Topic: [2013-12-15] TheAtlantic - Why Bitcoin will never be a Currency - in 2 Charts (Read 2606 times)

Your attempts at condescension are pathetic. I get your "argument". I just don't agree with it. Get over it.

Many many coins aren't even on btc-e, but still violent volatility.

As far as I understand my argument on the beauty of owning something whole vs owning a fraction of that is a little above your understanding. I'll leave it at that then, not much else to add here.

Anyone who has spent any time at btc-e will know that pump and dump is what most of them are attempting to do 24-7 for the last two years ....... they don't even attempt to hide it.

What does converting to mBTC have to do with anything? People aren't that stupid not to understand that 110 mBTC is still = 0.11 BTC, it's not a whole BTC They want to own a whole BTC, but many only got a hundred bucks to spend. So what do they do? Go for an alt-coin, you still can buy 3 full litecoins for example with that money, and feel good about yourself that you own something as a whole. That's one of the reasons.

Diversifying risk too of course, but that's when you're already into bitcoins. For newcomers they'd first consider bitcoins as it's the first one they hear about. And when bitcoin becomes absolutely unaffordable for most (somewhere past $5k), that's when alt-coins really take off, although they've already been taking off in the past 1-2 months relative to bitcoin.

Pump and dump is not unique to alt-coins, it happens in bitcoin too, just with less volatility, since it takes more efforts to move the bitcoin price.

Really? You can prove the recent rise in altcoins is attributable to us not converting to mBTC? Got any evidence? Ever thought there may be other reasons. Diversifying risk? Supremely skilled pump and dump artists?

I didn't say we need more of something. I said that's the way things work in the world. People copy inventions, because they don't want to pay hefty sums for the original invention, since it's too rare. What's so difficult to grasp here?

Many people can shell out a hundred bucks to try it out, but what would that buy them? 0.11 bitcoin? Not even 1 whole bitcoin. That's why they spend it on alt-coins. Why do you think alt-coins have been rising fast recently? People don't care that bitcoin is divisible. It's psychology, they want to own something whole, not part of it. And if they can own a whole coin, but just a different brand, they go for that brand. Not all of them, but still enough of them, for the value of the original invention to dilute. Human psychology is both simple and hard to understand.

The top comments on all of these articles are always pro-bitcoin; so long as this remains the norm, I'm happy.

Naysayer's gonna say nay


And in the end, it was just a troll article   Someone paid this guy good.

Oh no. Not that "we need more bitcoins" stuff again. They are divisible, down to 8 decimal points. Which could be increased in the future. What's so difficult to grasp here?

For the record, there is already a central bank in bitcoin, it's just it's decentralized. It's called alt-coins People 'print' as many brands of coins as they want, other people choose to take a share. The value of bitcoins is thus diluted into alt-coins. Is this good or bad? This is just the way it is. It's been like that with any invention, people copy inventions, sometimes blindly, sometimes making them better, but regardless of that the value of the original invention is diluted. So, the value of bitcoin is already somewhat stabilizing, as people choose not to pour all their money into just bitcoins, but a portion into others. With time it'll be even more obvious. The s-curve of the bitcoin growth will be getting flatter with time. Of course, it's still way off from now, but there are already signs of this.

It looks like people want at least 1 whole bitcoin, and many can't afford that, and with time it'll be even more so, so they buy alt-coins. Nothing you can do about human psychology here. Owning a fraction of something just doesn't look attractive to people, making them feel like losers, no matter how divisible bitcoins are, etc. Satoshi should have fixed the supply at 1 bln at least, then the chances of bitcoin being the only one for a longer time would be higher.

True enough. But the bitcoin network is built on trust and trust alone, shaky ground to begin with because trust is rarely regained if lost. If you promise from the start there will only ever be 21M coins and then change that, the trust ends. If you start increasing, where do you end? 30M, 100M, 20 billion, infinity? Just leave it at 21M. There's enough issues with bitcoin without messing with the fundamentals.

I also find it unlikely, but it will be whatever the majority wants.

It will never be removed. Dream on.

If deflation turns out to be a bad thing, then people can simply upgrade their client to bitcoin version xx where the 21mil limit is removed and block rewards continue forever.

meant for Onion.

Shock horror - another stupid article from a "journalist"

Of course people will spend bitcoins - any time the price is stable or going down they will spend, spend, spend

people tend to think that as the price increases, so does the stability as it would take much greater and greater amount of fiat to affect (or manipulate) the price.  Would the danger then be from those holders of massive amounts of coins, who could decide to dump their bitcoin load and send the price plummeting into the fiery pits of damnation?  I wonder if there are any economic simulators where you can plug in certain values (ie. bitcoinesque parameters) to test liquidity and volatility in a free market economy.  That'd be delicious

Funny math inside:

"You can see that in the chart below from Jason Kuznicki, which looks at the dollar value of all bitcoin transactions each day divided by the dollar value of all bitcoins each day"

Isn't it just amount of BTC daily  by all BTC ? What for to mess with dollar - those nowadays mathematics ...

Not worth reading.

As the price per BTC has risen I actually use more.   I think you are right.   This is likely the more common occurrence.   Goat just bought a Lambo and while I am sure he has plenty more BTC this is probably more representative of the behavior we can expect.   Higher it goes the more people use it!

right, and with that they kill one of bitcoins' main purposes -- taking the fate of our money, economy and status quo out of the hands of the easily corruptible and putting it into the hands of mathematical elegance.  Whether bitcoin's particular design has that ability has yet to be seen, but that's always as reparable as a software update, correct?  I like the idea that in order for a major change in the bitcoin software/protocol, 81% of the clients have to accept an update.  If that's not the definition of a true democracy, I don't know what is.

Oh come on everybody. Where are your senses of humour?  He's JOKING.

(Isn't he? ..... )