51–60 of 162 posts
> It now appears the $3 to $33 prices for Bitcoin were due to speculation. Come on. Was it ever attributed to anything but speculation.
I'm open to being wrong about my assumptions.
Is this really a bad thing? Now people can stop hoarding them and start really using them as currency. It never really mattered what they were worth unless you were holding onto them. If you use bitcoins to enable transactions only and keep your money in real dollars then it can be pretty useful.
It's a problem because the people who are using bitcoin have seen the value drop to less than 10% of what it was, so why should they trust it to be a currency worth using? For it to be a currency it doesn't need a huge value per bitcoin, nor does it need to be constantly rising a huge amount - but it does need to be reasonably stable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your reply missed his point as bitcoin is 'mined' not just bought and sold. The difficulty of that mining is set based upon the computing power of the miners. Add to this the fact that the number of coins available to be mined each day is designed to be reduced over time, and you end up with early adopters (formost of which being the creators) controlling a massive proportion of the total worth of bitcoins.
Is that much better than printing money and distributing the new money to major banks? That is what the US government is doing now. Most countries do a combination of distributing newly printed money to domestic banks and the government itself.
Bitcoin is essentially a giant pyramid scam. The early adopters have cashed out long ago. As mining gets more and more difficult, less people will cling to the liquid currency. Why trade with a deprecating currency, anonymous or not? The fact that the exchange rate is below the cost of mining should be alarming for many reasons. I'd assume the creator/first adopters do not care, either way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course it would require more infrastructure around bitcoin. There is already an impressive amount of exchanges, and it would be pretty easy to exchange bitcoins with software like android bitcoin wallet. excellent app btw: https://market.android.com/details?id=de.schildbach.wallet Gold isn't really a good instrument of exchange. Gold-backed currencies are, but the central issuer has proved problematic historically…
It's not a matter of infrastructure. It's a matter of belief: people who are looking for safety and refuge from inflation aren't going to move their money into a less-liquid, less-tangible asset with no track record (relative to alternatives.) Moving cash into bitcoin would make sense if there were some inherent advantages: better returns, more liquidity, better privacy, more stable values, faster transactions. So fa…
I will. The point is, at the margin, some people will. All and at once? Never! The more adventurous and tentatively? Yes.
Now it all depends on relative outcome of different strategies.
Is this really a bad thing? Now people can stop hoarding them and start really using them as currency. It never really mattered what they were worth unless you were holding onto them. If you use bitcoins to enable transactions only and keep your money in real dollars then it can be pretty useful.
It is if the only reason that they have value in the first place was the hoarding and speculating, which seems a reasonable interpretation of events to date. A currency of no value is not useful for trade. I mean that "if" as a true logical statement, not an implied assertion that it must be true. (I do believe that, but I'm not asserting it right now, because I'm not defending it.)
Porn is to the Internet as selling drugs is to Bitcoin.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your reply missed his point as bitcoin is 'mined' not just bought and sold. The difficulty of that mining is set based upon the computing power of the miners. Add to this the fact that the number of coins available to be mined each day is designed to be reduced over time, and you end up with early adopters (formost of which being the creators) controlling a massive proportion of the total worth of bitcoins.
Well, I guess that most startups are pyramid scams, since the founders (early adopters) end up controlling massive proportion of the total worth of the company.
Also Bitcoin is not a company, any more than US Dollar is.