61–70 of 437 posts
I consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but I'm still completely lost as to whether Bitcoin is basically a pyramid scheme set to crash massively, or something huge that will continue climbing. I probably should've taken the time to mine some back when my friends were doing it and tried convincing me too. Ah well. (Queue heated comments from both sides. Discussing bitcoin is like bringing up religion AND politics at the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All people who are owning Bitcoin are betting.
Ultimately that's true of any non-backed currency (and those too I suppose) isn't it, it's just the bet looks far safer for a country/region wide fiat currency. I wonder if much of the medium term success of Bitcoin has been because the money put in couldn't be laundered readily in any other way, so whilst Bitcoin is a relatively high risk the alternative was just to dump the money without a way to use it?
People actually use other currencies as a medium of exchange first, and store of value second (usually they purchase assets to store value long term).
Bitcoin is the other way round (at present at least).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All people who are owning Bitcoin are betting.
Agreed, I was just trying to say that currently, one of the most popular investment theses for Bitcoin is "Gold for millennials", not "anonymous paypal" or "decentralised stripe".
"Market cap size is critical for adoption of a store of value. It needs to be large enough to “fit” even very large amounts of fiat, ideally without affecting the market. Gold market cap is estimated at 7 trillion USD, which means that even the richest people can move all their assets into gold and not move the market. (At least one at a time. All of them at once will move the market big time).
Bitcoin market cap of about 70B USD is not large enough for even one of the richest people on the planet. This implies that if the market cap does not grow, Bitcoin is likely to fail as store of value."
I consider myself pretty tech-savvy, but I'm still completely lost as to whether Bitcoin is basically a pyramid scheme set to crash massively, or something huge that will continue climbing. I probably should've taken the time to mine some back when my friends were doing it and tried convincing me too. Ah well. (Queue heated comments from both sides. Discussing bitcoin is like bringing up religion AND politics at the…
There's no pyramid scheme. It's a hyped asset, to say the least, but there's no pyramid. Like a hyped startup, it doesn't do much yet, but it is promising, so people buy it. It may be "worth" much or zero in the end, it all depends on the final outcomes. It's also the easiest/cheapest/most open asset to trade (depending on where you trade). In the long term, Bitcoin can be seen as a safe heaven in case of economic ch…
When all is said and done, we will have had a massive lesson in the madness of crowds, high-tech edition.
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(i am somewhat familiar with the tech but don't follow the business side of bitcoin) what I find weird is the forks. A major selling point of bitcoin is that there will ever be only 21 Mio coins. You know, unless there is a hard fork and now there are suddenly twice as many coins. Presumably one of the resulting coins' value will drop but you are still creating value out of thin air, something that the crypto people…
> I am sure blockchain tech will be hugely successful in the banking and government sector Are you? Why? So far, no bitcoin/blockchain advocates have been able to explain to me a single non-illegal use case that isn't better served by a traditional, centralized database. A single large Postgres instance could handle all the global transaction volume of bitcoin, and it would be faster and orders of magnitude more ener…
I agree if you change "isn't" to "couldn't be".
Consider if I'm a small company and want to process cards. So I try to sign up for a payment provider. Except, oops, I'm outside the US where terms tends to be stricter. And, oops, I'm in a legal field (in my jurisdiction) but one that the payment provider considers risky or morally suspect, such as, say gambling, or adult products, or prostitution, or even just travel.
A lot of companies find themselves spending ages sorting out payments because of this. I've worked with startups (in travel, in one case) that spent weeks getting approvals from one provider before suddenly getting "no" - in the end it took four attempts and several months in case; we developed the whole platform faster than we could get approval from a payment provider. That's unusual, but it happens, and in general having dealt with payment processors in various companies over a period of nearly 20 years: it's been nothing but pain and misery most of the time.
That's not a problem of the "traditional centralized database" directly, but indirectly because the centralized database allows for centralized gatekeepers of transactions: Your payment provider may or may not care about the nature of your business, but if the card association does, or the issuing banks does, or the bank handling the merchant account does, it doesn't matter.
This, to me, is the biggest potential value of crypto-currencies: The rising importance of card payments over cash have been one of the largest un-democratic power-grabs of our time by handing power to those controlling the approvals process.
Some previous developments, like PayPal, had the potential to change this, but quickly ended up as steeped in problems as the card providers.
I understand why: They're taking significant risk, and they're managing that risk. I'm not suggesting some sinister cabal trying to control morality through payments; merely that these companies first interest is to protect their share holders investment, not the public interest.
But crypto-currencies has the potential to give us "digital cash", of sorts, in that while it's not exactly the same (it's much easier to track for starters), it is much closer to cash than cards in terms of inability to control its use. We can track it after the fact like we can with cards, but we can't easily stop people from making payments or taking payments.
That has value. Whether that's enough to sustain Bitcoins current momentum is another matter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All people who are owning Bitcoin are betting.
Ultimately that's true of any non-backed currency (and those too I suppose) isn't it, it's just the bet looks far safer for a country/region wide fiat currency. I wonder if much of the medium term success of Bitcoin has been because the money put in couldn't be laundered readily in any other way, so whilst Bitcoin is a relatively high risk the alternative was just to dump the money without a way to use it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no pyramid scheme. It's a hyped asset, to say the least, but there's no pyramid. Like a hyped startup, it doesn't do much yet, but it is promising, so people buy it. It may be "worth" much or zero in the end, it all depends on the final outcomes. It's also the easiest/cheapest/most open asset to trade (depending on where you trade). In the long term, Bitcoin can be seen as a safe heaven in case of economic ch…
> Like a hyped startup, it doesn't do much yet It does plenty already. I live almost exclusively on Bitcoin. I only get income in Bitcoin, I pay with Bitcoin whenever possible, and I have a Bitcoin-funded debit card for when that's not possible.
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The forked currencies are just the same as altcoins, you can't sell 1 Bitcoin Cash for $7000. The fact that people are willing to accept money for them doesn't change the value of one Bitcoin.
Forgive my total ignorance of bitcoin but - why can't you sell 1 Bitcoin for $7000?
Each of these other "versions" of bitcoin were created by a fork. As far as I know, when a fork happens you get an equal number of "new coin" as you have original coin. Seemingly creating value out of nothing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ultimately that's true of any non-backed currency (and those too I suppose) isn't it, it's just the bet looks far safer for a country/region wide fiat currency. I wonder if much of the medium term success of Bitcoin has been because the money put in couldn't be laundered readily in any other way, so whilst Bitcoin is a relatively high risk the alternative was just to dump the money without a way to use it?
No. People actually use other currencies as a medium of exchange first, and store of value second (usually they purchase assets to store value long term). Bitcoin is the other way round (at present at least).