vqp I also love the potential of Bitcoin.
There is a value with the potential you see. And value wants to belong to somebody.
In my dreams, it would belong to those who create the system that has the long-term staying power, but it may be too late. Bitcoin can't be changed now drastically (the debasement schedule is non-negotiable according to the wiki) and it has too much inertia and no one is going to like something that appreciates more sanely because everybody prefers "to get rich quick", rather than a methodical approach.
What is your problem with Satoshi and other early adopters getting insanely rich for taking Paypal/VISA/MC market share?
The problem as I see it, is he designed the debasement to be so short in duration and to feed into the delusion that goldbugs have that gold was a better currency in the past (it wasn't! go study history, it was same sh8t.). But this is really twisted because it doesn't even have the similar type of gradual debasement that gold and silver have, it is more like palladium or some rare earth metal that was just discovered.
There is a reason we don't use these for money, it is because the debasement is too rapid. Go read Dr. Fekete, I am sure many of you goldbugs know of him. He explained this to me in email long ago. I was writing on gold-eagle.com since 2007. Go read my articles. Some were lost. I used to write on financialsense.com too, but they lost my articles. Ditto Lewrockell who deleted my articles because I disagreed with him.It sort of analogous to Russia dumping palladium, then hoarding all production, but in this case they speed up the debasement in the beginning to get an inordinate share, then they slow it down inordinately too rapid, to create false scarcity which helps no one but the early adopters. It kills the long-term of the currency. Bitcoin will never survive long-term I can guarantee you that. It will run way up in price, and then it will fail. The govt will step in, then they have their digital currency. They will then modify it to fluctuate debasement.
You can't deny from the market what it needs. Debasement must fluctuate. Either you do it, or govt will later. Do you want me to explain why?
So what he accomplished is the psychology that we are doing something good, yet he compressed it so it is really bad. Nothing like stable money at all. Clever trick but I saw it immediately because I am so well studied since 2007 on monetary theory.
I would love for him to come forward now and say "we need to fix the debasement, I was wrong", then I would have no problem with the coins he already owns. And I would respect him much more. I would work on it, if anyone needs me (which they don't, there are good programmers here).
If we can't fluctuate the debasement rate, then we can't have it auto-adjust to abnormally high levels of dormancy, which are indicating froth and ponzi-like nature. But simply removing that goldbug delusion attribute, might be enough by itself. Debase it over 100 years at least,
so the early adopters don't get 50% of the money supply. Giving them all the incentive to
pump, pump, pump.The reason it hurts us is because an unstable currency has many problems. I explained in a prior link that it opens a scenario for the govt to apply deposit insurance or otherwise regulate bcz dumb fool investors will complain when they lose their shirts. Also a volatile currency will not be adopted as a unit-of-account by businesses. They have fixed costs in USD, so they will go bankrupt from the volatility. So they will have real problems with meshing with the currency due to levels of FX risk.
There are many monetary reasons. Do you want to have a serious discussion?
That is the whole point: money now might be coming from new investors as in all start-ups, but if this works as I think it can, there will be real money for the senioriage of the currency for a while and modest money supply for processing transactions in a highly competitive market.
Even Forrest Gump got rich unexpectedly and he didn't even take an informed decision.
We need the seniorage forever to keep all miners on our side. We would be better off if every user can mine with his hard disk space, no need ASICs.