Comment by sodafountan

It's solving a much much bigger problem than electronic payments (which was never really a problem in the first place unless you're overly concerned about privacy). We have a major problem with inflation in this world, you can't just put your money somewhere and have it retain its value anymore and it hasn't been like that for years, we're forced to play the stock market game which just consolidates power to big corporations and leaves a lot of people all over the world left behind - bitcoin actually solves that problem, and just to drive that point home, if you'd invested in bitcoin and held during just about any given 365 day period throughout its ten year lifespan you'd have likely beaten the stock market in gains by a lot, that helps a ton of people, especially young people who are saddled by debt. We have countries that have no reliable form of currency at all, again bitcoin solves that problem.

I agree with some of the sentiment of the article, bitcoin's energy consumption is something to keep an eye on and if we can seamlessly move to an algorithm that's greener then so be it but you have to realize the tremendous amount of good that bitcoin is doing for the world and will likely continue to do as it becomes scarcer and scarcer, don't knock a technology that can single handedly lift a continent like Africa out of poverty.

*edit: Nothing like defending bitcoin on Hacker News and getting downvoted to oblivion, hey rather than downvote why don't you point out exactly what you disagree with so we can have a discussion