101–110 of 191 posts
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How does Bitcoin provide you any "freedom from financial and fiscal paternalism"?
By providing you an alternative store of value that isn't controlled by a handful of people in government. Look at Zimbabwe Dollars or the Weimar Republic. There's no reason that can't happen in any other country and Bitcoin provides an alternative to government issued currencies or any other currency. Edit: downvote for ...?
In a moment of some depression, reflecting back on sinking so much money into Bitcoin at close to the peak of its price history, I made this: http://i.imgur.com/f3tIJwK.png It's important to understand that Bitcoin is dangerous to you, and you need to respect its danger if you decide to buy some. You need to be using a secure cold storage wallet. You need to not trust services like Coinbase to hold onto your coins fo…
In a moment of some depression, reflecting back on sinking so much money into Bitcoin at close to the peak of its price history, I made this: http://i.imgur.com/f3tIJwK.png It's important to understand that Bitcoin is dangerous to you, and you need to respect its danger if you decide to buy some. You need to be using a secure cold storage wallet. You need to not trust services like Coinbase to hold onto your coins fo…
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Yeah but my credit card company protects me from that sort of fraud so it really isn't a practical concern.
Only if you notice and report it, people get skimmed all the time and never notice.
Insert Mt.Gox joke here.
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Most alternatives for storing wealth have many restrictions attached to them when it comes to transferring ownership. Whether you agree with those restrictions or not, Bitcoin does not have them.
If you actually had enough money to worry about this kind of thing, I doubt you would be using Bitcoin for your assets.
> Under "Operation Choke Point," the DOJ and its allies are going after legal but subjectively undesirable business ventures by pressuring banks to terminate their bank accounts or refuse their business. The very premise is clearly chilling—the DOJ is coercing private businesses in an attempt to centrally engineer the American marketplace based on it's own politically biased moral judgements. Targeted business categories so far have included payday lenders, ammunition sales, dating services, purveyors of drug paraphernalia, and online gambling sites.
Bitcoin on the other hand doesn't care about these things.
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So, a merchant gets hacked and your credit card info is stolen. You notice fraudulent charges, call your credit card company and they reverse the charges and send you a new card. If someone gets access to your bitcoin wallet or whatever storage mechanism you are using fails, then that money is gone forever with no way to recover it. If you are a regular user with no need to make a political statement with the use of…
> If someone gets access to your bitcoin wallet or whatever storage mechanism you are using fails, then that money is gone forever with no way to recover it. Keep in mind that you're comparing two different markets in terms of maturity. One day, there may be a number I can call too when my bitcoin goes missing. I'm sure people made similar arguments before e-commerce. Surely it had to seem easier to just buy a produc…
Why would I even need such infrastructure if I can already do that today with my bank?
>“If you put your money into gold or other non-income- producing assets [read: Bitcoin] that are dependent on what someone else values that in the future, you’re in speculation,” he said. “You’re not into investing....”
>To illustrate the point, he asked readers to picture the world’s entire gold stock melded together into a cube 68 feet (21 meters) on each side valued at $9.6 trillion at then- prevailing prices. For the same amount, an investor could have purchased all the farmland in the U.S., 16 replicas of Exxon Mobil Corp., and still have about $1 trillion of “walking- around money.”
>A century later, the farmland will be producing valuable crops no matter the currency, and dividends from the companies would probably added up to trillions of dollars, Buffett wrote.
>The 170,000 metric tons of gold “will be unchanged in size and still incapable of producing anything,” he wrote. “You can fondle the cube, but it will not respond.”
In a moment of some depression, reflecting back on sinking so much money into Bitcoin at close to the peak of its price history, I made this: http://i.imgur.com/f3tIJwK.png It's important to understand that Bitcoin is dangerous to you, and you need to respect its danger if you decide to buy some. You need to be using a secure cold storage wallet. You need to not trust services like Coinbase to hold onto your coins fo…
There's risk associated with every investment, and there are plenty of other arenas in which you can lose all of your money in an eyeblink (for example: a single-drug pharmaceutical company with a drug undergoing FDA approval; the outcome is almost binary). I've been thankful to have experienced the highs and lows of bitcoin -- it's been a tumultuous introduction to the internal psychology of investing. The key to my…
As things are now (and as GP points out) speculation is probably the right word, not investment. From Wikipedia [1]:
Speculation is the practice of engaging in risky financial transactions in an attempt to profit from short or medium term fluctuations in the market value of a tradable good such as a financial instrument, rather than attempting to profit from the underlying financial attributes embodied in the instrument such as capital gains, interest, or dividends.
> The other way to get enough buy pressure would be if many people started deciding they want to hold bitcoin as a hedge or a speculation. This spurs occasional bubbles, but we haven’t yet seen it work long term. Bitcoin is doomed because it has no value. Commodities have value. Modern trade began by people trading commodities for each other. Some commodities had attributes which made them good currencies - they were…
If that's why gold has value, then $1290 an ounce seems quite pricey for fillings!
In a moment of some depression, reflecting back on sinking so much money into Bitcoin at close to the peak of its price history, I made this: http://i.imgur.com/f3tIJwK.png It's important to understand that Bitcoin is dangerous to you, and you need to respect its danger if you decide to buy some. You need to be using a secure cold storage wallet. You need to not trust services like Coinbase to hold onto your coins fo…
Sam is making valid points. But bitcoin's survival is not a function of its price in USD, and its adoption rate is also not a function of its price in USD. If we want to think of bitcoin as a currency, we have to stop thinking of it as a store-of-value/investment asset and start thinking of it as an efficient means of exchange. There is no such thing as "buy pressure" or "sell pressure" in liquid markets (BTCUSD is l…