What shows how superficial these articles are is that almost all of these articles (and most of the mainstream media articles) single out BTC, (which is less than 50% of total crypto market capitalization) without going into specifics of the given coin (like discussion of cons and pros of on-chain scalability solution vs. second layer scalability solutions, POW, POS, small/big block sizes etc...)
I think it would be a bit more interesting to speak about the price of a continously rebalanced, market-cap weighted index of the top 10 coins or something for mainstream purposes. This would prevent these articles focusing too much on the current state of BTC (which they cannot really focus on anyway without going much deeper), zoom out a bit more, and put the focus more on the possibilities in the whole evolving cryptocurrency space, which would be more interesting for a mainstream audience (they just don't know, because everybody tells them bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin).
The the second argument is made, it is a "storage" medium, like gold/silver, etc...
At least you could argue that gold/platinium/silver have some intrinsic industrial value, but bitcoin?
My portfolio contains other coins from the top ten so I hedge it with other solutions for scaling, but BTC's share in my portfolio is close to its share in the crypto market cap (a bit less, admittedly).
After all how much of money's value is due to the fact that it has a decent BTU value per weight in a furnace?
Most money is as purely a "digital fiction" as bitcoin is these days.
At some point, on some societies, things like rare sea shells, or big stones, were used as currency, but they didn't survive times for a good reason: No real use in real life.
Same with bitcoin, unless it starts having real use in real life, it wont survive. People buy it because they expect it will go up. It is like the Kim Kardashian of currencies, popular just because it is popular. But once that expectation is broken (i.e. of bitcoin always rising in value), than the downspiral starts.
And here's more or less the same article from 2013 when price was $84: https://whistlinginthewind.org/2013/04/12/the-bitcoin-bubble...
"So what now for bitcoin? It will crash and disappear like Pets.com, Leheman Brothers and Anglo Irish Bank, existing only in the memories of economists."
"There have been some slight recoveries which have given hope to bitcoinites. They cling to the hope that this is only a correction and that bitcoin will bounce back stronger than ever. They fail to realise that all crashes include a slight recovery followed by another crash."
I'm not saying the author is necessarily wrong, just highlighting the fact that no one knows what the hell they're talking about or what's going to happen.
With Pets.com or Leheman Brothers, there was a corporate structure that could stop existing. It could go bankrupt, the C-executives could be arrested, something could happen beyond which it'd be fair to say it was over.
With Bitcoin, you could have all of the exchanges go defunct, you could have 99% of the miners close up shop, and as long as a few people kept the blockchain going, a few years later it could be back, the same as before.
The question is this : for those people, assuming or not that they can coordinate, what is the optimal strategy? I'm thinking something like draw regularly, in order to build a war chest to "defend" the cryptocurrency against too violent crashes, such sustaining the confidence of the public. In a way controlling and fine tuning the influx of external money coming in from fools wanting in on the pyramid effect.
Is it realistic to think such strategy could be feasible, and if so, for how much time those people could/would want to sustain it?
1. Buy bitcoins or release media PR to pump price
2. Buy future shorts
3. Sell a large enough order to trigger margin calls and stop losses
4. Profit twice from your BTC sale, and short sale
5. If you believe the price will return, buy back in cheaper
than you sold due to other panic sellersAny currency that a:
1. strong entity circulates and
2. wants back
is fundamentally valuable.
> American dollars have value because the US Government taxes things, like land, and if you do not pay those taxes they will send you mean letters (trust me) before resorting to other means (trust Al Capone). You pay these taxes in US dollars. You just having dollars does not make them valuable. And dollars are not valuable because they are backed by gold or silver or sea shells. What makes dollars valuable is that the government wants them back.
https://hackernoon.com/the-guns-of-bitcoin-1f779309a718
Ways to destroy the US dollar value: Destroy the US tax collecting power, or have the US ask for taxes in a different currency. If the US started collecting taxes in Euros, the value of the US dollar would disappear instantly.
The US is a strong entity and has no incentive to ruin the value of the dollar. It will not start collecting taxes in Euros. Or Bitcoin. Why would it give all that power away? More likely is that Bitcoin gets made illegal or very difficult to use. At the end of the day, if you have US-protected assets, you will have to pay US dollars to the US gov and this will continue to give USD value.
Bitcoin has no such strong-entity backing, so it has no fundamental value. Bitcoin people are obsessed with the idea that mere possession is important. It's not. Ask people with loads of marks or Zimbabwe dollars.
See also the false equivalency to gold:
If you understand the computer science behind Bitcoin, you'll realize how ridiculous the false equivalency to gold is.
1. The claim of "rare" doesn't exactly hold true.
Consider the 10,000 BTC pizza - how did this happen? This was the direct result of Satoshi's economic policy, granting vast sums of BTC to mint out very quickly very early for a short duration to the very small pool of people who ran the software. Satoshi's algorithm produced BTC in plentiful quantities enabling the 10,000BTC pizza - thus it wasn't rare if you were Satoshi and the dozen other early whales hording as much as possible, until the algorithm begins cutting off the production and limiting later users from producing coins, starving the economy. Now there's a psychological game being played, where public relations and marketing must convince new users to buy in. Because the exchanges are unregulated, they can manipulate the spot price though wash trading and painting the tape [2] (where trades are falsified and you just sell the same item back and forth to your friend for a higher and higher price).
The supply was created by running a piece of software. It's not magic. Most of the supply was produced very early on and as much as 30% of all Bitcoins are owned by less than 100 people.
Best estimates are that there are about one million
holders of Bitcoin; 47 individuals hold about 30 percent,
another 900 hold a further 20 percent, the next 10,000
about 25% and another million about 20%, with 5% being
lost. So 1/10th of one percent represent about half the
holdings of Bitcoin and 1 percent close to 80 percent
(http://www.businessinsider.com/927-people-own-half-
of-the-bitcoins-2013-12). The concentration of Litecoin
ownership is similar
(http://litecoin-rich-list.blogspot.com).
Most of the big wallets have been in place from early on,
so sitting back and watching your capital grow has been a
very successful strategy.
The distribution of Bitcoin holdings looks much like the
distribution of wealth in North Korea and makes the
China’s and even the US’ wealth distribution look like
that of a workers’ paradise
3. Bitcoin network requires ASIC miners, largely centralized in China [3]. Assuming the inveitable surpassing of a more advanced cryptosytem making Bitcoin obsolete, as the market is informed there will be a decline in BTC's spot price and once this falls below the cost of OPEX for miners, the hardware goes offline and the network will cease to function. Maximalists will attempt to offer an emergency fork, in any attempt to save their "investment", just as they have developed the lightening network to create centeralized payment hubs, so "investors" can act as liquidity providors and take fees, instead of miners.
4. Electricty usage is unsustainable, GOTO 3
[1] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/86/is-it-possibl...
http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-inequality-2014-1
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r04gfWfRkE
[3] https://qz.com/1055126/photos-china-has-one-of-worlds-larges...
You end up having a balanced ratio of assets according to the relative ratios of those percentages and the current value of each asset, and it will be balanced at a rate according to the total percentage you're trading on (10% means it'd be averaged over 10 time-periods).
There is more formal analysis of this by people around optimal portfolio theory, math about how to balance your portfolio among a variety of assets to choose a risk level analytically, but this is the rule of thumb version AFAIK.
Or just print fake money and call it "USD" on your exchange.
Recently Sony sold them to Magix from Germany. Unfortunately the software is lagging behind, basically stayed for decades in low maintenance mode, and Magix software is known to be a cobbled together buggy mess. Their other own video software Video Deluxe is still 32bit buggy unstable piece that relies on decade old dlls and can't be installed on up to date Windows 7/8/10 without deactivating security functions, changing registry settings by hand and renaming the Windows cert folder. Nowadays the open source Audacity is a great alternative to SoundForge, and Premiere/etc are better alternatives to Vegas/VideoDeluxe.
He does bring up some great points regarding transaction throughput and the team productivity.
It seems like lightning network is the tool to get a lot of cheap, fast transactions done via bitcoin and turn it into a really useful viable currency.
However, that has taken a long time just to get to test mode. Much of the fate of bitcoin is tied to that github repository and pull requests. There has never been another open source software project with this much money riding on it. Can this team continue to deliver value?
There are other concerns like deflationary spirals, volatility, etc., but my bet on bitcoin is largely a bet on the dev team and whether or not useful pull requests get created & merged and what that velocity is.
Me too. Ahh the good old days. We'd be coding and day trading back and forth all day. Take turns watching for the Boss to come towards our area, so we could all hide the trading window and get back to coding.
My co-worker dev lost 3K on PETS.COM's stock in 1 day.
I'd gotten in on 100 shares of AMZN Apr 2000 at $57-ish, ate a loss of about 30$ / share in Oct 2000, sold at $28-ish. All I have left now is war stories ...ending very badly lol. The rush of trading on volatility makes it 'not a complete loss' tho.
When I talk to them now, I said why'd you ask for a stock tip if you weren't willing to follow through?
Sadly, I put my money into my own startup. Got about 15-20x return on my investment. You live and learn :-)
For the last 3 years, there has been a bitcoin civil war about how to scale bitcoin, as people have warned that the problems we are seeing now would happen.
And unfortunately for bitcoin, the side that wanted high transaction fees, and wanted to prevent all scaling won the war.
And now we are seeing those problems come home to roost, as segwit (which was marketed as an immediate fix) adoption has been minimal, and the mythical lightning network and layer 2 or 3 solutions that the core development team promises will that will solve everything is perpetually 2 years away from completion.
Things are going exactly as people had predicted.
Those of us who are fed up with these problems have moved on to other coins, such as Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash.
You also don't have to explain the altoins or pump them - most people here know what they are.
These types of comments might work well on reddit but they don't really add anything for the audience here.
What do you use those for? In the article above the author mentions you were able to pay for dinner, for various bits and pieces in BTC - even for pizzas, as we all know.
You can't do that with ETH, BCH, or any altcoin, and you can't use BTC for it any more either.
So why move on to other coins?
If you ask Stripe, they'll tell you that these restrictions are there because of the requirements of Stripe's partners. And that is exactly the problem.
If we are heading towards a cashless society (and we are), then we need an electronic payment system that does not consult the Bible before deciding whether to allow your payment or not.
or the HRC either, for that matter.
You can indeed pay for things with bitcoin cash, and as soon at bitpay adds it to their platform (Which they are working on and will do so very soon), the merchant adoption rate will actually be higher than the bitcoin adoption rate.
And all of this was done in only a couple months.
That's pretty much how USD wires work. It's markedly worse if going outside the border.
Even at these fees, on friction, fees, and settlement time, Bitcoin still compares favorably.
And for what purpose? Speculation? Day trading?
I really don't care about the wealthly wall street day traders who are throwing around hundreds of thousands of dollars. That "use case" is boring. "investment" is boring.
What I care about is the average person.
Bitcoin was originally supposed to be a peer to peer electronic cash system. As in, you buy things with it. It was not supposed to be a new wall steet.
Fundamentally, Bitcoin needs some form of off-chain transaction. It is just not feasible to record every transaction in a permanent public ledger (let alone one that needs to be synced quickly enough to allow for ~10 minute block times)
If on the other hand someone was to launder money ;) then still the fee is tooo large to launder petty cash (pay 55 dirty to get 5 clean). An efficient money laundering rate is anything north of 50% (100 dirty --> 50-70 clean).
I have paid this months bills and rent, I have budgeted some money for groceries and fun, I have put 10% of my pay check in my pension fund.
Something is very wrong if you feel conflicted when you’ve invested money or spent money to get by because you missed out on your money being worth more.
Bitcoin as a currency does not make sense from a macroeconomic point of view. Whats the incentive of spending something of a fixed resource?
Maybe I'm old fashioned but I prefer monetary policy to be decided by a small cabal of professionals.
I agree its a quite blunt instrument, things like mortgages for houses doesn't really tend to grow the economy.
But its a hard problem, personally I would like to see some tinkering with helicopter drops
It would be silly to ship in paper every 2 years so people could trade "cash" while working at the methane harvesters and excavators.
Just keep that price constant and we can finally move forward.
Bitcoin isn't the only alternative to cash.
If things do come to pass and a significant carbon mass is shifted off Sol-3 (human population), then currencies will fluctuate since that is what drives steady value. This value will fluctuate as bitcoin is now doing "if" the abundance of rare-earths is transmitted back to the Origin planet.
I'll say it again: "if".
Either that or I've been reading too much sci fi. Not sure which. Xenu knows!! :D :D
LOL
That's enough roller coaster for me. I'm out for good.
Here are my issues with Bitcoin:
1. Transaction times are insane, 30-45 minutes at peak hours. Bitcoin blockchain can only handle ~10TPS. 2. Fees, upwards of $30 / transaction a few weeks ago. This makes it not practical for any real purchasing or as a currency.
Both of those issues are solved by IOTA and the tangle, so that's where my money is going. I want to invest in a currency that has real world usability. Bitcoin doesn't have that at current scale.
IOTA uses the coordinator as a security measure right now (against 34% attacks) and will be removed once the coin is distributed enough to diminish probability of attacks. So saying it is not decentralized isn't honest. Without the coordinator it is decentralized.
Point two is also refuted once the coordinator is gone.