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Bitcoin's Golden Future

bloomberg.com

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Re: Bitcoin's Golden Future

#5

Post by imaginenore »

"Digital currencies have no fundamental value"

That argument never made any sense to me. What's the fundamental value of $1?

People assign value to all things based on how desirable they are (the demand). There are rare exceptions, like when a government ties their national currency to something like the dollar, but that immediately creates a black market, where it trades for its real value, and because of that, the government exchange only works one way (to buy or to sell). See Bolivar as a current example.

Re: Bitcoin's Golden Future

#6

Post by delegate »

Bitcoin and other crypto require a well functioning internet infrastructure, otherwise it's just data on a hard-drive.

Disconnect a country from the Internet (or filter the traffic) and you're forking the chain. Spend on both networks by buying other (unfiltered) crypto. There are states (even large ISPs) that can do that.

Also, the first thing to go in case of global conflict is the global Internet. Countries will try to damage opponent's internet links to gain strategic advantage.

Crypto currencies will be useless in this case, losing all of their value.

There's always the concern of a bug in the protocol, a solution to the hash function or plain old human stupidity that can crash the currency.

I guess my point is: be careful, this is still very much experimental, don't invest everything you have in them.

Re: Bitcoin's Golden Future

#8

Post by murph37 »

vocatus_gate wrote: post #2

The big mystery to me is whether Bitcoin is the Myspace or Facebook of digital currency. Only time will tell.

This is a large concern for me. If cryptocurrencies begin to attract more users and widespread adoption, what is preventing a new coin that corrects Bitcoin's inefficiencies from ultimately gaining more users and superseding it? I would love to know your guy's thoughts.

Re: Bitcoin's Golden Future

#9

Post by m_mueller »

imaginenore wrote: post #5

"Digital currencies have no fundamental value" That argument never made any sense to me. What's the fundamental value of $1? People assign value to all things based on how desirable they are (the demand). There are rare exceptions, like when a government ties their national currency to something like the dollar, but that immediately creates a black market, where it trades for its real value, and because of that, the…

I think the comparison to gold does make more sense than to Fiat. Fiat has inherent value in that you can buy all kinds of goods with it. Crypto so far has hardly another use than to trade against Fiat, which atm. is similar to gold (which does have industrial applications but its price would also collapse if all the reserves got dumped). This may change in the future, albeit probably not with BTC given its tech stack and the strange philosophy of the core devs.

Re: Bitcoin's Golden Future

#10

Post by rugffgbv »

thecopy wrote: post #4

Transaction time and energy inefficiency makes Bitcoin's future not so golden, imo.

Not only it's slow, but transaction fees are ridiculously high. $4.3 currently.

I go to shop and pay $0.5 for 2kg of potatoes (or a bottle of beer), and pay $4.3 fee, and wait 1 hour for confirmations?

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