wachtwoord

Exactly how I feel about fiat currency. But then extend the (far larger) group of smart people with a whole bunch of stupid and mediocre ones.

I can call the shit I took in the morning 'gold cash' but that's not going to make gold reproducible is it? ;)

Your lack of understanding is causing you to think it's fragile While it's actually anti-fragile (and has proven to be so over the years). I advice you to either increase your knowledge or choose to let this opportunity to pass you by. If you choose the former start by understanding that whether something is physical is not relevant. What is relevant is whether something is scarce, ownable, divisable, durable, non-reproducable, etc. The funny thing it's better able to do that than the best known physical store of value (gold).

Emphasis on paper as he holds a huge percentage of the float.

Regarding inflation: there is a pre determined max for Bitcoin (not all of them) so there is no inflation in total supply. There is some inflation in what portion is free floating already (the release of new tokens exponentially decreases to zero).

The whole trust network thing? They killed that before even launching Ripple. And it's all possible with lightning on the Bitcoin network.

Ripple sells a private block-chain that is used for very quick money transfers. Apparently transfers are just a few seconds to complete vs 10 minutes for bitcoin. Since it is private it has a mammoth advantage with energy efficiency / transaction capacity but you lose out on the robustness of a decentralized currency. If the ledger is centrally controlled, what's the benefit over a conventional database ledger? These are already fast and secure. There is no benefit except to Ripple labs who have managed to make a significant amount of people believe Ripple (XRP) hold any value whatsoever while being in control of over 95% of the float (and the ability to make more). Ripple is not even a crypto but like a government issued currency, only by a company.

@Cardboard I advise you to read the research paper on the previous page (p. 28). Basically store of value is worth at least 2 orders of magnitude more than a payments system. Therefore Bitcoin is likely undervalued where the altcoin space is massively overvalued (Ethereum for instance is valued today 50% above the estimated end state value which could be decades away). Talking about the valuation of the whole crypto space as such is therefore non-productive.

The value in gold was the limited supply. Now with the many other atom types such as the ubiquitous carbon, other metals such as iron and other precious metals such as silver, all present in much larger quantities than gold, does gold still have value? ;) There are and always will be a hard maximum of 21M Bitcoin. No matter how many other cryptos are created and no matter what kind of fancy names they are given.

In case anyone is interested a high quality paper on the economic state and future of the whole crypto space. Very well written and researched: https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/john-pfeffer/An+Investor%27s+Take+on+Cryptoassets+v6.pdf

I understood that he Australian bank requirements for reserves are particularly strict and as such large outflows of money would limit the banks ability to lend and invest and therefore badly hurt the topline. Of course this is no excuse for their malignant behavior but it does explain it.

I don’t know exactly where the anger is coming from, but if you are reading the same discussion I am, you will see the rudeness, name calling, personal attacks, and other school yard immaturity are not coming from the bitcoin bulls here. Also I am starting to see the same thing else where as well. Just a pattern I’ve been noticing and I’m pointing it out. Then they fight you? Or are we still at the mocking stage? ;) I think what I’ve been noticing is the beginnings of the move from mocking to fighting. On the bright side, I was at a Bitcoin ATM with my son last night, it is in the entry of a restaurant, this family walks by us and the little girl of maybe 7 says “hey Dad their buying Bitcoin too”. Sounds cool but I hope you explained to your son not to speak of such things in public. Stay safe.

I don’t know exactly where the anger is coming from, but if you are reading the same discussion I am, you will see the rudeness, name calling, personal attacks, and other school yard immaturity are not coming from the bitcoin bulls here. Also I am starting to see the same thing else where as well. Just a pattern I’ve been noticing and I’m pointing it out. Then they fight you? Or are we still at the mocking stage? ;)

As far as I know, Bitcoin doesn't have the ability to perform smart contracts natively, not without layering a third party on top. You might be thinking of Ethereum. Not natively as that is a security risk but on top of it is very possible. Rootstock is just released I believe (www.rsk.co) and I believe it (or something like it) will likely put huge downward pressure (and eventually kill) the perceived value of ethereum.

Blockchain "technology" is useless without Bitcoin as without the security, decentralization and lack of the need to trust any 3rd party provided by a system in which the tokens have a real world proven value, it's simply an extremely inefficient database.

Edit: I'm going to stop taking the bait and continue to live in my "fantasy" world. Good luck living in yours.

You're welcome. @DeepSouth can you understand you're a masochist from my point of view? Anyway, let's just all vote with our wallets and things will work out at some point :) I honestly don't understand your point of view. I'd say the empirical end result of your policy desires leads to decade long depressions and wild and violent swings in inflation and deflation. It's not masochism to desire an entity with the power to smooth out economic cycles and encourage growth. The federal reserve is one of the few things the US government gets mostly right. If you're terrified of your savings being withered away by low single digit inflation but don't want principal risk for your savings buy TIPS. I own bitcoin because I think the risk/reward is fair from here even though I think most bullish arguments for bitcoin are very stupid. The policy of the last ~120 years led to huge bubbles and (long! 20+ years at times) subsequent recesions while an organic market won't have recesions lasting longer than a few years. I concider loving that ewuivalent with loving pain. On top of that an organic market rewards its participants more fairly in the sense that good decisions lead to financial reward while the current system rewards having the right contacts at the policy maker for the most part. There have been no recessions that lasted 20 years this century, and I just pointed out an example of a decade long depression that occurred in the final decades leading up to the creation of the federal reserve. Per capita real GDP fell 10% over a decade in the US in the latter part of the 1800s. There were massive bubbles before the Federal Reserve (see canals, railroads). These are the facts, you are empirically incorrect, it's not up for debate. Is your persona/feelings so tied up in libertarianism ideology that you are unwilling to use reason and view the world through a historic and empirical prism? Lastly, the idea that most successful people achieved success through inside contacts at the Federal Reserve is a wildly bizarre conspiracy theory that makes no sense. Sept. 3, 1929 until Nov. 23, 1954 is not more than 20 years. Okay, I guess I must suck at math...... https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDPCA Real US GDP more than doubled between 1929 and 1954. What kind of insane garbage are you stuffing your head with? That's how long it took the market to recover. That's not healthy.

You're welcome. @DeepSouth can you understand you're a masochist from my point of view? Anyway, let's just all vote with our wallets and things will work out at some point :) I honestly don't understand your point of view. I'd say the empirical end result of your policy desires leads to decade long depressions and wild and violent swings in inflation and deflation. It's not masochism to desire an entity with the power to smooth out economic cycles and encourage growth. The federal reserve is one of the few things the US government gets mostly right. If you're terrified of your savings being withered away by low single digit inflation but don't want principal risk for your savings buy TIPS. I own bitcoin because I think the risk/reward is fair from here even though I think most bullish arguments for bitcoin are very stupid. The policy of the last ~120 years led to huge bubbles and (long! 20+ years at times) subsequent recesions while an organic market won't have recesions lasting longer than a few years. I concider loving that ewuivalent with loving pain. On top of that an organic market rewards its participants more fairly in the sense that good decisions lead to financial reward while the current system rewards having the right contacts at the policy maker for the most part. There have been no recessions that lasted 20 years this century, and I just pointed out an example of a decade long depression that occurred in the final decades leading up to the creation of the federal reserve. Per capita real GDP fell 10% over a decade in the US in the latter part of the 1800s. There were massive bubbles before the Federal Reserve (see canals, railroads). These are the facts, you are empirically incorrect, it's not up for debate. Is your persona/feelings so tied up in libertarianism ideology that you are unwilling to use reason and view the world through a historic and empirical prism? Lastly, the idea that most successful people achieved success through inside contacts at the Federal Reserve is a wildly bizarre conspiracy theory that makes no sense. Sept. 3, 1929 until Nov. 23, 1954 is not more than 20 years. Okay, I guess I must suck at math......

POW scales very well because the difficulty adapts to the perceived value in the system. This is exactly the intention. Funny how people always want to fix things that aren't broken ...

Don’t disagree with you on the store of value calculation though I’d be curious why you think bitcoin can’t eventually become a currency? Skabo and other have written about how medium of exchanges (bitcoin now or bitcoin when lightening is implemented) can gradually and eventually become a unit of account. Unit of account is in my thinking a bit of a spectrum. http://www.konradsgraf.com/blog1/2013/9/14/bitcoin-as-medium-of-exchange-now-and-unit-of-account-later.html I'm not saying it can't (gold has been a currency for a long time), I was just disregarding it in my previous piece because I doubt it's needed to make the valuation attractive. See it as a hard to value extra margin of safety. Szabo is awesome btw.

The problem with that is that it's much less a currency than it is a store of value comodity such as gold. I don't think your formula applies to such a situation or does it? Replacing gold is the only true target. Perhaps one order of magnitude higher due to the benefits it has over gold. Then apply a probability of that happening and calculate your EV (there is a margin of safety in this calculation as we are disregarding all situations in which it only partially offsets gold). Think the probability is extremely low? Then this is probably a bad bet and vice versa.

You're welcome. @DeepSouth can you understand you're a masochist from my point of view? Anyway, let's just all vote with our wallets and things will work out at some point :) I honestly don't understand your point of view. I'd say the empirical end result of your policy desires leads to decade long depressions and wild and violent swings in inflation and deflation. It's not masochism to desire an entity with the power to smooth out economic cycles and encourage growth. The federal reserve is one of the few things the US government gets mostly right. If you're terrified of your savings being withered away by low single digit inflation but don't want principal risk for your savings buy TIPS. I own bitcoin because I think the risk/reward is fair from here even though I think most bullish arguments for bitcoin are very stupid. The policy of the last ~120 years led to huge bubbles and (long! 20+ years at times) subsequent recesions while an organic market won't have recesions lasting longer than a few years. I concider loving that ewuivalent with loving pain. On top of that an organic market rewards its participants more fairly in the sense that good decisions lead to financial reward while the current system rewards having the right contacts at the policy maker for the most part.

You're welcome. @DeepSouth can you understand you're a masochist from my point of view? Anyway, let's just all vote with our wallets and things will work out at some point :)

Before central banking we had short natural healthy cycles. After central banking we have huge bubbles like 1929 because the market isn't allowed to correct. The US market before 1900 was great. That's when the Brityish injected the central banking poison pill from Europe.

People seizing power and covertly stealing from the general population? The economy is best left untouched by 'policy makers'. They'll only fuck things up like they have shown throughout history. Policy makers are messed up in their own ways but there is a very sound economic rationale behind why fiat is better than bitcoin. No there's not. There is Keynesian dogma and brainwashing which a child understands is bullshit. People never spend their money if it increases in purchasing power? How naive must you be to buy that ... But believe what you wish. This falls under freedom of religion for me. To the people not understanding why it's an improvement over gold I simply refer to this blogpost from 2012 http://moneyandstate.com/bitcoin-libertarian-introduction-used-care/