I also see that no one read/cares about the many other uses for cryptos. File storage, venture capital, advertising, and eBay style markets to name the ones I listed. This is just the beginning, and I feel bad for people who lump all crytpos in with Bitcoin and just scream "bubble lol" or think it's only gambing, drugs, and money laundering.

Clearly the mining guilds that hold just less than 50% could hold just more than 50%. The fact they voluntarily choose not to at this point is by the way.

Im talking about the replacement of bitcoin with a government authorized cryptocyrrency of their own. You know, make an amendment to the current currency legislation that bitcoin is not legal tender but Americoin is. Have its value totally linked to the value of the USD. Boom. Readily convertible with all the supposed benefits of bitcoin. Who's gonna use bitcoin then?

A government coin won't be:

- capped with a known future supply

- decentralised

- anonymous

Basically the three pillars of Bitcoin.

Isn't investing in say Siacoin or one of the others essentially investing in a startup with a solid business plan?

I can see how this can be profitable just like investing in Amazon or Google early, but how would you differentiate between a profitable business operating via an ICO/coins and Bitcoin/Ether which just act as a currency? One has a fundamental value and the other is based purely on supply and demand?

The difference is both Internet and Blockchains enable more to be done than before or more efficiently, but you can't buy a piece of the internet, where as you can buy a Litecoin or Ether.

How many bitcoin are a. totally inactive b. irretrievably lost? Gotta be in the millions already. Not only that even if you could account for all the coins in the software, a 'known future supply' is not GOOD for a currency.

A select group of people have control of the source code, and they and the few major mining pools have all control over the decisions. The major bagholders can crash the price at any time by flooding the market with cheap coins. How is that not centralized? Bitcoin started out decentralized with no internal power structures, but it ended up an oligarchy, like any other human socio-political structure without regulation. Similar oligopolies happen in pretty much any sector of human involvement you can name, with horrible consequences sometimes, which is why governments stepped in and regulated the banking and securities industry.

Bitcoin isn't anonymous. It can be tracked pretty easily unless the user uses perfect opsec (which is extremely difficult). It's pseudonymous. This is the reason truly 'anonymous' currency like Monero is used on darknet markets as or more often than bitcoin.

Name ONE legitimate use of bitcoin that is worth acquiring one for $2600 other than 'the value is going to go up.' If you can't do that, then how do you actually put a real value on it beyond what might happen one day? If it doesn't have real value right now, then it's a bubble of speculation.

Bitcoin is like a biotech company valued at x that's stock price goes up whenever it releases reports about how its future products are going to take over medicine, without actually having any products to sell yet. It doesn't really matter how many people believe in it. Without real world value, it's all hype.

A government can easily destroy a lot of those cryptocurrencies.

I see an estimate here of $400 million. It is probably much less. Since they could just hire a company and set up a factory to build it for much less. A lot of the current mining rigs are over priced due to supply demand imbalance.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/com...tcoin_network/

So like $2-300 million to seriously destabilize bitcoin. Governments much smaller than the US or China have wasted more money on less.

Now think what happens if the US were to use bitcoin. Even if it costs several billion $ to do a 51% attack, Russia would easily pay for that. The moment it becomes too big, it won't be decentralized anymore. Russia would easily pay a billion $ each year to buy mining rigs to destabilize these currencies if they gain a lot geopolitically.

But it won't become big. So yeah.

You pretty much need to acquire btc as a vehicle for buying altcoins. So there's that. It's almost a funding currency in that sense. Not to mention my favorite betting sites all accept Bitcoin but not my debit card or bank account. Also, you can actually spend them pretty much anywhere with a minimal amount of legwork. Bitcoin is used to buy gift cards to Amazon, Walmart, or pretty much anywhere else. You can use it to buy gold and silver. So there are many reasons other than pure speculation.

All of those things you mentioned are easier and more efficiently done with cash. I have no problems depositing money on betting sites with my bank account or CC. Once my ID is verified it's MUCH easier than acquiring bitcoin, which is a totally unnecessary middle step.

I've never bought altcoin but i fail to see the advantage of using real money to buy fake money to buy other fake money.

lol

a) it is not only a currency

b) do you enjoy either, 1. having your hard earned cash inflated away, or 2. searching far and wide for an adequete yield to keep up with inflation?

Why do you think the value of all the gold in the world is 7.8 trillion? Because it is used in jewelry and some electronics?

You literally cannot use certain cards on betting websites. The bank policy for at least some is that they don't accept them. Also, it's way easier and better to get paid out 10k+ in btc than to your bank for various reasons.

And you clearly don't know what you're talking about. Right now, quite a few coin exchanges don't accept USD, but they accept btc which is then traded for other coins.

No one really cares if you agree or not, though. Bitcoin is a 40 billion dollar market. That's reality. Is it a bubble? You and I aren't smart enough to know for sure. That's what makes a market though. Feel free to short it and maybe I'll buy some more and let's see what happens.

And yeah, the whole "we need the ability or threat of printing until the currency loses purchasing power" is Keynsian nonsense on par with "spending moar money, regardless of ability to repay, interest rate, etc. helps the economy grow."

Deflation is a boogeyman and should in fact be welcomed by the masses. Why do you think central banks/big bankers constantly dump paper gold on the market and suppress the price? With crypto, that option isn't really available since even if btc fails, hundreds of other cryptos are waiting.

this is patently false. toothsayer was shown to misunderstand the fundamentals of cryptocurrency and protocols (e.g. internet) in general in the bitcoin thread for 6 months or so before he gave up and left. he declined to make a bet for 10k that i proposed after he stated that bitcoin was going to $0 without an ETF. the ETF never happened and it went 3x from where toothsayer predicted it would fall.

he's a poser who doesn't understand cryptocurrency.

I don't think you understand the basics here. If there is inflow of $100 million in a cryptocurrency, but only 5% of the holders are selling because most are hoarding, that inflates the marketcap by 20x.

An extreme example to show this, Let's say only 1 bitcoin is available for sale, and everyone else is hoarding, and someone wants $100,000 worth of bitcoin, that would mean the market cap is $2 trillion. But actual value is much much lower as more people wake up and try to sell at a $100,000 a coin.

Current value of crypto's is vastly inflated due to insane amount of hoarders, and a lot of demand flowing in currently from daytrading Asian housewives (the definition of dumb money).

Also your argument that you need bitcoins to buy other coins is basically akin to saying, you need bitcoin to buy into the scam so that is why it is valuable. Even if crypto becomes big (and it won't), 99.9% of these alt coins will fail and most are blatant scams.

Yes. like 70% of use of gold is jewelry and electronics. And only 30-40% of jewerly retail value is gold, so not used as store of value. Also it is safe, no government can spend a few billion $ and seriously destabilize it. And even as store of value, it lasts forever, unlike crypto's.

lol wat?

In one sentence you prove my point (govt cant destabilise crypto) and then claim crypto is perishable.

I'd love to hear why you believe Bitcoin won't 'last forever'...

You're literally describing how every asset on earth is valued. People 'hoard' stocks, currency, real estate.

Because mining rewards go down rapidly. So unless a ton of people are using it for transactions (allowing miners to cover costs from protecting the network), security will be low.

https://learncryptography.com/cryptocurrency/51-attack

Government CAN destabilize crypto. Here:
You forget that governments dont think in terms of ROI. They would easily blow several billion on this. They could probably do an 80% attack rather easily. This only happens if a major country would use it.

Those are income generating assets. Generally people buy currency to buy income generating assets. With income generating assets you look at the price you are paying for it. Generally people don't look at what price they pay for a crypto currency. Because there is no earnings yield.

For example if I want to buy some drugs on a darknet marketplace, I don't look at price of a crypto coin, I would just place a market order. Because I will exchange it soon for product anyway. This is the same for regular currency, except with regular currency people do not sit on 90% of the currency hoping to flip it off for more later. The vast majority of regular currency is used to buy income generating assets or make transactions. That is why they are much more stable than crypto's. There is not a huge wall of potential selling speculators that could crater it's value.

The market for illegal remittance is very large. This is both a pro and con. Can you launder money for terrorism or a drug cartel? Sure. Can you send your friend $20? Sure.

The governments of the world almost uniformly think both are "bad" and are illegal. It just depends how hard it is to stop (very) and how much they want to stop it (a lot).

You're not addressing the point. All assets are valued by the price the next willing buyer is willing to pay. Also gold has no income and a lot of Western real-estate is negatively geared.

I think you are missing my point here. Also commodities generally trade around the marginal cost of production. Gold's marginal cost of production is $1300. People don't just buy commodities at any price.


And even if real estate is negatively geared, it could be sold to someone else who has less leverage to generate income. They will generally look at how much cash flow that asset can generate to determine how much they are willing to pay. So that puts an upper limit on valuation.

And I didn't say this is not true for normal currencies as well. If you go to a foreign country, you do not look at valuation first before buying. You just try to buy at or near the exchange rate. But then you actual use it to buy assets, or for legitimate use. And normal currencies are not 80-90% hoarded like crypto's.

The vast majority of peopel currently hold crypto's to hope that some other sucker will buy it for more before it inevitably collapses. This gives it a much bigger market cap than how much actual fiat money has flowed into crypto's.

I'm going to give you a basic economics lesson: Steady, small inflation is good for a currency because it incentivizes spending, investment, and economic growth. Deflationary 'currency' like bitcoin incentivizes hoarding. Which is exactly what we see in practice.

I meant to ask, why don't they? Why don't most big governments come down on it now?

Ye so this is what creates the bubbles. A lot of price-insensitive holders, who will hold for any prize. They do not increase their exposure in case of a severe drop, or decrease incase of severe prize increases.

However the relationship between supply and prize isn't linear?
In your example, if 1 bitcoin is available, it could be true that smart money thinks it's worth 50K. (Expectation of future utility) And they would buy up all when prize drops below 50K. It could also be true that they think it's worth 5$. So prize could drop to 5$ overnight. So you can't say that 95% holders drives up marktet cap 20x. It could drive it up much more than that, or less. With btc we know prize can never drop below the $ needed for current usecases. (illegal market and some other stuff) Anything above that it depends on what the big players think about future value of use cases and value of store-of-value which is more subjective.

I would be interested to know total fiat money that went into crypto. Also if anyone knows any academic work where they did simulations on the effects of prize when varied % of prize-sensitive and prize-insensitive are in the system.

You are familiar with the concept of Expected Value right
Current crypto prizes display a high probability of small scale usage + a low probability of wide-spread usage, with the second part driving most of the prize

Something can be 95%+ to fail, and still be a sick good investment