21–30 of 184 posts
Many reasons to be dubious about bitcoin and its liquidity and how much wash trading goes on, but it seems a bit odd to judge it by the amount of outstanding coin being traded. How much gold that exists is actively traded? Or even the same question for a typical company stock?
A better analogy would be: how much gold is actually being physically moved from one vault to another.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because Bitcoin is (at least theoretically) a currency. You're comparing it to a commodity or store of value. The power of a currency is the ability to trade it for goods and services. If that is no longer happening with Bitcoin it has morphed into something else entirely.
Yes, it has morphed. The devs in charge of Bitcoin have purposely abandoned the idea of it being a currency. On-chain transactions are artificially limited to about four per second, and they refuse to change that. They call it a "store of value" now. Other cryptocurrencies are working hard on scaling to the point of being workable currencies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because Bitcoin is (at least theoretically) a currency. You're comparing it to a commodity or store of value. The power of a currency is the ability to trade it for goods and services. If that is no longer happening with Bitcoin it has morphed into something else entirely.
I've never owned or traded bitcoin, but as I understand it the main attraction is that it's like the gold standard (of course for people who don't understand why the gold standard was a bad idea).
Wall Street Journal hinting not to trade bitcoin. What did they say about it in 2010?
Where is the lightning network, so people can buy common, small dollar amounts of goods and services with BTC? IMO that's going to be the next catalyst, it's slowly fading out until it's at least technologically possible to go mainstream.
LN has some fundamental issues with regards to security that I don't have time to go into there. However any L2 protocol based on BTC is going to have a hard time getting bootstrapped for the simple reason that there isn't enough throughout in the mainnet to transfer a sufficient amount of balance to a second layer. With the UTXO pool fragmented as is I don't think there is much hope of improvement.
Many reasons to be dubious about bitcoin and its liquidity and how much wash trading goes on, but it seems a bit odd to judge it by the amount of outstanding coin being traded. How much gold that exists is actively traded? Or even the same question for a typical company stock?
Because Bitcoin is (at least theoretically) a currency. You're comparing it to a commodity or store of value. The power of a currency is the ability to trade it for goods and services. If that is no longer happening with Bitcoin it has morphed into something else entirely.
Bitcoin is many things, but pinning it as a currency is very reductionist.
It can be used as a currency, but in its current form, it isn't very practical (lighting is aiming to, and will likely succeed in fixing that).
It is IMOH very much more useful for all the other use cases (eg store of value, doing away with government brain-hared management of fiat currencies, etc ...)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
100s of billions of dollars of gold is traded each day.
That could be the same gold being traded multiple times per day. What % of all gold extracted from the ground is traded annually?
Say a 100 people each own a 100 gold pieces. And they all buy and sell 100 gold pieces worth of goods and services per day.(10,000 gold pieces are traded) Why would it matter if this is physically the same gold coin traded 10,000 times or 10,000 gold coins being traded once?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because Bitcoin is (at least theoretically) a currency. You're comparing it to a commodity or store of value. The power of a currency is the ability to trade it for goods and services. If that is no longer happening with Bitcoin it has morphed into something else entirely.
I've never owned or traded bitcoin, but as I understand it the main attraction is that it's like the gold standard (of course for people who don't understand why the gold standard was a bad idea).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That could be the same gold being traded multiple times per day. What % of all gold extracted from the ground is traded annually?
Why does it matter if it's the same gold? Say a 100 people each own a 100 gold pieces. And they all buy and sell 100 gold pieces worth of goods and services per day.(10,000 gold pieces are traded) Why would it matter if this is physically the same gold coin traded 10,000 times or 10,000 gold coins being traded once?