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Beyond the Bitcoin bubble
61–70 of 244 posts
Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble
#62Is anyone else tired of hearing the word 'bubble' applied to everything? Whether we're talking about tech stocks, chicken futures, tulips, or Bitcoin, it's become a really tired and meaningless term. You can't know if an asset is in a 'bubble' until long after the bubble has burst. Bitcoin is far from having burst, so this article and all those that came before it offer nothing new or insightful. Please, let's move p…
We had the dot-com bubble, but it didn't stop the internet from changing everything in fundamental way. Google, Facebook and Amazon are in the top 10 most valuable companies in the world - all completely dependant on the internet for the business model. Granted webvan and pets.com didn't make it, but it didn't mean the internet had failed as an idea.
But just because there was an internet bubble and there is a bitcoin bubble, doesn't mean the internet and bitcoin are similar.
The internet had explosive growth. New uses and technology were coming out constantly.
Bitcoin? It's not clear actual use of bitcoin as a currency is even growing. It's very possbile nobody uses bitcoin at all in 5 years. The internet on the other hand was an eventuality. We knew it wasn't a fad.
Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are not seeing the whole picture and don't understand the goal of the "coin" in a "blockchain". I would strongly urge you to do some research so that you can make up your mind from a place of knowledge instead. http://github.com/jpantunes/awesome-cryptoeconomics
I tried some of the introductory stuff and even that is difficult for me. How about an ELIF of the goals of the coin?
There's two separate things that get conflated in these discussions.
The first is the blockchain, which is a technical innovation that allows a client to decide which version of a shared event log to trust, even if it doesn't trust any of the servers attempting to perform the update. The ELI5 version is that the record that took the most total work to generate is correct. Since generating a fraudulent record requires doing more total work than was done to generate the correct one from the point of the fraudulent change forward, creating a fraudulent record quickly becomes computationally infeasable as changes get older.
The second are cryptocurrencies, which are an attempt to mint a currency (a literal, if not physical, coin) independent of any government by, essentially, reintroducing the gold standard. Except instead of gold we're using blockchains, which it turns out can be engineered to behave economically like precious metals do under the right circumstances.
Separating the two concepts, and specifically avoiding putting on your engineer hat when you're thinking about the half that's more political manifesto than anything else, will go a long way in helping you get a toehold on what's going on.
Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble
#64I don't understand the transit example presented in this article. I feel like I am missing something fundamental about the utility of any of these distributed services backed by their own type of coin.
For the transit example you have some people who want to request rides, and some people who want to provide rides. OK. Someone develops an application to process these requests, in some kind of bidding system...
How are the rider and driver matched up? I assume there needs to be some publicly accessible list of all open queries. Is that list what would be stored on the TransitCoin blockchain, and would that imply that all records of requested and completed rides are public, such that someone who knows your TransitCoin address can read all your previous trips, which are stored in this immutable chain until the end of time?
Would the TransitCoins be 'mined' by people running a 'node' that does the ride matching? Then in order to pay for a ride you send a TransitCoin to the driver? The driver would then have to sell his earned TransitCoins on an exchange for USD (or GroceryCoins) at the end of the day?
In the end I don't see why a new currency needs to be included in every proposed use of a blockchain, if the people who want to participate as a consumer and as a service provider are the ones running the nodes of the blockchain.
Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble
#65I hope the technology matures beyond 'blockchain' and marketing drops the 'coin' moniker and the gold rush dies down. Cryptographically verified distributed log files should have negligible hype value and be hidden part of the infrastructure. I predict that 10 years from now normal relational databases have infrastructure for shared, authenticated and verified rows and columns and we laugh at the ICO era.
You are not seeing the whole picture and don't understand the goal of the "coin" in a "blockchain". I would strongly urge you to do some research so that you can make up your mind from a place of knowledge instead. http://github.com/jpantunes/awesome-cryptoeconomics
There's a reason this "CLEARLY YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND" has become a meme [1]. It's a card readily pulled anytime someone is critical of the crypto hype. What I've found more often to be true is proponents of crypto hype lack basic finance and economic knowledge. There's a reason most economists aren't on the crypto bandwagon, and it's not because they're afraid of it.
Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 'coin part' already has a name and it's not a new innovation. Large part of financial innovation in the last century is based on the idea that is now called coin. It's called derivative. If you have something valuable that can be traded, it can be made into derivative and traded in existing markets. Practically anything, physical things, electricity, indexes, future events or prices, insurances, storage capacity,…
> If you have something valuable that can be traded, it can be made into derivative and traded in existing markets Nitpick, though an interesting one. What you are describing is "securitization" more so than a derivative. There are essentially five things you can do in finance: move cash flows in time ( e.g. lending), move them between holders ( e.g. buying and selling shares), chop them up into securities ( e.g. an…
Good point. Securitization is the process of creating new financial instrument for an underlying illiquid asset. As a result you have underlying and derivative.
Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble
#67I hope the technology matures beyond 'blockchain' and marketing drops the 'coin' moniker and the gold rush dies down. Cryptographically verified distributed log files should have negligible hype value and be hidden part of the infrastructure. I predict that 10 years from now normal relational databases have infrastructure for shared, authenticated and verified rows and columns and we laugh at the ICO era.
You are not seeing the whole picture and don't understand the goal of the "coin" in a "blockchain". I would strongly urge you to do some research so that you can make up your mind from a place of knowledge instead. http://github.com/jpantunes/awesome-cryptoeconomics
Your comment isn't very helpful. How about your share some of your insights about the "whole picture" instead of posting some giant list of random links about something called "cryptoeconomics". To me, cryptoeconomics currently seems to consist of designing unscalable systems to convert fiat currency into CO2 and useless digital tokens, some of which can manipulate other useless digital tokens, etc, all achieving pretty much nothing.
So how about spreading some light?
Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't mean to sound insulting or naive but maybe I am doing so by accident. Let me try in another way, what is the motivation for hobbyists and companies like Fidelity to buy mining hardware to secure a public blockchain?
I don't understand the nature of your question, but I'd say: to make money. That is the primary overriding incentive in this discussion. People will lie, cheat, and steal for a dollar, they'll definitely do it for 1 million.
Ok, so people make money by running mining hardware that keeps a blockchain network decentralised and trustworthy.
The value of the token increases with the number of people who participate in the network (Metcalfe's ...) and due to speculation on the underlying value of having trust and consensus without a centralised authority.
The problem with centralised authority is that, despite the very best intentions of those involved, the centralisation of power reduces the overall ability of a market to operate freely, and the blockchain is the product of Anarcho-Capitalists who believe markets should be free from any central power.
Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble
#69Isnt the author, well, supposed to keep his private key private? It was quite easy to create a text file with that 1b0be2162cedb2744d016943bb14e71de6af95a63af3790d6b41b1e719dc5c66 key and "geth account import key.txt" into a ethereum wallet to get a seemingly valid account. Please tell me that i am missing something very important here.
Re: Beyond the Bitcoin bubble
#70Is anyone else tired of hearing the word 'bubble' applied to everything? Whether we're talking about tech stocks, chicken futures, tulips, or Bitcoin, it's become a really tired and meaningless term. You can't know if an asset is in a 'bubble' until long after the bubble has burst. Bitcoin is far from having burst, so this article and all those that came before it offer nothing new or insightful. Please, let's move p…
There are plenty of things being called a bubble that aren't, but cryptocurrency is almost certainly one right now. The formal definition of a bubble is something that's priced far above its inherent value. Unless you want to argue that there's currently $500B+ of actual value in cryptocurrencies right now and not just speculation, it's absolutely a bubble.
That said, bubbles don't always have to end in a burst. If real and sizable use cases for cryptocurrency arise, the value could eventually catch up with the prices.