Bitcoin is accepted as payment for many types of things. Go ahead and login to your online poker room and see for yourself. What exactly is it being used as when you send 1 BTC to Bovada and they credit your account with $5000 USD? Doesn't sound like it's being used for speculation in that case.

Yes BTC is also used for speculation, but it 100% is also used as money.

It's actually the preferred method of money from poker sites.

Myspace.

Social media is bigger then ever.

Crypto will continue to get bigger also. Bitcoin has been around 10 years and has been the leader in the pack. Will another crypto overtake it? Maybe, maybe not. I don't have reason to believe so considering it takes a lot to achieve what it has. It has a massive ecosystem of people and adoption that gives it it's value.


It would be similar to saying "myspace" if someone today said Amazon will continue to expand.

The most important thing I learned in college came from the new college president who was doing a series of "Chats" at various venues around campus. It was kind of an accident that my friends and I even went, but it turned out quite well. The whole discussion was on "If Present Trends Continue".



"The only present trend that is sure to continue, is that present trends never continue."

I swear 2+2 gets dumber every time I come back to see what's up. See ya. I'll stop back in when BTC hits 10k

Is there a lazier argument against BTC than this one?

I've posted this video before but at least try a little to understand what makes BTC valuable.

Hint: it's not fast or cheap payments.

I was commenting on Bitcoin. I was commenting on the idiocy of this statement.

BTC has been around ~10 years and has basically no utility outside of a couple blackmarket transactions and a ton of wash trading.

Android and iOS have been around about 1 year longer than BTC and have, let's call it "sgnificantly" larger influence on real world interactions.

10 years is enough time that you and I and my parents should be using whatever the product is in our day to day lives. I'm sure you'll say that you do, but nearly every place (of the handful) that "accepts bitcoin" actually uses a 3rd party that immediately converts it to real money since no suppliers accept it and most everyone else ignores it.

I meant I wasn't commenting on Bitcoin.

A lot of people and companies will accept BTC in exchange for $5k but that doesn’t mean it should be considered currency. A lot of people and companies will also give you $5k for your car, house or stock in a company but that isn’t a reason to call any of them currency.

Just because some people think BTC is currency doesn’t mean it is currency no matter how much you think it does.

You do realize that 10 years ago, somebody pushed some (highly revolutionary) code into the world and that it was literally used by just 2 people in the first week of it's existence. It had a value of $0 for roughly the first 1,5 year. It slowly but steadily kept growing and growing and right now each coin is worth more than $5k+ (!). It's absolutely mindblowing that people think this growth is insignificant. I would argue on the contrary. The growth of this open source software project is staggering. You have thousands of people voluntarily contributing to it in one way or another (developing, educating, starting businesses etc.). These numbers are growing daily.

Bitcoin is an absolute red pill. Once you grasp it, there's no going back. In essence it gave people an opportunity to create a free market for money again. We're here in the BFI section, so I assume most people are pro free markets. Somehow when it comes to money, people dislike the idea of a free market for it. Well, Bitcoin is the ultimate free market for money, it's completely opt-in as opposed to the current fiat system. It's completely voluntary. Don't want to join? Fine, be my guest. But you do take on the risk of Bitcoin winning in this free market for money, and that could end up being costly. But it's every person his own choice.

I am really happy Bitcoin gives me the opportunity to opt-out from the fiat system with a % of my NW. I am also intrigued by the depth of Bitcoin. There's so much to learn, there are so many challenges. It's intellectually extremely stimulating. And I am seriously happy to be able to live in a period where there's a possible monetization event of a digital, decentralized currency. These type of opportunities won't happen very often.

That's not a good thing man. It'll forever be an useless niche unless they make it a lot more user friendly. For example, why do you think apple has been so successful? Everything they design is so simple a monkey could use it.

I am eager to learn about most financial aspect of life.. but not bitcoin. If you have to use any energy into understanding it, the average person will NEVER bother with it.

Let s not pretend using bitcoin as a basic user is complicated, you can find 10 wallets on android and ios that take less time to setup than a paypal account.
It require to instal the app, write down 12 words to be able to recreate your wallet from scratch, that s it. after that it's not more complicated than sending an email or giving your email adress to someone else.
If you want to secure yourself a large ammount of money ofc you should read about it and most likely spend 100$ for a hardware wallet which wont be hard to use either.
Obviously the lightning network on the other hand is nowhere ready for the public to use without custodial wallets but bitcoin or most other cryptocurrency have decent UI for years.

I don't see a path for BTC to really take a significant amount of fiat's market share until the price stabilizes. My grandma is on a fixed income and can't afford to lose 15% of her monthly pension + SS checks because the value of her money went down. Neither can my neighbors who work their tails off, but have 3 kids and very little in the way of a cushion.

This people aren't alone. In fact, they are the majority - most people can't afford to risk a significant loss of their safe money.

So what is going to change BTC where it stops fluctuating so much?

Do you think people that invest in stocks/bonds/commodities/real estate should invest in a small % of that into crypto?

They could, but I'm not sure I'd say they should.

With your question I think we are starting to get off the topic of if crypto is a currency.

So much misunderstanding. This is a monetization event in the early stages. This is the early phase of price discovery, price fluctuations are inherent. Supply is well known (21M), demand is still tiny and can fluctuate a lot, this is ofc very volatile. With that said, volatility has tremendously reduced last couple years.

If people can't tolerate the volatility or don't have enough savings to tolerate the volatility then that's their good right. But the people who can tolerate the volatility during the monetization phase could be rewarded heavily. But some people will be later to adopt than others, that's how the world works.

You could reach ultimate stability if everybody adops at the same time. If equillibrium is instantly found. If you notice the resistance BTC gets, then everybody adopting at the same time is a pipedream. Not only for BTC, it's unrealistic for everything that ever existed.

Your neighbors and grandma will not be early adopters, but other people will have others tresholds and reasons for buying BTC, and every time this happens BTC takes a % of fiat's market share. While at the same time making it less volatile. At some point volatility has been reduced enough for your neighbors to step in if they want to.

Hey all. It has been awhile.

Craig Wright seems like a smart guy, but I think he is a conman. He seems bitter about things in his life and has a constant need to feel important and noticed as a sophisticated, intelligent, wealthy man. I don't think he is Satoshi by a long shot. I'd be very surprised if he was.

As far as Bitcoin goes, what do people think will happen considering Bitcoin is deflationary? History shows us that deflation is not a pretty sight.

Deflation of a currency is bad for its economy. Bitcoin isn't a currency for an economy, its just a digital gold.

Deflation is in this sense just another way of saying the supply of money is capped.

Why do you think having a capped money supply is bad? So you want it to be inflated. Who gets to inflate it? Why is losing a % of your purchasing power each year while they inflate it a good thing for you? Why is this all better than just letting a free market for money run it's course?

I do agree though, in the short term, there will be a lot of pain when you stop stimulating the economy. The economy is/has been heavily stimulated by central banks for a while now. They want to prevent the economy from slowing down. You can compare this to a drugaddict going for another hit. As long as you can keep it up everything seems allright, but if you want to try and get healthy there'll be a moment when you need to get through the pain in order to be healthy again. Deflation isn't the problem here, the unnatural inflation of money supply combined with misallocation of capital because of it is the problem.

Also:

I like to reason from personal incentives. I think incentives are extremely important in designing systems.

If you can choose between holding a currency which will be inflated 2-3% a year or on the other hand a currency which will slightly rise in value each year. I know what I'd choose. And I think I also know which one could easily win in a purely free market for money. The money which is reducing my net worth each year would really need to bring something extra to the table for me personallly to convince me to hold it.

I'm not saying I like inflation, but it may be a necessary evil. Considering the early 1930s seemed to have deflation in the double digits creating a depression because of the hoarder mentality, "why spend today when it will be worth more tomorrow."

I guess what I'm really trying to get at is the hoarder mentality. If everyone is buying bitcoin, at what point does it stabilize and people start using it as currency?

I've been dabbling into economics lately and it seems that the argument for inflation is that it incentivizes people to spend money. The thing is, thinking about things from a poor person's perspective they probably don't even think about inflation at all since most poor people don't have savings. From a rich person's perspective they probably are already investing that money anyway. This reasoning doesn't make much sense to me. Perhaps keeping inflation at 2% is a safety net to preventing it to getting too low to the point of deflation which will create a hoarder mentality.

Some of the inflation numbers from the past look pretty terrible. 1917-1920 in particular. Also 1979 to 1981. Yuck. Double digits.

If you grandma put her SS checks into BTC 5 years ago, she'd be a multimillionaire.

Wikileaks has already outed him, he's full of sht.

Oh hey trolls and trollettes. Good to see you're all still getting excited over every little nuance. Meanwhile, unwriter on twitter and others are building the entire future, on chain. We'll see you when you catch up. All the best!

https://twitter.com/CVPITVLIST/statu...50551558680578