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The Quora post that killed Bitcoins. Please discuss if his arguments are valid.

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Re: The Quora post that killed Bitcoins. Please discuss if his arguments are valid.

#11

Some of the primary arguments he uses against Bitcoin are actually its strengths. Fundamentally, Bitcoins will be in higher demand than dollars because their value will continue to rise instead of fall. This means that goods and services as priced in bitcoins will be discounted compared to dollars, driving their adoption. You can see this same dynamic at work in black markets around the world where the USD is the de…

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that at some point Bitcoin will stop its deflation. Once Bitcoin has mainstream success, if that ever happens, the value of a Bitcoin will stop growing and people will start spending Bitcoin. At some point, the value of a Bitcoin lost through hoarding will equal the value gained by new adapters.

Re: The Quora post that killed Bitcoins. Please discuss if his arguments are valid.

#13
The current design of Bitcoin is obviously not correct for the long term, and I am sure it will be supplanted by more evolved crypto-currency systems. There is absolutely nothing preventing people from taking the open-source code and creating an alternative "Bittoken" currency which changes problematic design elements such as the minting/issuance model.

Given the rewards that have already accrued to Bitcoin early adopters, I am surprised other competing cryptocurrency networks have not yet already been created. Lots of people who wish they had started mining coins back in the days before GPU mining would be eager to get in on the ground floor of an alternative.

Most problems with the critiques of Bitcoin like those in the linked Quora post is that they are debunking a straw man - the idea that Bitcoin is intended as a universal replacement for all other currency systems. By those standards of course it will fail. Looked at in another way, think of Bitcoin as something more like MMORPG loot. If people are willing to spend vast amounts of "real money" on items for their WoW character, spending that money on Bitcoins instead makes it seem like a sane investment rather than just flushing it away.

I've mentioned before that I think governmental action to criminalize Bitcoin and analogous technology is an even more serious threat to long-term value. If there is one thing that really might make the world's governments team up to completely ban strong encryption, it is a potential threat to governmental control over taxation and currencies.

Re: The Quora post that killed Bitcoins. Please discuss if his arguments are valid.

#14
I would love to see a currency like this work, and I would be interested in using one, but the major issue for bitcoin, for me, is that deflation is built into its core. Inflation is a good thing.

Inflation encourages holders of capital to use it to invest in other things. That is, inflation encourages productivity. The inflation has to be relatively low, of course. Probably low enough to allow someone to retire without worry.

Re: The Quora post that killed Bitcoins. Please discuss if his arguments are valid.

#15

As an zeroHedge reading, armchair economist i think there are a lot of flaws in that guys argument "Bitcoin does not have a central bank capable of printing and lending bitcoins" >>I rather think thats the point. Lending is inflationary. "Built in Deflation" >> God knows how the computer industry makes money when if i hold my $$$ just a little longer, i can buy an even better machine. "For Bitcoin to work as a curren…

"God knows how the computer industry makes money when if i hold my $$$ just a little longer, i can buy an even better machine"

Not really. Because if you expect the value of your cash to rise, you would probably hold onto your cash. The liquidity of the system would drop as people hoard their cash (what happened during the Great Depression), depressing an economy.

"bank run"

He's talking about the need to inject cash into the system during economic shocks (the reason for the Fed injecting money into the system). This, again, happened during the Great Depression, as perfectly sound and profitable banks toppled left and right because of the bank runs, taking down the rest of the economy.

Re: The Quora post that killed Bitcoins. Please discuss if his arguments are valid.

#17
post #9
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me Bitcoin is more like Gnutella. Massively overhyped and fundamentally flawed.

It takes just a few keystrokes to type "fundamentally flawed", but people seems to not agree whether that's really the case. So why do you think it is flawed?

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