51–60 of 103 posts
There are elements that are definitely Ponzi. This weekend I played with altcoin mining. The goal of course to figure out how to turn those coins into money I can spend. Aside from maybe LTC, no one is taking altcoins for payment or exchanging for fiat; you convert to BTC on an exchange like Cryptsy, and then sell the BTC on Coinbase, etc. At present, you can mine with the same hardware you could use for BTC 3 years…
Bitcoin is a scarcity-based currency, it's kind of a deflationary spiral, people save and don't spend their bitcoins. We desperately need a digital currency, it's the future... How could we solve this issue ?
As far as I can tell, the only ones who benefit from the "money has to be in constant circulation" adage, is those who gain a profit off every transaction made. Money is meant to be a representative token to make trading easier; I fail to see how it makes any sense to "encourage spending" in itself.
Roubini isn't laying out the full argument. Bitcoin has low value as a means of exchange currently , but that may change in the future. If speculators are correct that it may go up in the future, it is in their best interest to bid the price up now and collect money in the future. That would make BTC not a speculative bubble, but merely an asset that speculators have properly valued. If you want to argue BTC is or is…
who cares about your fancy pants arguments when it doesn't even pass the smell test? It has a lot of strikes against it: 1) deflationary 2) slow 3) energy hungry
You raise valid concerns but there are counter arguments to them all so I don't think such a glib dismissal is warranted. From pg's essay[0]
The first time Peter Thiel spoke at YC he drew a Venn diagram that illustrates the situation perfectly. He drew two intersecting circles, one labelled "seems like a bad idea" and the other "is a good idea." The intersection is the sweet spot for startups.
It's supposed to be a currency, but no one's actually using it for currency. They're just gambling on it, hoping to take advantage of other people's mistakes to make their own money. It's a zero-sum game, and it's destructive. People are just playing around with the electronic version of Monopoly money.
The driving force behind currencies is a large organization or group of organizations that work to keep it reliable. The dollar is kept stable because the federal government is large, established, and pays in dollars. With more and more people using the dollar, it becomes even more stable, to the point that other countries can use it for transactions.
Bitcoin doesn't have that. People don't have any assets tied in with Bitcoin the way that they do with dollars or Euros or yen. And why would they, when it's so volatile that a bank account of Bitcoins will change its value by 50% in a day?
Proponents of Bitcoin say that its benefits are that it's decentralized, unregulated, and doesn't have to rely on a government to ensure that it's stable. I actually think that these are bad traits for a currency to have.
Roubini isn't laying out the full argument. Bitcoin has low value as a means of exchange currently , but that may change in the future. If speculators are correct that it may go up in the future, it is in their best interest to bid the price up now and collect money in the future. That would make BTC not a speculative bubble, but merely an asset that speculators have properly valued. If you want to argue BTC is or is…
You are not even asking the right questions. The most important one is the supply of alternatives to Bitcoin.
I expect there will only ever be a few networks that have 'high' levels of participation and the rest will all be susceptible to computational attacks (high value networks will attract investment in mining capability and that investment will make it difficult to get people to risk value on smaller networks that use the same proof of work).
One problem that I think is salient about Bitcoin is that it's just not that useful . It's supposed to be a currency, but no one's actually using it for currency. They're just gambling on it, hoping to take advantage of other people's mistakes to make their own money. It's a zero-sum game, and it's destructive. People are just playing around with the electronic version of Monopoly money. The driving force behind curr…
TL;DR: Man spends 5 minutes thinking about Bitcoin on a plane and comes to conclusions which may or may not be correct. Shares them with people because he is super duper important.
I'll just leave this here for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouriel_Roubini You can agree or disagree with his argument, but snidely dismissing him as someone without expertise who mistakenly thinks he is "super duper important" is silly.
He is super duper important. But that doesn't validate his hasty shallow opinion on bitcoin in any way.
Worlds best zoologist said about first ever example of martian organism "It lame bacause it's not a frog." after thinking about it for an hour.
There are elements that are definitely Ponzi. This weekend I played with altcoin mining. The goal of course to figure out how to turn those coins into money I can spend. Aside from maybe LTC, no one is taking altcoins for payment or exchanging for fiat; you convert to BTC on an exchange like Cryptsy, and then sell the BTC on Coinbase, etc. At present, you can mine with the same hardware you could use for BTC 3 years…
That doesn't make it a Ponzi scheme.