Last year alone there were over 200 academic, quasi-academic, research papers, journal articles and theses dedicated to bitcoin. There've been tens of bitcoin conferences and there's loads of discussion on the tech and economics of bitcoin to be found at say the protocol's core developers's IRC channel, mailing list or github discussion pages. Feel free to start there if you want.
But to most people none of that makes much sense if you don't even grasp what bitcoin is and why it matters. Hell I couldn't even be bothered reading about that if it didn't matter. Only once you grasp why it matters can you get into the technology and economics and see if it still adds up. And you generally don't want to start with the question of 'why it matters' from a highly technical research study.
But this op-ed is titled exactly that: 'why bitcoin matters'. I think it's an excellent place to start thinking about bitcoin. I use the word research in an informal sense, hence the word 'basic research'. ('looking into something') Sorry if that was misleading.
Now you can say 'he's biased, he is heavily invested'. Or you can say 'He is heavily invested because he is willing to put his money where his mouth is and make a big bet on this technology and not without good reason'. If it was a short-term bet, your criticism is valid. (I invested in A, I pump A, I dump A, I profit deluding others). But this is a long-term bet, you don't generally make those unless you genuinely believe in its fundamentals. And it's not just an opinion, but a large bet, there is money at stake.
So I'd say the op-ed is very valid, perhaps much more so than someone who isn't invested in the outcome and thus has no risk saying something completely wrong, unlike Marc.
>If it was a short-term bet, your criticism is valid. But this is a long-term bet
How can you even claim to know what sort of bet it is? I don't believe Mr. Andreesen is nefarious, but I fully expect him to talk his book. It would be foolish otherwise.
As far as his Op-Ed, I find this interesting:
"Target is happy because it has the money in the form of Bitcoin, which it can immediately turn into dollars if it wants, and it paid no or very low payment processing fees; you are happy because there is no way for hackers to steal any of your personal information"
Let's put aside the fact that people having their accounts hacked and Bitcoins stolen, amounting to hundreds of millions(?) of dollars is all over the news. We can also put aside the fact that "immediately turn into dollars" requires a fee, somewhere. How do I get a refund if need be? Target needs to record that information regarding my purchase, then we're back at square one: my information on the system of some retail operation, waiting to be stolen.
>Feel free to start there if you want.
Start where? Bitcoin proponents are going to have to do a better job selling the technology than "Go research it". I Google it and end up in /r/Bitcoin, which is a hell-hole. If understanding the importance and use of a technology involves independent research and attending conferences, no one will bother. The Bitcoin advocates need the public to understand the tech if they want it to go mainstream; Mr. Andreesen gets this, that's why he's writing Op-Eds in the NYT.
I find the technology fascinating, really. Especially with regards to the idea of information and contracts being passed through the blockchain. Yet every sales-pitch is about Bitcoin as currency, and I haven't seen very many compelling use-cases there yet.
> But to most people none of that makes much sense if you don't even grasp what bitcoin is and why it matters.
This is exactly the type of thing people were saying in 2000 just before the dot-com crash - that all the old fuddy-duddies who were talking about revenues and earnings instead of eyeballs "just didn't get it".
On the subject of value, the "another view" piece says:
> Bitcoin is a digital currency, whose value is based directly on two things: use of the payment system today – volume and velocity of payments running through the ledger – and speculation on future use of the payment system. This is one part that is confusing people. It’s not as much that the Bitcoin currency has some arbitrary value and then people are trading with it; it’s more that people can trade with Bitcoin (anywhere, everywhere, with no fraud and no or very low fees) and as a result it has value.
I don't disagree with the speculation part (although speculation increases price, not value). The other part is what is nonsense. Yes you can trade it - but I can trade gold as well. Gold has had value for 10,000 years and I feel pretty safe holding it. Bitcoins are worthless hashes, and I wouldn't feel safe at all holding it, especially since it went from $1100 a Bitcoin in November 2013 to its current $230. I was saying as much here when Bitcoin was twice its current value.
"People can trade with Bitcoin and as a result it has value". No. Every commodity was traded at least once - otherwise it wouldn't be a commodity. It's traded because it is useful to someone. Currencies are just commodities with certain aspects that make them good currencies: durability, portability, divisibility and uniformity. Or pieces of paper that you can trade for such currencies.
The price of Bitcoin has halved since I said it was worthless here. Looking at your first HN post, you were telling people to buy it when it was over $600. People who listened to you would have lost 60% of their money. I'm the one who "doesn't get it" though.
> that all the old fuddy-duddies who were talking about revenues and earnings instead of eyeballs "just didn't get it".
Please, don't put me in the group of people screaming 'you just don't get it', trying to hype something. That wasn't my point at all. I merely said that proper research about how X works makes no sense if you don't even know why X matters in the first place. It's like teaching a robot how the internet works when it doesn't grasp why the internet matters in the first place. It's not an argument that says 'you just don't get it', it's just me saying 'people can't be bothered to read about how bitcoin works if they don't even care because they don't know why bitcoin matters'.
But fine turn it into a red herring then attack me and compare me with now famous idiots in the 2000 recession. Great point.
> Looking at your first HN post, you were telling people to buy it when it was over $600. People who listened to you would have lost 60% of their money. I'm the one who "doesn't get it" though.
Looking at my first HN post I can't see me telling anyone to buy it at all. Now I can see why you don't get it, you've made up your mind and you color the entire world around you to support that point.
Anyway I'm glad you pointed Gold out, the thing valued way beyond its industrial value, as the awesome example of something having value for its usefulness, when a global decentralized ledger which can't be forged, has durable, portable, divisible and uniform tokens, apparently is useless and has no value because it's brought about by 'worthless hashes' (which obviously aren't worthless because millions are spent on doing them and they offer the qualities of security of said ledger, you know, sort of an important and valuable component)
It's also great you pointed gold out when Gold, like Bitcoin, when adjusted for inflation was priced at $1200 at one point, and traded at $350 at a later point. Hell it was closer to $2k even. Even when not adjusted for inflation that's literally about 60% lost, hey almost like bitcoin?
And like bitcoin, if you actually zoom out and not cherry pick particular timeframes (like say, in the past few days when if you had $100k in bitcoin, you'd suddenly have $130k, because volatility goes both ways), you'd see bitcoin grew in price by 100x in 2013, and thousands of x over the past few years. I think everyone of us will sign up for a couple thousand x in a few years, no? But hey, better just cherrypick when something bad happens, then dig to someone's very first post (I wonder if you read them all?) and then lie saying I told people to buy bitcoin when I didn't. Your silly argument would've had as much value as when the price of bitcoin crashed from $30 to $2: none. Unless of course that was the end of the story, but it wasn't as bitcoin later went to $260 or $1200. That it's volatile and risky is a given, nobody denies it, and it's the very reason I recommend to almost everyone I know to buy bitcoin.
Anyway don't take these points as me trying to justify bitcoin by its price, I'm merely putting context to your ad hominem attack ('oh look he tried to sell you bitcoin and the price went down! what a fraud! and bitcoin too!'). I wouldn't mind as much if I had actually told people in my first post to buy bitcoin, when I didn't. In reality, I'd only encourage someone to buy bitcoin if they understand the risks, can handle the risks financially, and have a specific user case (whether it's long-term investment, or buying bitcoin for a few minutes to use it to transfer value quickly and cheaply for remittance using the network as a fiat-to-fiat international transfer that can beat WesternUnion rates).
If you don't feel safe holding bitcoin, that's completely fine by me, it's a very valid point and I'm the first one to say that billions of people today would feel the same and I'd agree with them, too.
