Bitcoin Makes Even Smart People Feel Dumb
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Re: Bitcoin Makes Even Smart People Feel Dumb
#2Hyperbole - it's not really that hard. But it uses maths, so maybe not everybody has the stomach to try to understand it.
Re: Bitcoin Makes Even Smart People Feel Dumb
#3Hyperbole - it's not really that hard. But it uses maths, so maybe not everybody has the stomach to try to understand it.
It's not only the math involved in the creation of a bitcoin, there's also economics and networking and psychology involved. Granted, most people don't understand how money really works, but grasping a dollar bill in your wallet is easier than the a virtual something on some virtual place.
See? I even feel dumb trying to explain why people feel dumb.
Re: Bitcoin Makes Even Smart People Feel Dumb
#4Hyperbole - it's not really that hard. But it uses maths, so maybe not everybody has the stomach to try to understand it.
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Re: Bitcoin Makes Even Smart People Feel Dumb
#5The cryptosystem part is hard, but the rest is not all that complicated. The economics, though, are very strange. Valuing a cryptocoin is really hard. It's like valuing a penny stock with no business activity.
Re: Bitcoin Makes Even Smart People Feel Dumb
#6Bitcoin is a distributed economic cryptosystem designed by someone with at least a rudimentary understanding of these topics.
A lot of Bitcoin enthusiasts understand neither cryptography, nor distributed systems, nor economics.
What could go wrong?
Re: Bitcoin Makes Even Smart People Feel Dumb
#7The cryptosystem part is hard, but the rest is not all that complicated. The economics, though, are very strange. Valuing a cryptocoin is really hard. It's like valuing a penny stock with no business activity.
But isn't valuing a penny stock with no business activity really easy?
Re: Bitcoin Makes Even Smart People Feel Dumb
#8The hard part here is market making. Market making is almost pure game theory, and unless you worked at a big market making trading house (i.e. Goldman, JP Morgan, etc) the learning curve can be really expensive.
In this type of work, it's not that bitcoin is making people feel dumb, it's that the smartest people playing in Bitcoin are making money at the expense of everyone else. There are a lot of really smart people playing in Bitcoin who are comparatively dumb.
Bitcoin is just the stock market 2.0: the big guys manipulate the market with impunity, except there aren't any laws to stop them (nevermind the government ignores the rules in the stock market if you're "too big to fail"...)
Re: Bitcoin Makes Even Smart People Feel Dumb
#9Bitcoin is a distributed economic cryptosystem designed by someone with at least a rudimentary understanding of these topics. A lot of Bitcoin enthusiasts understand neither cryptography, nor distributed systems, nor economics. What could go wrong?
Speculation is part of any market. It is true to understand the Mathematics, Crypto-tech and Economics part of BitCoin and CryptoCurrencies in general is very hard. But doable by intelligent people. The idea of facebook or iPhone would be hard to explain in 1990, similar is the case with Crypto, the tech is way ahead of the culture.
Re: Bitcoin Makes Even Smart People Feel Dumb
#10When we say we "understand money" we mean we know how to spend it, aquire it and store it.
When someone says they "understand bitcoin" it means grappling with cryptography, mining, ledgers, economics, game theory, fiat currencies, deflation, dapps, etc. etc.
Very few people need to really understand all of that to "get" bitcoin, mainly because most of the use cases aren't figured out. Most people are overthinking at this point and not attacking it from a "how is this useful to me and what do I need to know" perspective, but trying to grok it all, which is pretty hard.