Could Bitcoin Be More Disruptive than the Internet?

Hey all. This is my first Hacker News comment and the first time one of my posts got shared. Thanks for that.<p>Sorry the title is lame, but I went with something which would get attention at BarCamp Nashville. Not all of them are tech savvy, so the title served its purpose and got the talk selected.<p>Moving on from the title, what do you think of the content?<p>There are a lot of Bitcoin haters out there, but also a growing group of supporters. From what I&#x27;ve seen, few informed people argue against the actual technology while some argue about the politics or economics. To my knowledge, we&#x27;ve never seen a deflationary currency (outside of some babysitter experiment). We&#x27;ve never seen a store of value with no third party risk which can be transferred anywhere in the world immediately. As for wasted energy concerns, my understanding is the system is more efficient than the overhead associated with ACH, Credit Card, PayPal or other networks for securing transactions.<p>Either way, curious what you all think about the content. As this is my first HN comment ever, please, be nice. :)

This is one of the more egregious Betteridge&#x27;s Law violations I&#x27;ve seen today.

No. Normals are easily pwned. You remember all those botnets that steal normals&#x27; internets? They will now stead their bitcoin wallet instead. Normals will lose their bitcoin to theft and never trust it again. End of story.<p>The only thing you accomplish with bitcoin is wasting electricity and making global warming worse. Please stop destroying the planet.

Ladies and gentlemen, Hacker News 2013. Standing by to shit on every provocative idea microseconds after posting!

Today&#x27;s xkcd is relevant: <a href="http://xkcd.com/1289/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1289&#x2F;</a>

If anything, the web provides a strong medium for bitcoin and this helps with the buying&#x2F;selling process. Bitcoin wouldn&#x27;t survive without the major benefits the web provides it.

Claim: The answer is no.<p>Proof: Bitcoin requires the Internet to function. Therefore, the things disrupted by Bitcoin are a subset of the things disrupted by the Internet. The Internet can be used for disruptive things other than Bitcoin, so the things disrupted by Bitcoin are a <i>proper</i> subset of the things disrupted by the Internet.<p>Since the total number of things in both categories is finite, this means fewer things are disrupted by Bitcoin than are disrupted by the Internet.<p>QED.

It&#x27;s certainly disrupting a lot of people&#x27;s peaceful nights with all the stories that are showing up of exchanges disappearing or supposedly being hacked. But then again, I&#x27;d presume given the nature of its economy, you&#x27;d have to be a fool if you didn&#x27;t consider these outcomes possible.

The correct heading would be: &quot;Could Bitcoin be the most disruptive thing to arrive on the internet since the web?&quot;<p>Rather than look at bitcoin, best to look at the websites that it brings about, and the ones it minimizes -- especially the ones that don&#x27;t embrace bitcoins, such as banks. You could also measure it as a proportion of internet traffic vs web traffic. The key is that websites use bitcoins, and to take that into account.

I saw this earlier, I still don&#x27;t get the logic of the conclusion. Can you really qualify technology B (Bitcoin) as being more disruptive then technology A (internet) when B requires A to operate?<p>Maybe if you look at the technologies in the vacuum in which they were created, but in reality you&#x27;d want to contextualize them as extensions of one another, otherwise you get a biased picture of their disruptivity.<p>edit:sp

Internet allowed the creation of things such as Bitcoin. Btc is only making the Internet impact larger, if such a thing is ever measured and matters at all.

No.

More disruptive than the Internet? No. More disruptive than Facebook? Yes.