I didn't say that's what a socialist is, I said a modern socialist operating within the existing framework is very strongly "concerned with ethical trading, ethical buying" at the very least.


I actually believe "create wealth" is nonsensical gibberish at its core, but much of that belief is probably outside the scope of this thread.

As for scheme/gold rush/etc, I posted this a little while ago:


p.s. We're probably agreeing at many points in the grand scheme of things, I'm just coming from the camp of, "Look, capitalism is like 98% bull****, we're all adults, we can admit that, and bitcoin is far less bull**** than most of it."

No I'm not. Bitcoin is currently the quintessential application of blockchain. It will continue to evolve and has a good chance to stay on top.

Ok easy to misinterpret what you wrote. I can see what you're saying now.




No offense meant, but I reckon this is because you don't understand the fundamentals of business.

You're both wrong, which is surprising because TIT owns a business. There's a big difference between speculation on future utility of a technology and actually providing goods and services (which create wealth). When you invest in a company you are buying a slice of it because you are confident in its business models ability to generate wealth. You are hence a partial owner of all its assets and a partial debtor to all its liabilities. That is very different from speculation on an emerging technology. Bitcoin has no business model, and it cannot generate revenues. It has no balance sheet. If you want to make money off blockchain technology, invest in a company that is using it to create business solutions.

Yes, you are. Bitcoin is created via blockchain technology. It is a proof of concept. The value of blockchain does not give value to bitcoin.

Maybe, but it's more like I'm talking about some philosophical semantic stuff, which is why I said it's not really part of this thread.


The goods and services are the bitcoins themselves and everything that led to their existence. Low-value goods and services, maybe.

I added a p.s. btw.

You seem to be implying there are as many rejecting bitcoin (after adopting it) as there are adopting bitcoin. Do you have a citation for that?

Merchant acceptance of bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency, is at an all-time low, according to a new report from JPMorgan

This confusion over what bitcoin actually is probably drives 95% of discussion about it. It's created like a currency, but it acts like a commodity, yet it cannot be used to create new things, and it's a poor store of value. I think a lot of the confusion comes from conflating bitcoin with the blockchain tech that creates it. While blockchain is certainly a useful, innovative, and valuable emerging technology, bitcoin itself serves almost no purpose. Bitcoin proved blockchain tech is valuable, because it works. The real development and growth built upon blockchain tech in years to come will be interesting to see. Bitcoin will always be seen as the proof of concept, and people may even hold it and trade it for sentimental value.

Hmmm well we probably do agree on a lot of things, but I don't agree capitalism (if you mean private ownership) is BS. I do think unrestricted and unregulated capitalism is almost as bad as communism though.

Yeah I have a bunch of ETH too. But funny thing, BTC is a pretty reliable leading indicator for ETH prices. Wonder why that is?

I like Gemini a lot for BTC and Ether

https://archive.is/vsZQ0

Said it better than I ever could in a hundred years.

Are you short BTC DODN?

Why spend your life investigating something you hate and have no financial interest in? Doesn't seem very fun.

all I'm doing is singing that song in my head, for the past two days, u guys know the one.

bitcoin is worth 10k......how do I buy some?

It seems pretty foolish to short something on an unregulated exchange.

I don't hate bitcoin or blockchain. I actually think blockchain is pretty cool, and I'll probably invest in chain.com or ripple if/when they go public. What I do hate is hubris.

EDIT: If y'all wanna know what REALLY to invest in, it will be things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bK6wHW1K9jM Bitcoin won't last. No one is going to spend billions of dollars to acquire a tool when they can just make their own with all the proprietary bells and whistles for basically free.

lol

[edit: Laughing was at previous poster's claim to hate hubris, which was edited out.]

That writer is likely long Bitcoin, so it doesn't really support your position.

RA HAaa HAaa raaa haaaa ha ra ha ha whoaaaa whoaewewewwhoa whoa!

ra ha ha ra ha ha ra ha ha, whoa whoa whoa

Read the response. The one by the actual economist, SirBastian. Dietzman has since deleted that idiotic post and his associated reddit account for being owned so badly.

Is it safe to give my personal info to CoinBase? Why do they need the last 4 of my ssn?

100k users signed up Thanksgiving weekend. I'm pretty sure of those 100k that wanted to deposit and successfully did gave their last 4 digits up.

U gonna get raped bro

Tax purposes and identity verification most likely. I believe CoinBase is an American based exchange.

Basically, I was responding to someone saying "transaction fees are measured in bitcoins man, not USD" with "you're wrong". If your disagreement was that USD should be replaced with another currency, or just "fiat currencies" in general, in both of our posts - I'm fine with that.

Barro: Finally I want to ask you about bitcoin. Does the run-up in bitcoin prices make any sense to you?

Krugman: No.

Barro: What's going on here?

Krugman: Bitcoin ... nobody understands it. Which is, for the time being, a positive.

Barro: A positive for the prices?

Krugman: It's got this mystique about it because it's the some fancy technological thing that nobody really understands. There has been no demonstration yet that it actually is helpful in conducting economic transactions. There's no anchor for its value.

Unlike pieces of paper with dead presidents on them, those are anchored by the fact that you can use them to pay taxes. There's no anchor for bitcoin, but bitcoin has developed this mystique. Probably the price going on partly this tied up with libertarian stuff. I'm told that there are apocalyptic "the end is coming" guys who are accumulating bitcoin, because once we turn into a "Mad Max" wasteland, having a digitally distributed ... never mind.

I think it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And the psychology of it is clearly ... I mean, if you're using the shoeshine-boy test, or "My barber asked me about bitcoin." The feeling that people are caught up in something that they really don't understand, is overwhelming.

Barro: So you think this is an obvious bubble?

Krugman: This is even more obvious, I think, than the housing bubble was, and that one was, I thought, tremendously obvious.

Barro: Sometimes a bubble can be obvious and yet can persist for a long time. And in fact, I've been saying that Canadian housing is in a bubble for years, and it keeps going up. So the nice thing about calling a bubble is that if it doesn't burst you can always say, "Well, it's just going to burst later." I guess the question is how long can something like this go on with bitcoin?

Krugman: The thing about bitcoin is there isn't actually a whole lot of stuff. In a way, the fact that it's completely untethered to anything real means that it doesn't fall until ... It can just hang there in mid-air for a long long time. It's not like housing prices. If housing prices are unrealistic, the more housing gets built, and you can see it. With bitcoin, the cost of producing new bitcoins has gone crazy high, so that's not going to happen. We're waiting for a Wiley Coyote moment. Cartoon physics. He runs off the edge of a cliff and it's only when he looks down and realizes there's nothing under him that he goes Pchew! So we're waiting for that sort of thing to happen, and that can go on for a long time.

A bubble is a natural Ponzi scheme; that's how Bob Schiller puts it. That as long as it's going on, everybody that bought in keeps making money, and it looks good. In the end, somebody's going to be left holding the bag. Everybody assumes it's not going to be them.

You made some of those points just as well ITT already.

The weird thing though is that much of it was not controversial for bitcoin bulls to say at the beginning of the year. Maybe I just followed non-insane bulls.

A more interesting contrast is a reply to that reply:

I'm kind of in the same boat as you. I know I don't understand everything, but what I do understand makes me bullish. Will Bitcoin collapse? Perhaps. We shall see. I think it is here to stay. Only time will tell.

I'd like to throw this out there. In the TV show Breaking Bad, Will would have benefitted greatly by using Bitcoin to transfer his meth money to his family.

@aggo
I think of transaction fees in terms of dollars not Bitcoin. Sorry, but we all do this and we know it. At the end of the day the dollar is what we use to buy our groceries, pay our bills, and purchase our things. If you want to get down to the heart of it, we are really talking about the CPI. Bitcoin is too volatile in order to think of it like that for now. In the future though... things could change.

Ya I agree with a lot of that. The thing is, bitcoin is often misconstrued as the thing that blockchain (and the internet) certainly is-->a foundational technology. Bitcoin isn't that, it's just the thing that the bitcoin blockchain creates. It's highly odd because people believe in blockchain, but they're perhaps wrongly investing in bitcoin as if its the only possibility for blockchain. That would be akin to investing in Netscape because it revolutionized web browsing, thinking it could never be improved/proprietized/innovated on etc. In other words, bitcoin is a single use application of a foundational technology. In my opinion, it's a poor one.

I have absolutely no doubt that blockchain will eventually become the foundation of some and perhaps all of the global financial system. But governments aren't going anywhere. Neither are central banks. Neither is monetary policy. Bitcoin is though. It's going into the history books as the proof of concept for blockchain tech. The only value it will retain in the long run is sentimental, which is why I don't invest in it. It's too risky.

Good link from Harvard Business Review that gets into more depth than I'm capable of: https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-truth-about-blockchain