You wouldn't react this way if you weren't emotionally invested in your viewpoint, reflexively lashing out as you imagine your treasured views are under attack. Anyone who isn't emotionally invested in a "side" the way you are can see Augie is calmly raising valid points and is not attached to a side.

predictable troll is predictable

I’m not emotional. I rationally do not appreciate pointless straw man derails in every crypto thread. His only point is that crypto is volatile and may be in a bubble. This is the most obvious observation and has been pointed out over and over.

I would honestly appreciate logical constructive arguments.

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perhaps you are confused on what i meant, and your examples of things that are unstable are very weird. i don't mean as a technology it's unstable.

your example of bitcoin's current success and usefulness is providing payment services for the underground economy. these transactions would be blocked by banks and are illegal. the government would like to stop them if they could and also arrest the people making the transactions if they could.

i think it's a safe assumption that the government will not endlessly tolerate a network providing financial services to the underground economy. they can't just turn off bitcoin, but they can take lots of disruptive actions, like the tax i mentioned earlier coupled with onerous regulation of exchanges.

the government doesn't need to tax bitcoin to kill it, though, just regulate it and construct an apparatus to remove all anonymity. taxing it would kill it faster. but if the government has full view of the blockchain the way they have full view of the banking system, eventually it's utility as an underground payments system will cease to exist as it's patrons find themselves arrested.

being in the crosshairs of the US government is a textbook definition of an unstable future. bitcoin needs a better use for the future.

stuff about digital gold is a laugh. that's what you say when you've run out of ideas. it's annoying to me too because gold is actually used in industry and jewelry. bitcoin needs a USE.

i happen to think that blockchain technology will be useful in the future. bitcoin's problem is that it's only useful to the banks. nobody else cares. it's about processing payments. the banks will just use their own crypto currency to settle between each other. they will need the price to be stable, there will be no speculators.

i'm sure there will be other clever uses for the technology. again, this won't correlate with a bunch of speculators getting rich. the reason everything is a "coin" is because every coin outside of BTC is just an opportunistic business trying to make a buck by printing their own bucks. american capitalism jumping the shark. businesses in the currency printing business. amazing.


Can you please give me one example of this?


not at all, sorry. do you really think i'd have such well reasoned arguments if it's just a bunch of sour grapes?

i've been using bitcoin consistently since around the $1600 level to cash out from ACR. i change it to USD as fast as i can because it's annoying to lose 10% just from price fluctuation. i've never considered it an investment, and still don't, because when the bottom drops out it will be a bloodbath!

there are no chances for high rewards without another guy eating the corresponding crap sandwich. it's not like investing in a company that actually creates new wealth by creating something new that people want. it's financial hot potato, don't be the last guy holding the coin.

you must have missed my post that many of the bitcoin zealots are actually unconsciously espousing an anti-american, anti-capitalism, and open borders ideology. i think i'm on to something with that theory and i shall continue to cultivate it.

but please, i do beg your forgiveness for posting about bitcoin in the bitcoin forum.

Thanks for the laugh

You should probably read what you write before you hit submit. You quoted most of my posts except the part you didn’t quote you’re trying to tell me what I mean by saying something completely differerent. Then you make a whole bunch of assumptions. This is just garbage logic and a waste of time. Once again, if you aren’t going to make a logical point please leave. I don’t care how bitcoin makes you feel. This thread isn’t about your feelings towards crypto.

There's a politics subforum for this.

k, sorry i was unable to express what "unstable" meant. sorry. my bad, i'll do better next time.


yea, no, i think i'm getting it. the depth of discussion a bitcoin zealot can handle is around this level:

"coin X has really increased in value, great project, great potential."

"coin Y is down 80% from ATH, crap project obviously"

take one step beyond that ******ed threshold and then you get some platitudes about how blockchain technology is going to change the world.

ok, i'll go along with that, i just need someone to explain how coin X or Y, made by profit-seeking companies, can compete with coin Z, identical in every way, but made in the future by central banks.

I’m done arguing with you. No matter what I say you’re going to ignore the points I make and throw up more walls of text that say next to nothing. Your just responding with more straw men. I’m not arguing cryptos may be in a bubble. Clearly many of the alt coins will go to zero and even bitcoin has the possibility to go to zero but the technology is here to stay and whatever coins come out on top will be worth a fortune. If you don’t understand this you need to do more research.

Ripple is in actual use by over 75 established banks worldwide so in that regard it is far ahead of other ICOs. Because it is a useful technology and it is in use I doubt the XRP price would ever stay below $.20 for very long. It is hard to know what the upside price in 2018 would be for any of these ICO coins since there little history to go by, but XRP is one the more solid coins. JMO

i understand the theory. what i don't understand is why the technology won't simply be usurped by the federal reserve system and the government.

if all of the banks agreed to start using $GOV, fed sets the price and controls the supply, how exactly is some profit-seeking corporation or loose affiliation of devs working on an open source project going to compete with that?

if blockchain technology is as paradigm-shifting as the optimists say, it seems inevitable to me the coin to come out on top will be $GOV. how could it happen any other way? money is not exactly a new concept. i think the onus is on the zealots to explain how the government is going to relinquish control of currency. i think they would throw the entire weight of the government behind maintaining that control if they had to.

The federal reserve of the USA isn’t even controlled by the govt. It is in part but the banks control most of the power of the fed directly.

Anything created and controlled by the govt isn’t decentralized and is an entirely different product to most crypto. If you want to see a crypto currency that is more centralized look at ripple. I’m not an expert on ripple but it was created for the banks and it’s my understanding that it is centralized. It is a very fast and efficient product.

The govt isn’t some all knowing entity that always works in the best interest to make the govt more powerful. What’s the motivation of politicians to ban crypto?

It is my theory that any country that bans a powerful economic tool like crypto could pay a high price.

Banning crypto and forcing it to the black market is just another way to make organized crime more powerful.

Im not saying they absolutely won’t ban crypto. I’m saying it’s an obviously bad move and there isn’t a whole lot of motive for the average politician. If they did ban bitcoin the market would surely suffer.

It’s also worth considering crypto could be banned in many countries and take over the entire economy of other countries. Once again you can’t just look at the success of crypto in a vacuum of the USA’s economy.

Central banks, retail banks, clearing houses will likely tokenize and yes they won't be using a public chain for that. They'll do it in their own time for commercial / practical reasons. Same as they would adopt faster servers, upgrade SWIFT or whatever. Nothing changes with that though, its business as usual and is largely the future you are envisaging.

What you are underappreciating though is that for the first time, there exists a competitor to the traditional financial system in cryptocurrency. Whichever small number of trusted public chains like bitcoin survive represent that competition. That competition is not going to die. This coin is held by the ground-level, unwashed, hoi polloi. Because it is their own currency, is equally or more secure, more transparent, as fast or faster and cross-border it will have a user base.

Where the profitable altcoins come in is providing edge case features within that model. For example, by providing price stability. Or improved speed / throughput. Or improved UX. Or faster to market. X and Y don't compete directly with $GOV. X and Y provide a specific service to the user base.

my overall point is that if using ripple is vastly superior to their current system, which i'm sure it is, the banks will just take ripple's technology and not use ripple's coin. why exactly would they use XRP? ripple is completely open source, yes?


i don't think they will ban it. i think they will regulate it and the regulations will significantly weaken it and eventually it will die off. i think the government has an interest in having as much visibility over financial transactions as possible. if they can simply identify and track everyone using the bitcoin network they could use it as a tool.

the trend in modern society is more and more government control and overreach, not less. i can't comment on how good or bad our current situation is but the way things are going is obvious.


i agree with that, which is why i think they will harshly regulate instead of passing criminal laws. if you're using bitcoin for financial services for your drug or human trafficking operation it doesn't really matter if the US licensed exchanges are banned as long as there's still a strong international market. like we've seen with online poker, there will always be someone to help you carry out your shady transactions.

i suppose this is true. i don't really consider them a competitor because i think there are some things you can't compete against the government with.

i think there are a few government functions which are essential and which the government would be unwise to relinquish control of. currency being one.

the military would be another. what would happen if you announced you were creating an alternative military: gathering 20 million able bodied men and then arming them with technology superior to the US army. if that really happened in a serious way, the government would snuff it out before it got started.


don't really disagree with this. i think that's a different vision than a lot of the bitcoin zealots have. i think the existence is possible for a long time with a solid community of actual users. i think all of the speculation is hurting the future of bitcoin in a big way because the government will be compelled to act if bitcoin's volatility causes significant economic consequences for enough people.

For sure. For auditability - to be able to control the bad actors and collect taxes.

Protecting people from themselves when it comes to speculation and scams is just business as usual for the authorities imo. It's not a fundamentally hard problem to regulate exchanges, just taking a few years start to finish because it is a new asset class.

Bad things. There is currently a grey area whereby developers claim distance from the projects they code. This could be an important regulatory battleground in the next couple of years. Governments don't want to stifle innovation, yet when a crypto coin feature undermines their auditability requirement it is imo akin to the example of starting a private army as it threatens the governments raison d'etre.

Just want to say that for ripple to have a value of ~$2.00 it would have to have a cap of ~$100MM... Which is basically the same as BTC and ETH's combined cap as of right now.

did i just read bitcoin as a technology?! lol after that i was done reading it.

for ripple to be $1/$2 in the short term is insane and imo not even possible.
There are a few things that will have impact and are good for the price.
55B ripples are in escrow for client usage, so actual active supply is now around 38bish.

Given time and overall market cap increase, yes ripple can become $1 or $2 in the long run.

I kind of think of Ripple as that safer index fund(alt-coin version) that I can just plop some $ into and not check it knowing that I'm in it for the long-run.
You're not going to get rich with ripple in the very-short term but you're also not going to wake up and see it off 90% of its previous day's value.
That said, it's still one of my favorite alts and I'm kicking myself for being so nitty on my purchases sub .20 (sucks having to own Bitcoin or ETH or LTC and then sell those for something like Ripple )

People think market cap is important. It's irrelevant; it's a measure of total circulation X current price, not a measure of currently invested fiat to date.
So people buying up tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, etc and storing long term have bought for pittance, say 500,000 XRP for $0.006 as the price was not so log ago, $3,000 dollars investment. That same 500,000 is worth $125,000 at today's (ish) price of $0.25, but only if cashed in. Therefore actual invested market cap remains at $3,000 until it's sold again, at the new value of $0.25. So that's a 'current cap' of $125,000 that looks way over inflated considering the actually invested dollars.

Consider exponential wastage of XRP as use hikes, consider locked up/cold stored XRP, consider transactional bridge-currency use of XRP for over $5 trillion market cap daily forex trades per day (2016 average), consider extension into international liquidity/speed/cost reductions, consider bank adoption rates, consider retail liquidity of XRP (currently basically non-existent on the adoption curve where retail use goes), consider new technology uses, consider escrow storage by Ripple Labs, consider bitcoins terrible real-world pitfalls, consider bank hoarding of XRP and consider increased trade demand on ever increasing crypto exchanges, and all of a sudden theoretical market caps of $1-5 trillion are absolutely feasible.

Remember, just because 100,000,000,000 in 'supply' doesn't equate to 100,000,000,000 daily trade volumes or equal fiat investment mapping.
The reality is that for trading purposes, which largely drives price currently in a low adoption market, we only see daily trade volumes of a few hundred million dollars on market cap of ~$10,000,000,000....

People are stupidly using linear mathematics to limit the price predictions without taking a fuller viewpoint.

I don't necessarily believe XRP will surpass BTC or even ETH for single unit price, but prices well above $1.00 are possible. I mean blimey, it's already been at nearly half that before....people selling big XRP stacks short at $1.00 will regret it in years to come. Bear in mind that a current international transfer costs $35+ and takes three days... compare that to XRP and it's like comparing hobbling on crutches with flight in an Iron Man suit.

My opinion, and it's only exactly that (opinion) is that XRP could hit a value of between $20-50 relatively easily within two years, given adoption rate by the financial institutions of XRP and Ripple platform.

At the bottom end, this could mean a x80-fold price increase for today's investors.

Did you just make that up as you went along?

Market cap is market cap is market cap.

According to you, AAPL market cap might only be $200B because that's all that's been put into it.