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A Prediction: Bitcoin Is Doomed to Fail

dealbook.nytimes.com

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Re: A Prediction: Bitcoin Is Doomed to Fail

#311

Post by betterunix »

GhotiFish wrote: post #241
dinkumthinkum wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think these kinds of views are what make the bitcoin community seem ridiculous ... It's just constant downplaying of actual upplaying of conspiracy like goldbugs do and it just seems hard for serious and educated people to take seriously.

I'm not downplaying anyting. Bitcoins intention is to be a real currency. You don't turn your dollars into Canadian Tire money to shop at Canadian Tire. Saying you're not supposed to convert bitcoin is the statement of someone who thinks bitcoin is NOT an investment. So... not a goldbug.

There are only two ways that you could have a work where Bitcoin does not need to be converted to other currency:

1. People stop bothering to follow the law, and governments throw their hands in the air and do nothing about it.

2. Governments start accepting Bitcoin for tax purposes.

I am not confident that either of these will happen...

Re: A Prediction: Bitcoin Is Doomed to Fail

#312

Post by ceol »

v13inc wrote: post #224
dinkumthinkum wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or I can use actual money and forget all this nonsense ... Which do I choose?

What about credit cards? Chargebacks are quite common.

Credit cards are not a feature of a currency. You could just have credit cards that keep debt in BTC instead of USD.

The point of the person you're replying to is that, for 99.999999% of businesses, there is no benefit to using BTC. It doesn't offer the buyer any protection, it's extremely volatile, and it would require an overhaul of the entire economy's infrastructure to implement in any meaningful way.

Re: A Prediction: Bitcoin Is Doomed to Fail

#313

Post by oleganza »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #169
jafaku wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

News flash: A transaction requires a buyer and a seller. If you bought Bitcoin, someone else sold Bitcoin.

There is no balanced ledger - Bitcoins can be spun into existence through mining, i.e. without the transfer of hard currency.

Mining is strictly planned, everyone knows how much and when will be produced. New bitcoins are already accounted for in the price.

Re: A Prediction: Bitcoin Is Doomed to Fail

#314

Post by betterunix »

nostrademons wrote: post #14

I think Bitcoin's doomed to fail, but not for the reasons the article suggest. There're ample historical counterexamples of currencies that are not tied to a government. Gold is the most obvious example; if currency was inextricably tied to governments, there would not have been a mad rush to colonize the New World (and extract its gold reserves). In prisons cigarettes frequently serve as currency, as a medium of exc…

"There're ample historical counterexamples of currencies that are not tied to a government. Gold is the most obvious example"

...governments were accepting gold for tax purposes, kings were filling their treasuries with gold, armies were sent to steal gold from other countries, etc. Gold was absolutely tied to government when it was used as currency, and I am using the past tense here because gold is not a currency outside of a few highly niche markets.

"What really makes a currency is confidence"

I think you are confusing confidence with demand. What makes currencies work is demand -- the fact that everyone in the market demands the currency. Typically this happens because of a government, or more precisely because of a government that enforces certain laws.

"so can strong crypto"

Oh yeah? Let's just assume that Bitcoin actually qualified as "strong crypto." I'll release my fork of Bitcoin that is identical in every way, but happens to have its own block chain that I started using this post. How successful do you think that will be as a currency? Why can't we all just create our own personal block chains (and thus all be rich)? There is more to the story than "strong crypto."

Re: A Prediction: Bitcoin Is Doomed to Fail

#316

Post by waps »

john_b wrote: post #40
lukifer wrote: post #4

Calling BitCoin "privatized" misunderstands its nature. While it's true that there are large players invested, crypto-currencies are protocols, and cannot (reliably) be owned or controlled any more than TCP/IP or HTML. Meanwhile, fiat currency (as we know it) is not merely a tool of state; it is a command-and-control tool of the government-industrial complex, a creation not only of the U.S. tax code, but by massive p…

The whole article (willfully?) misunderstood Bitcoin's nature. It even implied that Bitcoins are issued by Satoshi himself. I think it's good to take a critical look at Bitcoin when the price rises so rapidly, but this article is more like a political hit piece than anything with economic merit.

According to Shamir's paper, that's 95% accurate. Theoretically you're right. Practically, you're wrong.

Re: A Prediction: Bitcoin Is Doomed to Fail

#317

Post by geoka9 »

atmosx wrote: post #231

At the beginning I thought so too, that BTC is doomed in the long run. But after the spike prices and a careful re-reading the only really thing that still puzzles me is the D. Ron and A. Shamir paper[1] released in 2012. If this paper holds true then a handful of early adopters holding more than 95% (the paper states 98%) of the currency, will and can bring the currency up and down overnight and their extremely powe…

> Extremely high degree of privacy (you can put 50.000.000 USD worth of USD in a USB stick and pass through 7 airports, or print them in an A4 page encrypted with GPG, and no one will know).

Even better, you can keep those millions in your head, using a deterministic wallet (google "brainwallet").

In short, you keep a password in your head, and when you are ready to spend, all you need is access to an Internet-connected device - using that password you can reconstruct your private keys and import them into a bitcoin client.

Re: A Prediction: Bitcoin Is Doomed to Fail

#318

Post by jafaku »

tedunangst wrote: post #171
jafaku wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

News flash: A transaction requires a buyer and a seller. If you bought Bitcoin, someone else sold Bitcoin.

That doesn't account for an imbalance in the number of potential buyers and sellers. It's very easy to buy a house for $100 million. Go to your real estate agent and say "Here's a $100 million. Buy me a house." It is, however, considerably harder to sell a house for $100 million.

Is the market price of houses $100 million though? No? That's what I thought.

Re: A Prediction: Bitcoin Is Doomed to Fail

#319

Post by geoka9 »

Bitcoin may have already failed as a currency. However I think it has spectacularly succeeded as a store of value - an alternative to gold, if you will. It has all the benefits of gold, none of its problems (bulk), and some brilliant advantages: ease of handling/transportation/transferring (maybe transferring it is too easy - make an unlucky typo and your savings are most probably lost for good - but that's a side effect of its efficiency).

FWIW, unless governments start to intervene by outright banning it, I suspect Bitcoin will first become the ultimate storage of value, then its price will become less volatile and with time stable enough to start using it as a currency.

Re: A Prediction: Bitcoin Is Doomed to Fail

#320

Post by alttab »

DrJokepu wrote: post #227
varjag wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Government backing can provide one source of confidence. But so can strong crypto, and one could argue that these days people have more confidence in crypto than in governments. Not quite. The confidence in "normal" fiat currency arises not so much from government backing, but from the fact that a well-managed national currency envelopes the GDP of a national economy. Government really needs fiscal discipline to no…

In addition, there are various measures a government or a central bank can take to stop or at least slow down escalating inflation. If there was a sudden loss of confidence in BitCoin (or more realistically, people lost confidence in other people’s confidence in BitCoin), such hyperinflation would spread and escalate with the speed of light with nothing to stop it. This kind of volatility might be interesting for spe…

The bitcoin price won't stabilize until it's operation literally dictates demand.

Once for all practical purposes everyday life is handled in satoshis, how does an economy expand?

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