21–30 of 62 posts
How many entities have recently stopped taking bitcoin, and how many have started? Are the growing transaction cost and latency going to kill usage?
1) "Bitcoin turns out to be a clunky, slow, costly means of payment". This is missing the phrase "right now". There is nothing inherent/unfixable in Bitcoin or competing cryptocurrencies that make them bad for payments in a technical sense (maybe in a exchange rate risk sense but that's not the claim being made). Yes Scaling, Speed, Security, and UX are issues, no those aren't insurmountable. One could easily say "dial up internet is a clunky way to watch videos"; yes and the technology will evolve.
2) No intrinsic values. I'm not sure that you need intrinsic value in a currency, only buy-in, and there are a lot of compelling reasons to buy-in.
3) It's a bubble. Provide your valuation model. I don't claim to know what the correct valuation is, but I'm not making a hard claim of bubble vs no bubble.
4) North Korea is potentially manipulating the market. Time to break out the boogymen! I don't doubt that NK is trying all measures of cyberscams / hacking / etc, but I really doubt that they have the capital or skill to meaningfully effect these high volume markets.
Don't get me wrong. There are massive problems and criticisms that can be leveled against Bitcoin et al, but this reads more as an "old man yells at clouds" kind of story.
> Bitcoin, by contrast, has no intrinsic value at all. The idea of intrinsic value should die. It's fundamentally a complete misunderstanding of what value is based on. FIAT currency and Bitcoin have value as long as people believe it has value. Value isn't some objective criteria it's a highly subjective one, what one considers valuable another might not. depending on what we are talking about, you can then add some…
BTW, I agree with you. I'm just trying to convince the masses that this is a good idea.
"It’s a nifty trick. But what is it good for?" The last time Krugman said this it was about the internet. “The Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s….ten years from now, the phrase “information economy” will sound silly. (1997)”
Is Apple part of the "information economy"? Is Google? Is Tesla?
I'm asking, I'm not suggesting one way or another.
To answer my own questions though Apple would seem to be in the smart phone business (and of course the internet is the reason we have smart phones).
And Google would seem to be in the advertising business (among others). Their ads do play on the internet though.
So, I don't know — information economy? Internet economy? Internet-related economy?
We've heard about Bitcoin being a bubble and having no intrinsic value the entire duration of its existence -- so much so that Paul making these his main arguments feel like traveling back to ~2013 when it was "bubbling" then. If people use Bitcoin and believe it has value, it _gives_ it value and credibility, in the same way that diamonds have value, even though they are no longer "rare". When people stop using Bitc…
Unless what is driving up the price is speculation.
I mean, do most of these new-to-bitcoin users actually "use" Bitcoin? Purchase with it? Or are they holding, waiting to dump?
Furthermore, gold is heavy and thus impractical to use in day to day transactions, just like Bitcoin.
There are altcoins, but then there are also alt-metals (granted a lot fewer of them) such as silver, platinum, palladium, etc.
The way I see it, bitcoin is just like gold except you can also trade it online.
> Bitcoin, by contrast, has no intrinsic value at all. The idea of intrinsic value should die. It's fundamentally a complete misunderstanding of what value is based on. FIAT currency and Bitcoin have value as long as people believe it has value. Value isn't some objective criteria it's a highly subjective one, what one considers valuable another might not. depending on what we are talking about, you can then add some…
> FIAT currency and Bitcoin have value as long as people believe it has value This argument precludes any rational discussion of the price of Bitcoin. Bitcoin at $50,000? Correctly priced, because people feel like it! Bitcoin at 50¢? Correctly priced, because people feel like it! Contrast that to national currencies, where fundamental relationships between rates, real GDP and other factors relating to the economy can…
Yep. Exactly. Bitcoin doesn't have the history of other currencies and assets, by the simple fact that it has only existed for about ten years. Something that can't be changed because we don't have time machines to go back thousands of years and tell everyone how to build computers and create cryptocurrencies.
So instead of people saying that Bitcoin is inherently worthless all the time, maybe we can just agree that it's going to take a lot longer than ten years and a lot of swings both up and down in the price before we start creating enough of a "heritage" to come to an informal consensus on how much they are worth.
A lot of people come across as "This is something new and I don't want to spend any effort trying to understand it. Worthless! Everyone putting money into it are nothing but tulip heads!" and it'd be more annoying if my paying attention to it and taking small risks with it didn't just help me turn a small amount of USD into a downpayment on a house in 12 months, something I most likely wouldn't have been able to do putting that money literally anywhere else.
Some of the worse points of this article: 1) "Bitcoin turns out to be a clunky, slow, costly means of payment". This is missing the phrase "right now". There is nothing inherent/unfixable in Bitcoin or competing cryptocurrencies that make them bad for payments in a technical sense (maybe in a exchange rate risk sense but that's not the claim being made). Yes Scaling, Speed, Security, and UX are issues, no those aren'…
I would agree, but the point seems to be more about the current state of Bitcoin. Without technical changes that incorporate lessons from other currencies, Bitcoin is indeed terrible for transactional payments.
I only follow this stuff casually (never had any Bitcoin), but it seems that Bitcoin maintainers have heavily resisted changes that would allow Bitcoin to become transactional. And discussions about implementing technical changes leads to some of the more political fighting I've seen on HN.
Therefore, Bitcoin may not have technical limitations, but there are political limitations on what is technically possible with Bitcoin.
> Bitcoin, by contrast, has no intrinsic value at all. The idea of intrinsic value should die. It's fundamentally a complete misunderstanding of what value is based on. FIAT currency and Bitcoin have value as long as people believe it has value. Value isn't some objective criteria it's a highly subjective one, what one considers valuable another might not. depending on what we are talking about, you can then add some…
> FIAT currency and Bitcoin have value as long as people believe it has value This argument precludes any rational discussion of the price of Bitcoin. Bitcoin at $50,000? Correctly priced, because people feel like it! Bitcoin at 50¢? Correctly priced, because people feel like it! Contrast that to national currencies, where fundamental relationships between rates, real GDP and other factors relating to the economy can…
You can measure the exact same indicators for Bitcoin, with roughly the same amount of usefulness. In fact, if you go measure Bitcoin velocity you'll see it's basically zero, what means it's mostly not a currency, but something people are speculating on.
Some of the worse points of this article: 1) "Bitcoin turns out to be a clunky, slow, costly means of payment". This is missing the phrase "right now". There is nothing inherent/unfixable in Bitcoin or competing cryptocurrencies that make them bad for payments in a technical sense (maybe in a exchange rate risk sense but that's not the claim being made). Yes Scaling, Speed, Security, and UX are issues, no those aren'…
>There is nothing inherent/unfixable in Bitcoin ... bad for payments in a technical sense I would agree, but the point seems to be more about the current state of Bitcoin. Without technical changes that incorporate lessons from other currencies, Bitcoin is indeed terrible for transactional payments. I only follow this stuff casually (never had any Bitcoin), but it seems that Bitcoin maintainers have heavily resisted…
If I were to write an article criticizing the cryptocurrency space, I'd talk about politics, regulations/lack there-of, currency risks/lack of cheap risk mitigating instruments, and how bearer instruments are crazy risky. He addresses the issues that I'd expect someone who hasn't observed the space enough to address.