I hear ya. I do like the support its getting from businesses.

But will they go after bitcoin poker in the US? My state law says it is illegal to play online poker for ANYTHING of value.

The thing I don't like is that Satashi apparently has hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoins. Does he really? Is that ok?

Thinking about the positives accepting bitcoin can bring to a business, how would bitcoin benefit say a grocery store?

State law doesn't change. They might go after it. Not sure how.

Why does this bother you? And he likely does have a ton. Oh no, someone who created one of the most innovative things in the modern world is going to benefit from it. No one knows who he is, he may never spend them! He may not even be one person. He may not even have access to them anymore!

Grocery stores deal in cash and CCs almost exclusively. They have to deal with cash, which is subject to losses, having to manage it, deposit it, etc... This is costly. CCs they have to deal with fees. All of these issues go away with Bitcoin. No chargebacks as well.

I mostly agree.

Anyone know how to profit from this without too much counter-party risk? (I know how to profit from the >$5000 part, lol.)

I'm a bitcoin bull and I wonder about this myself.

bitcoin is 'programmable money', 'distributed trust', low fee, public ledger, proof of ownership or identity, algorithmic (as opposed to fiat). All of those things are super awesome and clearly have a lot of value IMO.

At the same time I don't see how bitcoin can become a store of value without backing. If it isn't a store of value then it is not very useful as currency.

I wonder if the bitcoin protocol and network will be used without bitcoin being a currency?

USD is not backed by anything, do you believe it has stable value?

All those things don't give intrinsic value

Sigh, this is so wrong.

Tom: You clearly believe Bitcoins have intrinsic value. But tell me why technology can't come up with a better alternative to Bitcoins in the near future? Bitcoins value isn't just intrinsic value (which is 0) but also has competition from future technology. Clearly there are many examples of where something once innovative turned to stone once other people got involved but Bitcoins is enjoying the advantage of being so miniscule that people with real money don't care.

lol instrinsic valueaments.

maybe "value" comes from the market (ie supply and demand).

is there any reason a btc can't be worth $100k in the future? Is there an upper limit? My guess is if it goes to 8 decimal points, even at $10,000,000 then .00000001 is still 10 cents.

just seems impractical to need to resort to so many decimal points.

Bitcoin is already so far ahead with exchanges,merchant acceptance and consumers using it. Anything a new alt coin does that's better bitcoin can just cherry pick it and add it to the protocol.

Your understanding of "intrinsic value" in our technological world is flawed. In reality nothing has intrinsic value, it has only utility value.

Take for example domain names. According to you domain names have zero intrinsic value and just because they will face competition from emerging technologies in the future(yes they will), they should be worthless. Well... Sex.com was sold for $13 million in 2010.

If USD has intrinsic value, then surely BTC does as well because I can swap my BTC for USD

You keep saying it but never can answer why USD has intrinsic value. I guess you could use them to wipe their ass.

It could come up with something better. However, due to the network effect, it would have to be enormously better and Bitcoin would have to not evolve during the time it takes to overtake it.

Microtransactions would make it really useful to pay in even fractions of a penny.

That was a good post, not sure anyone answered it. Seems like a pretty big part of the problem to solve in order to make it viable.

I think I'm about as BTC neutral as can be, I think some of you might be a bit too bias one way or the other. I'm also fairly novice which I think allows my perspective to speak for the masses when it comes to finance:

BTC isn't a currency to me. I'm actually nervous to own it because of the wild swings. The closest thing I've ever seen to it has been the dotcom bubble, where essentially everyone at the water cooler was hyping everyone to own some tech stock to get rich quick. That was effectively why most people were buying those shares at the time.

I don't doubt that a lot of people use BTC for the core reasons it was created, and that those reasons could be sound. But that's not why most people are mining them or buying/selling them. And that has to count for something.

Also someone mentioned that the intrinsic value of a BTC lies in the programming, and I do buy that. Building it and having it adopted first has value, as does the limited supply. But something in my gut tells me that if a skilled powerful company could step in and do two things:

-build a better one that they control (I'm thinking backed by a guy like Steve Wynn or someone similar). Solve problems other coins have, either by making them more stable or somehow backing them with value

-start to hoard BTC

Anyway my 2 cents.

My prediction is $20-50 range by Jan 1, 2017, but it could very well see $2000 first. And I'm certainly not rooting to be right.

LOL @ building a copy of Bitcoin but making it centralized. That's like inventing a version of email that instead prints it out and sends it to a physical mailbox.

What is intrinsic value?
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/money.../06/01/261028/

Seeing how bitcoin is not a company or business I don't think the term applies. Bitcoin has incredibly little "intrinsic value" It's mostly in the proof of work in being the first commercial application to solve the byzantine generals problem.

Most tech companies have very little "intrinsic value." It's one of the reasons Warren Buffet avoids tech stocks. He has no way of valuing them because their "intrinsic value" is almost nothing - its just some servers, code and human capital(ie facebook, google, twitter). All their value is tied to the fact that they have millions of users. Same for bitcoin.

Can we stop bickering over "intrinsic value" now?

I definitely see the value of bitcoin for sellers/merchants, but I'm not sure I understand why bitcoin is so great for consumers.

I'm pretty new to this space, though, so I'd love to hear from bitcoin enthusiasts about why my thinking might be off here. I'm sure many of these concerns have been mentioned already, so I apologize in advance for repeating.

Why is your average consumer going to buy something with bitcoins rather than with a credit card? It seems to me like a credit card offers a huge advantage with protection. If your credit card gets stolen, you get your money back. If your bitcoins get stolen, you are SOL.

Similarly, if you buy something fraudulent or otherwise have problems with a seller, the credit card company can help you out. As far as I can tell, you get no protection with bitcoins.

With that in mind, I think an average, non tech-savvy consumer is going to need a really compelling and straightforward reason to pay with bitcoins instead of credit cards.

One often cited reason is the fees. But buyers very rarely pay processing fees directly. The fees are almost always paid by the seller. Sure, the seller is likely passing on the fee to the buyer in the form of a higher price, but that's spread out to all buyers, regardless of payment choice. If sellers started offering a different price for payment with bitcoins, that could change things, but they have that option now and basically nobody uses it.

Person to person transferring is a possible use, but there are already plenty of services that do this for no/little fees in developed countries (paypal/BOA).

What other benefits does bitcoin provide to buyers?

It just seems to me that there's not enough value on the buyer side. Much of the benefit of bitcoin on the seller side is that it removes the middle men -- banks and credit companies -- from the equation. But from the consumer's point of view, those middle men provide important protective value.

Finally, I think there are concerns about what happens during a crisis. Governments have the flexibility to alter the money supply, manipulate interest rates, etc. Who's in charge at bitcoin?

It's a super cool technology, but I'm skeptical of it becoming a dominant currency. My guess is that it will be a niche for now, and the technology will eventually be copied by financial companies and possibly by governments.

I need it to pay my taxes. (not joking)

For consumers:

1) Ease of use
2) Potential savings (might get a discount for it)
3) Not opening yourself to identity theft
4) Privacy (not having it tracked to your identify if you are making purchases that might be embarrassing, for example)


You are right, someone is not going to pay with Bitcoin over CC, provided they have a CC.

Buyers pay the fees with marked up prices.

You are thinking like me 2 years ago, only thinking about one application in only a single market (well banked customers).

You can use those middlemen with Bitcoin if you so choose in the future. However, there are a huge number of times where they aren't needed.

Bitcoin will be useful in solving trust applications where it has traditionally been very expensive.

That gives it utility, not backing.

Here's a related article on bitcoin's value from an economist:

http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthw...t-bitcoin.html

>$10,000 stable around March-April 2015.

I may not be using the correct language. I apologize.

I'm talking about things that give a currency a stable value - not backing as in commodity backed or something like that.

I'm pretty sure that currencies in the past have effectively been 'backed' by taxation. For example, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hut_tax

The government has a lot of control over the supply and demand for $USD. Part of their goal is to make it stable and they have a lot of tools to work with. For example, making $USD legal tender.

bitcoin's supply is algorithmic. It can't be manipulated but it also can't be artificially stabilized.

bitcoin demand is currently highly volatile and while I'm not convinced that stability is impossible I'm not convinced that it is possible either. Mostly I'm just at a loss in thinking of any possible mechanism for it to become acceptably stable so that it could function as a store of value.