This is absolute gold coming from someone that bases all his arguments as if the premise of "fiat bad" was an indisputable fact.

This is my point. TS refuses to traverse the falsifiable realm. That means every statement he says is non-scientific. Its pure fud, and can only ever be fud.

So he can make predictions and even if they are wrong, he is still right? See we have problem here. He'll continue to do this, and there is no way for him to be wrong.

Sort of. I think we have many naysayers that have made predictions that bitcoin won't ever be worth X, and that in year Y it will be worth less than Z, etc. Many people have been proven wrong, and you can perfectly make such statements that are not falsifiable.

So I guess you do agree tho that TS has made no falsifiable claims?

And I disagree that he doesn't have access to reasonably objectively provable conclusions. He alludes that banks will never use the system, so if banks start to use the tech then that would disprove it. If bitcoin starts to settle large scale real world transactions this could disprove a falsifiable claim if TS were to make something concrete with value and time.

It's pure tactic to center one's argument around unfalsifiable claims, thats why science and academics rejects and is uninterested with people that do so. I think if someone is going to constantly assert others are irrational and cloud a subject with assertions of their own opinion and the reject of experts then they should have to put up a falsifiable claim.

At least one.

It's quite common knowledge that the purpose of central banking is to provide inflation. It's "good" because it incentives spending. It's bad because it destroys savings. It's also argued by many many economist that the practice is responsible four repeated financial crises.

But I didn't put it up as an unfounded premise, I gave multiple well respected economic philosophers lifes works and studies on the history of our economies as the backing for the statement.

Do you disagree with Hayek's thesis? Or do you disagree Hayek is reputable? Or do you disagree that central banked money is destructive was his these?

Papers have been put out that show (in theory obviously) that the system runs fine that this time simply based on the transaction fees.

No, I'm living in a world where I'm trying to have a discussion on a topic with someone who doesn't understand the subject matter, and thus talks about "the experts" and claim they all agree with his absurd notions
Sorry man, but this is straight out of the nutjob playbook. Szabo's ideas about gold for example are NOT mainstream and they're contrary to expert opinion. We can debate them, and I find them interesting and am even slightly sympathetic to them, but your claim that Szabo is an "expert" on gold and thus his views on money are correct and bitcoin will win are ****ing comical, to say the least, if not downright sad. The reason you don't lay out the arguments yourself (instead calling the argument "founded") is because the intelligent traders in BFI would see them for the fraud they are.
It's you who's denying the experts. The Austrians - who comprise most of the bitcoin commentators and people you quote - have been strongly disproven. The same tired arguments were used for gold and silver at the height of the bubble this century; we saw how that turned out.

The mainstream view is that gold is valuable because it's rare and in demand for secondary uses/traits, and that its use as money has piggybacked off that. I quoted an example above, but basically:

1. It has a unique and extremely pleasing sun-like shine that can't be counterfeited even today, and certainly couldn't be 100 or 2000 years ago:
This quality alone makes it highly valuable for ornamentation, and it is a secondary quality that has nothing to do with money and provides a constant strong bid for what is a rare element. And that's just the start, it has many more unique and highly valuable qualities that have nothing to do with money and everything to do with jewlery and ornamentation:
So here we have a highly pleasing to look at, incorruptible, untarnishable metal that is highly ductile and malleable, the best of all the metals, where a small amount can be used to plate/cover a dome, or trim plates, or ornament anything really, with its beautiful and unique shine (compare with brass, for example), thus justifying a high price since the value it provides is high and unique. Its shine is also greatly enjoyed in jewelry. Around 2/3 or newly mined gold becomes jewelry or is used in industry.

Against all of these facts, we have Szabo claiming that gold became money because it has the properties needed of money, and that it could have ****-colored and dull if a ****-colored and dull rock had the properties of money. I call that a halfwit's argument, and contend that it was gold's many properties providing extensive secondary desirabilities that kept its value. If you want to debate it, let's do it, but retreating into the corner, rocking back and forth and screaming "the greatest economic experts in the world (Szabo, you claim, lmao) agree with me, it's a founded argument"! is pathetic and sad. Why are you so afraid to engage on actual arguments? Do you sense, deep down, that Szabo's argument is bull**** and unconvincing to rational people?
Your claim that it's a founded argument about the source of value of gold, for example, is high comedy and discredits you completely. Your quoting of Szabo on this topic - and claiming he's the world's greatest economic philosopher - makes you a joke, frankly.

You've quoted the opinions Szabo and a couple of hardcore Austrians. I suggest reading more widely; at this point this is basically a religion for you; you have no doubt about Bitcoin's future value. You have your godhead (Szabo), your bible (bitcoin related writings), and the holy ghost (bitcoin), and it's all tied up for you in one big confused blob.
On the contrary, I think most here find it good and simple question and your inability to provide any answer, damning to your credibility.

You've stawmanned me. Will you allow us to steelman my argument? Szabo didn't give his conclusion based on thin air. He traversed the other great economists of the past and pulled out the reason and rationality of their arguments that are based on empirical evidence. I don't want to argue with you about Szabo in a vacuum, because that would mean cutting out the foundation of his argument that is based on the observed history we have.

So will you allow us to debate in regard to mises, rotherbard, and hayek etc.?

To be clear this is what Szabo did, he didn't just make a baseless conjecture, he made sure it was backed by our historical observations and well understood classical theory.

So which philosophies of economics do you accept? I need to know this to have a basis for discussion. Or do you reject them all?

Also will you give any falsifiable claims, or do you refuse?

Noose: If in my example he was right and BTC did drop to 4000 in that timeframe would that mean the market is a bubble? No, of course not.

He's trying to make a long term prediction about the market, and other things. You're asking for a verifiable claim. The only claims which are verifiable would need to be short term which would make them pretty meaningless to his overall point.

Can you think of any falsifiable claims which we could verify in the short term which would prove that crypto is a long term bubble?

I understand. But he's reduced me to pointing out that his argument cannot be considered scientific. You are simply agreeing with me.

It makes the debate useless because he's reduced it to something that can never resolved. I didn't really come here to debate "yes it will versus no it wont"

You are just reiterating the same point. We should want to discuss more factually based content. That would be the reasonable thing to do. And we should want to base it on what experts in the given fields are saying (based on academic studies and empirical results) rather than the contrasting arguments to the experts and the rejection of expert opinions.

Contrarian argument:

Quote the story of facebook/instagram/whatsapp or anything that takes off crazy without revenue.
Like everywhere in life, there will be winners and losers. At some point in the future, somebody will be the facebook bag holder. Those who make it, we call geniuses, those who don't are "scams". Bitcoin gets 100k+ new users (?) every day.

Madoff/Enron turned out to be an obvious scam. But easy to say after. Yes, you can be spectical of everything that shoots up this fast, but it's not an argument in itself that it must be a Ponzi.

In an alternate universe, it does not even matter that Madoff was a Ponzi. Imagine some black swan event happened and investors lost their money (instead losing it through being scamed).

It's more than that. These people and arguments I'm reference have been studying these phenomenon of crashes and times of boom and bust for many many years. And they've meticulously waded through the arguments of different (often contrasting) philosophies. They are able to offer a NEW explanations based on observations that were not historically possible. These new explanations offer reasonable points for why some historical arguments were wrong and why others were right.

Once this is well understood in relation to past (and a past we can explore further than ever before as our understanding of it grows) one can (or a small group) extrapolate a solution.

Once you can provide a solution that would end the booms and busts you can then reverse engineer it. Once you have the general design you can translate it into a working algorithm. Once you have a working algorithm you can translate it into a programming language.

Then you have a falsifiable conjecture along with a blind peer reviewed academic paper.

You see there are new experts on economics and its not toothsayer, and toothsayer is in direct contrast to the expert and the empirically observable truth.

Toothsayer has just been functioning on the premise that there is no founded argument that backs up with bitcoin is not a pyramid. An easy mistake to make.

What I am most interested in doing, is presenting that argument. To show, not why bitcoin isn't a pyramid, but that a small group of persons built a new understanding of economics over the last 20 years, and eventually used it to extrapolate a programmable solution.

I can't falsify toothsayers claim....but I can verify that claim there. (and that those people know WAY more about our history of economics and economic theory than TS)

Facebook/instagram/whatsapp provide a service for which they sell the watching eyeballs to advertisers. That's the entire basis of all of these companies.
No, not at all...it's just a counter to Nooseknot's crazy argument that Bitcoin has unquestioned legitimacy because of who discusses it, how much it is in the media, its market cap, or who's worked on it. It's another kind of weird appeal to authority that is easily skewered by referencing greater ponzis and frauds that had all of those qualities and in greater quantities than bitcoin - yet were in fact ponzis and frauds. The claim that bitcoin has "unquestioned" legitimacy and is beyond questioning is just another nail in his credibility coffin.
I'm all on board with you there. I think bitcoin is deeply flaky/doomed to fail, yet I was strongly recommending a buy at $250. I don't hate bitcoin, I think it's an awesome idea on many levels, and I'm not averse to risk. I am averse to nutty reasons and logic.

What date, can you give a reasonable timeframe, or is just "anytime in the future forever"?

And what is your definition of failure? What will the price do? Will it go down substantially or stay high or stable? If it will go down in your opinion, then whats your ballpark estimate for the price in the given timeframe?

Gold!

DIGITAL gold: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html

shotty mod

adddblockrs (funny, 2p2 blcked that word as *****) and new messengers could kill the business. Many things that can go wrong.
Bitcoin enables black market, possibly store of value, and anything we want it to imagine. It's our personal jesus . Seriously though, those use cases are not ironed out, and just like AI, deep learning, machine learning and all the buzzwords, "Blockchain" will save the world. It's an advantage when people can believe what they want. Eventually the day of truth will come when rubber hits the road, but we're far from there and the potential is big. How big, again, that's up to anybody imagination. Trying to value this thing is crucial. And depending what you compare it up against you can value it anywhere from 250 up to 100k/coin.

I find him interesting, those appeals are funny lol, especially the frequency, but he can defend himself.

I view this multi-dimensional, which is what made it the most interesting topic to me in the last years. Economics, philosophy, (mass)psychology, cryptography, Bitcoin is everything for everybody and you learn many things, question status quo, make you dream, fantasize etc.

It has a religious/political movement dimension, that's why you see some type of vocabulary. You can call the early Christians crazy, but hey, they helped bootstrapped one of the worlds most successful operating system and got eternal life in return .
It's easy to mock religious nut jobs, and dismiss the whole thing. But discussion this aspect makes less sense, it ends in "i feel" and "i believe" which is not useful for a discussion.

So let's talk about new daily users or find some valuation model. That's more discussable.



You can find those nuts everywhere. Yes, less frequent in Math clubs, but you'll find other types of nut jobs there. I like the guily by association type of thought process. It's often very accurate, but the outliers are most profitable if you detect them. For me poker was one of them, everybody calling it a scam, etc.
Bitcoin hits the nail as well and it's no surprise that it finds a nice breeding ground in a poker community especially when our American friends have a real world use case.

Disagree about doomed to fail, but when i say the dollar is doomed to fail, i will eventually be right. So it's more interesting to talk numbers or years.

Why do people buy crypto tokens?

A/ for profit
B/ not for profit

For the people arguing the inflation argument and that bitcoin will be a second gold:


So we will have another mediocre protection against inflation? Great.

https://www.fool.com/investing/mutua...he-sp-500.aspx

AND WE ALREADY HAVE GOLD!! And on top of that like 70% of gold is used for legitimate purposes, so you got a solid base to provide a bottom value, you won't have that with bitcoin.

It would be outrageously stupid to expect bitcoin to outpace equities in the long run

I'm playing devils advocate.

The argument is not that BTC will outpace equities in the long run. So in a way you are presenting a straw man.

The argument is that BTC is a better version of gold and if it were to replace gold either full or partially, the value of 1 bitcoin would be anywhere between 25k - 200k/coin.

After that level is reached, it will no longer have this fast growth.

I'm not good at understanding graphs. What is the left side? %? Usd$? I think we have argued now that gold wasn't considered a good universal inflation hedge which I have felt this is commonly accepted.

Is it not true that gold has historically been considered a safe haven store of value?

I think we need to consider the international views. A citizen of a country of a hyperinflating currency probably can't rely on their stock markets as a safeheaven.

I'm not strong in my understanding here...

Lol where to start. You first say that the argument is not that BTC will outpace equities, then you say it can go to $200k (which means a 28 bagger, seems like outperformance to me?).

Then you argue it is a better version of gold, why exactly? Vast majority of gold is used for jewelry, some is used for electronics, and then some for governments to manipulate their currency (that is why India and China own so much of it).

How can something be a 'better gold'. The attraction of gold is that most gold has legitimate usage, so there is a nice floor in price. Bitcoin does not have that. Bitcoin cannot be used in electronics or jewelry.

It is amusing though, it seems most bitcoin bulls have already sort of abandoned the whole 'bitcoin will replace fiat' thing. Now it is 'bitcoin is the new gold'. Even though we already have gold. And most of gold's value is backed by legit use and by governments buying it to drive down their currency.

You know what comes after gold? SILVER! you know what the market cap of silver is? Only tens of billions, less than the current bitcoin market cap.

This question is answered in this brilliant video, where someone describes the feature of the final bitcoins never being found, which perpetually forces miners to keep trying to mine it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GH6p3WE3v8Q

If you don't have time to watch the full video, which I highly recommend, the specific part in question is described at the 5:37 timestamp mark.

Guys you realize that bitcoin forked over a month ago? And there's now Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Cash? Bitcoin Core is the gold type, with high fees. Bitcoin Cash is the cash type, with low fees and faster transactions, but it is not worth as much.

The sum of the aggregate of all forks will be ~800k. Bitcoin is the sum of all forks.

The Segwit2x fork coming is not the same as the previous fork, because there is no replay protection on it. Therefore it cannot coexist with the Bitcoin Core chain. Likely, only one of them will survive this fork.

Bitcoin is fracturing because that's what happens to revolutions when they're successful