191–200 of 306 posts
Make no mistake, it will one day go down in flames, and 10 years from now people will write stories about bitcoin the same way they do today about how insane Iceland's banking system got, or Pets.com being worth $20 billion or whatever.
I see all these people calling themselves libertarians arguing against BTC but I have yet to see why BTC would fail. I hate this "BTC is not money" argument because the core foundation of liberalism states basically "money is what people voluntarily choose to use as money". So if they are convinced that BTC works (works at least better than some alternative) , why shouldn't they use it as money? Volatility is not an…
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I wouldn't trust Graeber, as he is frequently wrong about easily verifiable facts in such a way that it supports his world view. There's no reason to trust a liar when he tries to tell you something you don't know about. My favorite Graeberism is when he describes the founding of Apple: > Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley…
Uh, thanks for pointing to this. I found an article detailing this a bit more[1]. This is a inaccuracy that is quite telling about the quality of research this author is going to offer. 1 http://www.businessweek.com/finance/occupy-wall-street/archi...
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Yes, but the volatility nobody is debating is that it was below $1 in 2011 before it shot up above $33 and then came down to $2 at the bottom again. A similar development could be observed earlier 2013 where it started the year around $10, then shot up to $266 and came down again to $80. It should clear to everybody who holds bitcoin, that there is massive volatility, and that you might buy your coins at a time, whic…
The more people who use BitCoin the less volatile it will be, the more BitCoin tokens will be spread across a large number of individual actors, the less a single actor can dictate price fluctuations.
For comparison, the foreign exchange markets do trillions of dollars every day in volume. The daily volume of Bitcoin trading is around $100 million at times.
> In this sense, Bitcoins is not a Ponzi scheme. It is simply a supermoney scheme. Admits that bitcoin is not a ponzi scheme in his own article. > The money was siphoned off from the beginning. Somebody owned a good percentage of the original digits. Implies that most bitcoins are owned by satoshi nakamoto, without substantiating this claim by any number to quantify the impact. The estimated stash of satoshi is about…
there's no question that the author of this article wrote it with linkbait in mind - calling bitcoin a ponzi scheme. having thought about it - the argument that bitcoin is going to be worth a lot "because there are only 21 million" - we have to consider that bitcoin is just one of "n" virtual currencies. while bitcoin may be limited, we already have 37 alternatives (at least) and there's no reason another hundred can…
Not to mention the safety - it's easier to pull a 51% attack on the other currencies (see the attack performed on Feathercoin)
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a fiat currency is just a currency without intrinsic value. it's not a derisive term, you'll find it in any introductory economics textbook.
What is the intrinsic value of Bitcoin, aside from its scarcity?
Bitcoin is not an investment scheme. It's a payment system. Unfortunately people are looking at it as an investment scheme. Even if it was an investment scheme it hardly fits the definition of a ponzi scheme. In any new investment whether it's a startup or bitcoin the early investors make out better than later investors. That is not the definition of a ponzi scheme.
It's not a ponzi scheme, just an amusing bubble.
> In this sense, Bitcoins is not a Ponzi scheme. It is simply a supermoney scheme. Admits that bitcoin is not a ponzi scheme in his own article. > The money was siphoned off from the beginning. Somebody owned a good percentage of the original digits. Implies that most bitcoins are owned by satoshi nakamoto, without substantiating this claim by any number to quantify the impact. The estimated stash of satoshi is about…
there's no question that the author of this article wrote it with linkbait in mind - calling bitcoin a ponzi scheme. having thought about it - the argument that bitcoin is going to be worth a lot "because there are only 21 million" - we have to consider that bitcoin is just one of "n" virtual currencies. while bitcoin may be limited, we already have 37 alternatives (at least) and there's no reason another hundred can…
It's really not a technical question. Bitcoin came first, it has the traction.
Getting traction into another chain is possible, but much more difficult than with Bitcoin. (Which only involved creating the first of a new, disruptive technology).
Simply said, why would I want to buy any of the alternate coins? As long as you can't give me a satisfying answer to that, your argument is moot.
> In this sense, Bitcoins is not a Ponzi scheme. It is simply a supermoney scheme. Admits that bitcoin is not a ponzi scheme in his own article. > The money was siphoned off from the beginning. Somebody owned a good percentage of the original digits. Implies that most bitcoins are owned by satoshi nakamoto, without substantiating this claim by any number to quantify the impact. The estimated stash of satoshi is about…
> There will be an eventual cap at 21 million bitcoins, so satoshis stash is somewhere between 9% to 4% of all bitcoins. Btw: As the rules and mechanics of the Bitcoin network are enforced by the majority of clients it would be pretty simple to invalidate these bitcoins if the majority of the Bitcoin software authors would agree to do so. Just ignore any transaction regarding these old addresses.
However I think you will find that really nobody wants to participate in such a scheme for a pretty simple reason.
Fungability is an important concept for money in order to work. A landmark case in scottland around 1750 (Crawfurd v. The Royal Bank) recognized that fungability is more important than the individual right in the money. The very same conclusion has been held up in virtually every juristiction imaginable since.
Miners, which very much depend on fungability to run their business, would be dammaging the very foundation on which they are running their business, if they would undermine fungability.
Since you would need the cooperation of the majority of miners, to do something that is not in their self-interest, a serious attack on fungability is not easy to pull off, although it gives credible threat to encourage debate.