthermore, blockchain technology necessarily requires cryptocurrency, which is something people seem to overlook or not understand. Without some kind of digital token, there is no way to incentivize miners.

Wrong. You only need tokens for decentralised, trustless, anyone-can-participate blockchains. You can have 'private', tokenless blockchains run by authorised nodes.

Actually it is right and you pretty much just admitted it. A centralized and non-trustless blockchain like the one you are describing is completely pointless. You are better off using a database, which would be WAY faster and WAY fewer computational resources.

Betting on blockchain is the same as betting on crypto, and crypto is even more overhyped than blockchain technology itself.

Blockchain-based cryptos are more overhyped than entire blockchain tech? Isn't it like saying "my legs weight more than my entire body"?

Cryptocurrencies are more overhyped than blockchain technology itself. The two ideas are commonly viewed as if they aren't coupled together even though they are. I'm not saying it makes sense.

[xuan87]

Yes blockchain and Bitcoin maybe a little being overhyped, but it's the one that make people interested, at least something new was introduced and people was excited to see new things and as far as I know blockchain and Bitcoin is very useful and can help a lot of people, the technology maybe not yet perfect and consume a lot of energy, but it's a promising technology that can change the world

[sjefdeklerk]

Yes blockchain and Bitcoin maybe a little being overhyped, but it's the one that make people interested, at least something new was introduced and people was excited to see new things and as far as I know blockchain and Bitcoin is very useful and can help a lot of people, the technology maybe not yet perfect and consume a lot of energy, but it's a promising technology that can change the world

Well as the author says, it not only consumes tons of energy, it's just not usable as payment system because of the extreme slow processing speed. I think a lot of people have some dream about how bitcoin is going to change the world. But it's also important to look at the technology and what it can and can NOT do. That's why I think it's such a good article, it lays out why blockchain can not be used as an international payment system.

[arthotdog]

All journalists write their articles for the money of bankers. I don't believe them. They don't understand what bitcoin is. For them, it is only a virtual currency. For users, this is much more. This is the ideology of a free economy. People may not have a significant impact on the actions of governments. But they do not want to quietly observe the irrational spending of their taxes. Therefore, bitcoin will never die.

your wrong,ofcourse they understand bitcoin,but they deny it becaue THEY ARE A WRITER WITH COST(not Cause)cant you even see that if Bitcoin funded hes write ups then maybe t articles will be in reverse,lets not spend our time with thisk kind of issue.coz it comes out that were only advertising that articles to favor the dev

[YuginKadoya]

I really think the article is praising Blockchain more over the one that is running through it, He is talking about the failing Cryptocurrencies and the hype of so many people over initial coin offerings will all fail and blockchain will be the one that will be revolutionize over it, I really think that blockchain started with bitcoin and if there are so much hype for bitcoin blockchain also is taking credit with it as well, I don't think it is a helpful article for bitcoin and wants to take of bitcoin from blockchain.

I don't know if you can really differentiate out blockchain and bitcoin itself. I don't know if you do really know on what you are trying to say here. Blockchain technology we do all know is just like a backbone on where all transactions being made of and can publicly be seen with those transactions do happen.We do know bitcoin is the first crypto did able to make use of this technology.Criticism cant really be avoided and its not really a surprising thing for me to be read of.

I am not really talking about the difference between blockchain and bitcoin because I am talking about the article itself, If you would read the article it is trying to take out blockchain technology from the one that is running from it and trying to innovate it without bitcoin, And they are trying to explain the usefulness of blockchain technology if its not being use as a ledger of transaction because it can really be use in different things other that bitcoin.

[TERA2]

I agree that blockchain is not that great of a technology and I hated the moment bitcoin news started being filled with headlines of "blockchain" instead of "bitcoin". The entire purpose of the blockchain was only to be used with bitcoin where it was absolutely needed because there is no centralized entity to trust and robust security against hackers in this wild wild west is needed. As soon as you move away from the use case of bitcoin, blockchain is no longer neccessary or efficient. I also have hoped that bitcoin will upgrade its use of blockchain to a more distributed model as well as get rid of POW.

[Dreamchaser21]

I don't agree bitcoin is worthless even I'm agree there is have a risk if you invest in bitcoin but for me that the way for earn profit.

How can people say bitcoin is worthless where a lot of people changed their life because of this. Bitcoin is everything, its technology that drives the price to pump higher is the prove for itself. Believe on bitcoin, its value will make you more rich in the future.

[hase0278]

Yes blockchain and Bitcoin maybe a little being overhyped, but it's the one that make people interested, at least something new was introduced and people was excited to see new things and as far as I know blockchain and Bitcoin is very useful and can help a lot of people, the technology maybe not yet perfect and consume a lot of energy, but it's a promising technology that can change the world

Well as the author says, it not only consumes tons of energy, it's just not usable as payment system because of the extreme slow processing speed. I think a lot of people have some dream about how bitcoin is going to change the world. But it's also important to look at the technology and what it can and can NOT do. That's why I think it's such a good article, it lays out why blockchain can not be used as an international payment system.

That is the case for now. What if a revolutionary technology is introduced to help the problem at hand? What if the slow transaction speed has been solved through a fork? IMO anything is possible to happen in the future as people's mind are creative and always craves new things, thus people might build mining devices that are far more efficient and cheaper to use than the current ones. This might solve the issue at hand about it consuming a lot of energy.

[pawel7777]

The benefit of decentralization is not nearly large enough to outweigh the massive costs.

What does this even mean? How do you determine the value of decentralisation and what's its fair cost? Why do people (miners?) bear those costs then?

It means that the only "pro" of crypto over, for example, Visa or Mastercard or Venmo or any other means of transferring money/value is the fact that it is decentralized. You don't have to trust anyone, whereas with Venmo, you're giving a company control of your funds. The cost of crypto vs these systems is that it is WAYYYY slower, not scalable, more expensive in many cases, and requires the use of a massive network that consumes stupid amounts of energy even when it is less than 1% of the size it would need to achieve the dream of replacing fiat currency. It's just not worth it.

You haven't answered the question. How do you determine the value of benefit of decentralisation? If the high costs are not justified, what's the fair cost?
Average Joe may not be valuing decentralisation too high, but it's a different story for WikiLeaks (and alike), who had all their bank accounts frozen, or for individuals/businesses from Cyprus (EU member state, not some Banana Republic), who had seen their money just taken away from them, or for citizens of shithole countries with high risk of hyperinflation - you get the gist.
Other than exchanging physical goods (incl. cash), cryptocurrencies are the only way to transfer value in trustless, censorship-free, borderless manner. How do you put a value on that to say whether costs are justified or too high?

As for speed/costs - cryptos are performing pretty good. Bitcoin seems slow compared to other cryptos, but txs are irreversible and settled in average of 10 mins - this is huge advantage over the traditional means. Credit card purchases are rather expensive (especially for small merchants), buyers' could think they're free, but they're not - merchants pay the fees (and pass the costs to the buyers via increased product price, which also reflect costs of fraudulent chargebacks).

I just made a purchase on Aliexpress, my first payment attempt failed for an unknown reason, tried different card - it went through. Now I only have to wait 1 day for them to verify my payment. Wow, how fast and convenient. I'd be happy to pay even $15 fee just to use BTC if they had such option.

...
Wrong. You only need tokens for decentralised, trustless, anyone-can-participate blockchains. You can have 'private', tokenless blockchains run by authorised nodes.

Actually it is right and you pretty much just admitted it. A centralized and non-trustless blockchain like the one you are describing is completely pointless. You are better off using a database, which would be WAY faster and WAY fewer computational resources.

Private blockchains don't require high computational power (mining hashpower) at all. If it's pointless then why the hell is Swift (and others) spending presumably a fortune to explore/implement blockchain tech? They don't know any better? You want to email them and educate them on the issue?

[1Referee]

Well as the author says, it not only consumes tons of energy, it's just not usable as payment system because of the extreme slow processing speed.

LN removes obstacles such as transaction precessing speed, confirmation times, costly fees, etc. You however fail to see the value in it, because for some reason you keep hammering on that second layer like it's something that can't and won't work, while it does already deliver an outstanding job. I am sure that at a given point if Bitcoin provides on-chain scaling offering all the aforementioned features, you'll still find something to complain about. Let me ask you a question, from all the current altcoins, what is according to you a 'perfect' example of an adoption/usage stimulating altcoin? And explain why you think it is. Just saying this or that coin because it's faster and cheaper isn't enough.

[Coffee135]

The benefit of decentralization is not nearly large enough to outweigh the massive costs.

What does this even mean? How do you determine the value of decentralisation and what's its fair cost? Why do people (miners?) bear those costs then?

It means that the only "pro" of crypto over, for example, Visa or Mastercard or Venmo or any other means of transferring money/value is the fact that it is decentralized. You don't have to trust anyone, whereas with Venmo, you're giving a company control of your funds. The cost of crypto vs these systems is that it is WAYYYY slower, not scalable, more expensive in many cases, and requires the use of a massive network that consumes stupid amounts of energy even when it is less than 1% of the size it would need to achieve the dream of replacing fiat currency. It's just not worth it.

You haven't answer the question. How do you determine the value of benefit of decentralisation? If the high costs are not justified, what's the fair cost?
Average Joe may not be valuing decentralisation too high, but it's a different story for WikiLeaks (and alike), who had all their bank accounts frozen, or for individuals/businesses from Cyprus (EU member state, not some Banana Republic), who had seen their money just taken away from them, or for citizens of shithole countries with high risk of hyperinflation - you get the gist.
Other than exchanging physical goods (incl. cash), cryptocurrencies are the only way to transfer value in trustless, censorship-free, borderless manner. How do you put a value on that to say whether costs are justified or too high?

As for speed/costs - cryptos are performing pretty good. Bitcoin seems slow compared to other cryptos, but txs are irreversible and settled in average of 10 mins - this is huge advantage over the traditional means. Credit card purchases are rather expensive (especially for small merchants), buyers' could think they're free, but they're not - merchants pay the fees (and pass the costs to the buyers via increased product price, which also reflect costs of fraudulent chargebacks).

I just made a purchase on Aliexpress, my first payment attempt failed for an unknown reason, tried different card - it went through. Now I only have to wait 1 day for them to verify my payment. Wow, how fast and convenient. I'd be happy to pay even $15 fee just to use BTC if they had such option.

...
Wrong. You only need tokens for decentralised, trustless, anyone-can-participate blockchains. You can have 'private', tokenless blockchains run by authorised nodes.

Actually it is right and you pretty much just admitted it. A centralized and non-trustless blockchain like the one you are describing is completely pointless. You are better off using a database, which would be WAY faster and WAY fewer computational resources.

Private blockchains don't require high computational power (mining hashpower) at all. If it's pointless than why the hell is Swift (and others) spending presumably a fortune to explore/implement blockchain tech? They don't know any better? You want to email them and educate them on the issue?

Blockchain is a very expensive technology. It requires a lot of energy. But this technology is supported by many like-minded people. They allocate costs to each participant so they are minimal. Who will provide banks with their capacities? People unite in order not to use the services of banks. In fact, the cost of a Bank transaction is very low. Banks charge very high prices for transfers only because of their monopoly. They don't need the blockchain.

[ktabb]

The benefit of decentralization is not nearly large enough to outweigh the massive costs.

What does this even mean? How do you determine the value of decentralisation and what's its fair cost? Why do people (miners?) bear those costs then?

It means that the only "pro" of crypto over, for example, Visa or Mastercard or Venmo or any other means of transferring money/value is the fact that it is decentralized. You don't have to trust anyone, whereas with Venmo, you're giving a company control of your funds. The cost of crypto vs these systems is that it is WAYYYY slower, not scalable, more expensive in many cases, and requires the use of a massive network that consumes stupid amounts of energy even when it is less than 1% of the size it would need to achieve the dream of replacing fiat currency. It's just not worth it.

You haven't answered the question. How do you determine the value of benefit of decentralisation? If the high costs are not justified, what's the fair cost?
Average Joe may not be valuing decentralisation too high, but it's a different story for WikiLeaks (and alike), who had all their bank accounts frozen, or for individuals/businesses from Cyprus (EU member state, not some Banana Republic), who had seen their money just taken away from them, or for citizens of shithole countries with high risk of hyperinflation - you get the gist.
Other than exchanging physical goods (incl. cash), cryptocurrencies are the only way to transfer value in trustless, censorship-free, borderless manner. How do you put a value on that to say whether costs are justified or too high?

As for speed/costs - cryptos are performing pretty good. Bitcoin seems slow compared to other cryptos, but txs are irreversible and settled in average of 10 mins - this is huge advantage over the traditional means. Credit card purchases are rather expensive (especially for small merchants), buyers' could think they're free, but they're not - merchants pay the fees (and pass the costs to the buyers via increased product price, which also reflect costs of fraudulent chargebacks).

I just made a purchase on Aliexpress, my first payment attempt failed for an unknown reason, tried different card - it went through. Now I only have to wait 1 day for them to verify my payment. Wow, how fast and convenient. I'd be happy to pay even $15 fee just to use BTC if they had such option.

What are you talking about? That concept doesn't make any sense. Decentralization is a concept, not an asset. It doesn't have a quantitative value. If that is really what you are asking then your question has no answer.

I had never even heard of Aliexpress but the problem you are describing is most likely not an issue with the credit card. Either way, your evidence is completely anecdotal. The last bitcoin transaction I made took 8 days and cost $40.

Speed/cost may be performing better for crypto recently, but 10 minutes is still WAY too slow. If I go into a store to buy something, I'm not going to wait 10 minutes for the payment to process. Furthermore, the costs for bitcoin transactions are higher than credit card costs to vendors for reasonably small transactions. This problem will only become larger as mining becomes more difficult and fees rise. For bitcoin to be worth anything, it needs to be able to scale to thousands of times its current size, and it is running into major hurdles way before even coming remotely close to that point.

...
Wrong. You only need tokens for decentralised, trustless, anyone-can-participate blockchains. You can have 'private', tokenless blockchains run by authorised nodes.

Actually it is right and you pretty much just admitted it. A centralized and non-trustless blockchain like the one you are describing is completely pointless. You are better off using a database, which would be WAY faster and WAY fewer computational resources.

Private blockchains don't require high computational power (mining hashpower) at all. If it's pointless then why the hell is Swift (and others) spending presumably a fortune to explore/implement blockchain tech? They don't know any better? You want to email them and educate them on the issue?

Your argument is that private blockchains must be valuable otherwise people wouldn't be spending money and looking into it. That argument is horribly flawed. Go read the last few Snapchat earnings reports and tell me that Snapchat Spectacles are valuable. They spent a ton of money on it and then gave up when it fell flat on its face.

One reason I can give you for many companies to be looking into blockchain is that simply saying the word "blockchain" in public will cause a company's stock price to go flying to stupidly high levels. Look at Long Island Blockchain, formerly Long Island Iced Tea. They are an iced tea distributer based on long island and their business has NOTHING to do with blockchain. They announced that they would look into blockchain technology and changed their name, and all of a sudden their stock price surges to wildly irrational levels.

And just to add, the bottom line really is that more and more crypto can be created infinitely, and none of them ever have any intrinsic value (yes, the USD DOES have intrinsic value). The crypto space is infinitely inflationary for this reason, and IMO will eventually fail. It is only getting so much attention because it is new and people made a lot of money. This is not anything remotely like the internet.

[Kevin77]

Ah yes an article in .... The Guardian.

A "news organisation" that actively attacks those who go against the establishment in any form once again speaks negatively of cryptocurrency.

Shocker.

The fact that you "just stumbled" upon article from that "news organisation" means you cannot distinguish between fact and propaganda and are too easily swayed. But please give any crypto you have to me. I'll put it to better use I promise.

Your last statement actually sums it up. If anyone thinks blockchain technology and bitcoin is worthless, it does not take them anything to opt out. This is a community and opinions can be shared, but some are better off not being shared as they do not serve a purpose other than spreading bias or misleading information.

I can agree that the blockchain technology is over hyped and we all saw that with what happened with bitcoin late last year as people are tending towards being greedy but how does that make bitcoin worthless. If the author is even informed about swift, then he would not even write that bullshit.

[pawel7777]

...
What are you talking about? That concept doesn't make any sense. Decentralization is a concept, not an asset. It doesn't have a quantitative value. If that is really what you are asking then your question has no answer.

I agree (with the bold part). But yet you gave decentralisation some value by saying: "The benefit of decentralization is not nearly large enough to outweigh the massive costs". Costs are measurable and you valued decentralisation below that. What if costs were 50% lower, or 75%, would decentralisation outweigh the costs then? Is there any deeper logic behind your statement, or is it just "I don't like it - not worth it"?

I had never even heard of Aliexpress but the problem you are describing is most likely not an issue with the credit card. Either way, your evidence is completely anecdotal. The last bitcoin transaction I made took 8 days and cost $40.

Aliexpress is a sub-brand of Alibaba, only the biggest e-commerce platform in the world. Not quite an anecdotal evidence if there are plenty of others with similar problems and when they have dedicated FAQ section for that. What's anecdotal (purposely?) is your BTC transaction, if really happened at all (care to share tx id?).

Speed/cost may be performing better for crypto recently, but 10 minutes is still WAY too slow. If I go into a store to buy something, I'm not going to wait 10 minutes for the payment to process. Furthermore, the costs for bitcoin transactions are higher than credit card costs to vendors for reasonably small transactions. This problem will only become larger as mining becomes more difficult and fees rise. For bitcoin to be worth anything, it needs to be able to scale to thousands of times its current size, and it is running into major hurdles way before even coming remotely close to that point.

Are you of impression that fiat transaction are settled instantly?
You can build any 3rd party payment services on top on Bitcoin, with instant transactions (ie transfers between Coinbase accounts, pre-RBF BitPay purchases), you could accept BTC zero-conf for smaller purchases before RBF was implemented (you can still do it with BCH), you have BTC powered debit cards, you have Lightning Network, you have coins that scales on-chain, you have non-blockchain coins that claim to have unlimited capacity (IOTA) etc.

Bitcoin was created primarily as a response to the flawed global financial system, not as competition to payment processors. Even if it can compete with the latter - comparing them is bit missed.

Saying BTC is only worth something if it has capacity to replace fiat entirely is simply retarded and no different than saying McDonalds is worthless until they have capacity to feed entire world.
There's nothing stopping BTC from existing forever as a niche-alternative to fiat. What gives it value is the free market - not the way how you feel about it.

Your argument is that private blockchains must be valuable otherwise people wouldn't be spending money and looking into it. That argument is horribly flawed. Go read the last few Snapchat earnings reports and tell me that Snapchat Spectacles are valuable. They spent a ton of money on it and then gave up when it fell flat on its face.

No. My argument was that: "Furthermore, blockchain technology necessarily requires cryptocurrency" and "A centralized and non-trustless blockchain ... is completely pointless" are false, as evidenced by Swift (among others). Private blockchains are just a form of distributed database and some find this tech very useful.

I have impression that you got stuck in some weird "something-is-overhyped-therefore-completely-useless" kind of logic.

One reason I can give you for many companies to be looking into blockchain is that simply saying the word "blockchain" in public will cause a company's stock price to go flying to stupidly high levels. Look at Long Island Blockchain, formerly Long Island Iced Tea. They are an iced tea distributer based on long island and their business has NOTHING to do with blockchain. They announced that they would look into blockchain technology and changed their name, and all of a sudden their stock price surges to wildly irrational levels.

Agree. What are you arguing here? Yes, 'blockchain' is overhyped and mis-used to screw investors. How does this affect cryptocurrencies?

And just to add, the bottom line really is that more and more crypto can be created infinitely, and none of them ever have any intrinsic value (yes, the USD DOES have intrinsic value). The crypto space is infinitely inflationary for this reason, and IMO will eventually fail. It is only getting so much attention because it is new and people made a lot of money. This is not anything remotely like the internet.

No, USD DOESN'T have intrinsic value.
Cryptos are infinitely inflationary only if you assume that every newly created crypto is somehow automatically valuable and gets its share of crypto market cap (at expense of other coins). If that's what you believe, then put all your money in, go margin-short on BTC and create new coins at rate of thousands per day. Instant billionaire. What's stopping you?