Topic: [2014-06-24] The Bitcoin Universe Now Resembles A Medieval Agrarian Economy (Read 975 times)

This article is horribly written. Basically, it points out that old coins are not moving very much, or at all, and therefore the transaction volume and liquidity is "probably not good". Then it makes a completely false equivalency with Cleantech and how their venture capital investments started to dry up right around $250 million dollars, so that must mean that Bitcoin's VC is about to end since it is getting near that point. It is amazing how the article compares Bitcoin to the internet almost a dozen times, and then it uses Cleantech (some random corporation without any relation to the topic at hand) to use as comparison for this proposed "Bitcoin Bubble".

The most offensive point was at the end when it says, "Imagine if those incentives decreased 50% every 4 years?  That's Bitcoin's internal economy." This obviously refers to block halving and implies that mining bitcoins is the only incentive for using it. As in, the only way to make money from bitcoin is to mine and sell it to people who want it. I guess remittances, contract storage, ownership registering, and encrypted transaction recording are services that have ZERO incentive, at least I would guess that if I was a gullible Business Insider reader.

This is a case of classic FUD that is easily dismantled by anybody who takes 5 minutes to wade through the dross of this egregiously written shlock piece. This manipulative "journalist" is trying to keep the price down for his boss and himself so they can buy in before the Bitcoin stocks go live on NASDAQ at the end of the year. The second BTC hits the Wall Street ticker tape, you can bet there will not be one word on BI that implies Bitcoin is anything short of a miraculous once-in-5,000-years-gold-2.0 invention. That is, until they feel like shorting the stock.

Where's my flamethrower?

I think I just realised why so many of you are having a hard time reading through this and from what I've seen he's a neo-keynesian, what he's doing is he's writing in the style of Ben Bernanke or Janet Yellen and using lots of overly-complicated wording to try and throw you off and has quite literally made up estimates to support his claims. I need to look through it a bit more when I'm feeling patient but the basic jist of it is he thinks Bitcoin is a bubble etc. and he's used made up mathematics to back himself up instead of actually going out and finding out the transactions from various sources he's just gone and posted up some estimates with fancy charts and the rest of his article seems to be off topic rambling.

What a dick, if he wanted to know the transaction volume he could have gone to the major exchanges and asked them or looked at stuff like http://www.bitlisten.com/ , http://coinmarketcap.com/ or http://fiatleak.com/ this is all really useful data available for free that you'd have to get a court order for in other economies!

Business Insider........

The usual crap from bank-rolled journalists who know nothing about the subject they are trying to pour scorn on.

That article had an interesting perspective on Bitcoin adoption

If Bitcoin is a medieval agrarian economy then that means it has a lot of room to go still comparing a digital trading system to it is at first bizarre
But it makes some sense when you read it since miners are kind of like farmers and need to sell their products to raise capital for the next batch and farmers don't always make profit (Although they aren't subsidized to farm for more products here)
I guess the network is oversecure in a sense but it may as well be called a growing pains but his argument is well founded in data.  

If 1/3rd of the real economy is the current ratio that is very high and pretty over-secure for this state that said it is still too early to call it a mature technology but it is maturing gradually and step by step.
That said it should balance out in time and it was an interesting read.

But I still need a flamethrower since this could easily be researched not just guesstimated.

this article is a stream of incoherent incompetent bumbling. not sure why anyone would recommend it.

"As I noted in my previous article, last month BitPay announced that it was processing about $1 million in daily payments.  It is unclear what amount of bitcoins that constitutes, depending on the time frame and therefore price levels (early December or the month of May) it could represent 1,000-2,000 tokens per day." - Some Know-Nothing Journalist From Business Insider

It is not that hard to say "1000-2000 bitcoins per day", nor is it hard to figure out that that is the only proper way to say it. Oh brother, when will they grow up and learn?

I haven't heard the word agrarian used in like forever but it is interesting to see it brought up in relation to crypto and specifically Bitcoin.

http://www.businessinsider.com/tim-swanson-on-bitcoin-economy-2014-6?IR=T&

Separating activity from growth on Bitcoin’s network

One of the contentious areas of writing about Bitcoin data and emerging markets, is discussing what conclusions and interpretations (if any) can be drawn from say, transactional volume.

Let us put that aside for a moment and consider ways to estimate real commercial volume.  Are there any other ways to do so besides a full traffic analysis?