Topic: $20 before CES (Read 3780 times)

lol...I meant that responsibilities can demand your attention when you would rather be speculating. GF knowing its in her best interests = win, but would you have speculated the same amount before you had met her?

Las Vegas, how appropriate... gamblers and hookers.

Jan 10-13 and yes, still in Las Vegas

I'm not sure I understand your question here, but I'll answer it as if I understood it as if you replaced the words "would have speculated" with "will speculate":
Yes, actually!  I wanted to spend tonight with my gf but I told her I couldn't cause BTC prices are moving too much XD
She knows it's in her best interest too.  :-)

When is CES this year, and is it in Las Vegas?

It wasn't too long and I did read the whole thing.  Thank you so much for that succinct explanation.

I can respect that. Do you think you would have speculated more at present if you didn't have those same responsibilities, however?

You've got the idea right, just reverse which is volatile. That's due to relative growth rates: if the core asset grows at 1% and the economy (and accompanying issued money supply) grows at 5%, there's going to be an increasing separation over time. The asset doesn't change much - the rest of the world does.

In earlier times (generally before industrial revolution & late colonialism), gold was recognized as being valuable, but often spent in exchange for productive goods. Today, it is held as savings mostly because many people now have living standards well above that of subsistence. Gold works better than anything else as a universal store of value.

Gold has experienced periods of rapid inflation, most recent and notably during the California gold rush in the mid-1800s. This would be similar to the present situation with Bitcoin. Since gold's historical inflation rate has been about 1.5% per year, Bitcoin should reach that point in about 8 years - late 2020.

Overall, gold is a measure of price, not something that is priced. Saying that gold is worth X dollars or Y Euros is backward in a practical sense. The fluctuation in gold's existing supply is minute compared to that of other forms of money.

Pricing of goods in terms of gold was not stable. Over time, the supply of gold expanding at only 1.5% was not enough to keep pace with a broader economy's expansion. Prices would begin to decrease, then plummet rapidly. This was a primary reason for other forms of money such as fiat paper (and why metal coins have been debased so often throughout history).

The US dollar today is a derivative of gold; it used to be representative of the metal. Where the US dollar can maintain price stability, it cannot also act as a store of wealth - that leads to a conflict known as Triffin's dilemma. A monetary unit can perform dual-duty for only so long before the separation is great enough to cause either widespread price instability or wealth dilution - one must be sacrificed for the other to remain viable.

Bitcoin partially solves this by allowing for decimal expansion, although the effect from resets (which should occur periodically every ~20 years) may be somewhat jarring. Still, that is preferred to arrival at a complete economic meltdown as the world is witnessing now. For comparison, the same situation could exist with gold by decreasing the size of gold coins. The problem is that anything less than ~1 gram is prone to practical complications.

If the Bitcoin protocol were amended to allow 16 decimals expansion instead of the present 8, it is conceivable that the system could provide growth capacity for at least a century - assuming system integrity remains in all other areas.

tl;dr Gold's value keeps rising due to relative supply during any era, so pricing things in gold only works for a short time - maybe a few decades.

It's not so much an issue of responsibilities, it's more an issue of constant extremely bad luck, combined with a few poor choices.  I have my fair share of responsibilities.  Honestly I don't have it all that bad:  food, running water, roof, people that love me.  I'm good.
I might have made a good day trader or stock broker or anything like that, but I loathed the thought of being part of that culture.  It doesn't suit me.  Plus, you have to have some resources to start with, and living below the poverty line all my life, i simply never had a chance at them.  It's not like I haven't been trying -- Thank JR Bob Dobbs for Pell grants.  Luck played a major part in it.  But I'm not complaining; if anything I'm celebrating.  The price point of entry into the BTC mining and trading world has become affordable and attractive to me.


+1.  Whoever sits at the top of mount fiat, man things at the base must look realllllllllllly small... like, $2 small.

Yeah what you have to lose when you have responsibilities is different to when you don't.

On the bright side, I think what you believe about bitcoins having a world changing power is why it didn't burn out completely a few months ago. As soon as I understood it, I too realized it's fundamental strength - non-central, and therefore non-abusable power, and while this holds true there is a lower limit of value to the system (apparently that idea was "worth" $2.00 / BTC to someone with a lot of money).

This is precisely why I have difficultly getting my friends / peers to adopt BTC.  Even if they see the fundamental world-changing power that it possibly has, like I do, they have jobs and houses and cars and children and crap that I don't have, so the speculative value to them is just not as appealing as it is to me.

I am a trader stuck in a hobo's body.  Bitcoin and bitcoin speculation (particularly as manifested in Bitcoinica -- thank you Zhou) are like Amazing Grace to me.

Yes I think I see the point in your post, and I agree. I was looking through the eyes of the phone buyer incorrectly. They weren't buying the iPhone because it was stable, they were buying it because everyone else was. Stability is gained through that process, in external observation, as you point out.

I think a better reply would have been that Mass Adoption requires Adoption more than anything else! For that, I still don't see the $20 price mattering over a $5 price, rather that there is a point to having bitcoins. If the attraction is speculation while bitcoin only businesses build up to take advantage of any true unique benefits of BTC, then I guess that's what the path will be.

Somewhere, somebody had mentioned an idea along the lines of the private sector beginning to issue branded cryptocurrency backed by BTC.  In that case, I'd imagine you would have a stable enough currency for everyday use, backed by a more volatile asset.

I'm not too interested in history, so I don't really know, what was it like when gold backed the USD?  Did the price of gold fluctuate like it does nowadays?

Sure, I agree that people prefer stable government, and will occasionally resort to pitchforks to enact their preference.  But that has nothing to do with money.


This also has nothing to do with money, and is actually an argument against your premise.  What is necessary for mass adoption in your model is less-than-mass adoption, just a herd big enough to grow into a bigger herd, and if you keep working backwards, you'll see that the only thing needed is a nucleus big enough to build on (plus time and value).


Ahh, naughty boy, trying to pass off your own prejudices as universal truths.  That's why I jumped on your post.    At least you had the decency to recognize it.

In the real world, currency stability is a consequence of widespread use, not a cause of it.  The dollar is sorta stable because everything else is referenced to it.  To some extent, everything is referenced to it because it is stable, but a new currency starting up doesn't have that option.  Even the US dollar started out pegged to ("as clones of" would be a better way to put it) Spanish dollars.  Seen in reverse, the Roman currencies were abandoned in ancient times because they became unstable as people stopped using them, rather than the other way around.  And towards the end, the Roman coins were debased to such an extent that they were nearly homeopathic, barely better than our own modern coins.

The good news is that in the current world, bitcoin is still mostly used for USD -> bitcoin -> USD transactions.  I know that seems like a bad thing because we want bitcoin to take off, but it really is good, because for most people, they can use bitcoin without caring what the exchange rate is, or how the rate will change over time.  I want to send $500 to someone so I convert to bitcoin at rate X, and I don't really care what X is, because I immediately send, and when the recipient gets them, they convert back at very nearly X.  And if "very nearly X" isn't good enough, he can use a service (there are already several) to do the exchange instantly, turning the already small risk of a rapid change in price into a known fee.

So, regular people on the street don't (need to) care about exchange rate volatility and can essentially ignore it.  But traders and speculators like the volatility, because changes in the price are opportunities for them.  The real fun starts when more traders and speculators get on board, because the higher the rate goes, and the harder it is to swing the price, and the more stable it becomes.  Once the exchange rate is high enough, then prices will start to show more stability, and then the second phase can start, where people can hold their savings in bitcoins without it being a crazy gamble.  That phase is when the old currencies start to wither and die.

Yeah, my logic was that stability for mass adoption as a principle was sound, based on the fact that unstable sovereignties do not last very long, and are soon rejected by their constituents. The masses get unhappy with prolonged instability and seek stability elsewhere or change the state to reflect that. Do you agree with this premise? I think this is pretty clear, but if you don't we can discuss it.

This concept is also supported by the herding principle, that people will flock to something (eg the iPhone) not because it is technically better, but because 'lots of people have one' as the predominant reason. That is, everyone else buying an iPhone has value to the individual trying to decide which phone to get, if they value a faster decision. There was a paper I read once about the effect in music sales, how two songs might be technically/musically similar to a pro, but one does far better than the other once it reaches a critical mass through this herd effect. I'm sure it can be found somewhere, but this idea is what stuck inside my mind.

My guess is that stability is craved by the masses because it's a lot of work making decisions all the time. They'll opt for the iPhone because they'll assume others have done the decision work for them. It's a less risky route, and the mass' behaviour generally suggests they are extremely risk averse. There are plenty who aren't risk averse, of course (eg current bitcoin speculators), but these are not the masses.

In the case of bitcoins, these kinds of people will see the wildly changing prices as a sign of risk, and instability. There are tons of other things, of course, but I said and I do believe that for mass adoption, stability is the most important thing. I hope that explains why. I can't cite much because this is mostly the result of my own reflection.

In relation to exchange rate stability - it matters because we still need other currencies, when we don't, then the point is moot.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=CES

I don't venture out of this forum much, what is CES?


Coin Entertainment System?

Any sovereign state can be taken as an example of bitcoin exchange rate stability being a necessary precondition for mass adoption of bitcoin?  I'm missing something.

It swung so hard, it hit proudhon and turned him around too. 

It is quite something to watch.