Topic: Bear post of the Day - page 6. (Read 8697 times)

people "get it" but they don't Believe it, last Sat Night i was playing poker, ( i was pretty drunk ... and high   ) anyway at one point someone asked "what is bitcoin?" and i told her, we talked about... Government! ...  Fake Dollars! ... Real Bitcoins! i had blurted out so much info so fast one of them lol'd at me and said " you going to sign us a song now" so i got up and starting signing "Mr. BITCOIN Bring me money, give me a chance out of this economy!" LMAO!

gr8 publicity right?

sure, but they will never buy in, because they don't believe and they never will.... they like their bank notes, they like their bank accounts. to them this is money, and just cuz some kid can cough out tons of "BS" about "Dollars" and thinks "bitcoin" is better, wont change their mind. nothing will!

Honestly I believe it scares them, they don't really understand it, they hear me say thing like " everyone fights over a VERY LIMITED SUPPLY, and that's what gives it value!"
and as they start to understand it scares them! they don't want to hear about why the dollars we all use are really just FAKE money, it scares them.

The wheels are already in motion. A few big adopters are already in (most recently Reddit, Mega) making sure the word will spread, and there are plenty of forward looking entrepreneurs having a go at bitcoin (only a matter of time before online poker with bitcoin hits big, and other harder to foresee big hits). It's just a matter of time now, and it's completely out of the hands of us single individuals.

The hard work has already been done. Time to reap the rewards and enjoy the ride. All you need is patience.

+1 to this thread. Thank you for starting it. I believe one of the largest obstacles to major bitcoin adoption is helping the rest of the world "get it". There are so many people on this forum alone spreading disinformation and lies it's astounding; and the majority of us (myself included) do not yet fully understand bitcoin enough to rebuttal. The more we focus on why and how bitcoin is the answer, the more we learn ourselves and the more we pass that knowledge on to others.

I would also like to add that an inherent risk of using centralized digital currency is the possibility of insolvency/bankruptcy of the issuer.

+1 Holliday


How does uniqueness determine chances of success? I'd think that the LESS unique something is, the more likely it is to succeed...
Given that bitcoin is hands down the most popular crypto currency, I'd say it has a good chance of success based on INERTIA.

The other things you need to take into account are CONTEXT and TIMING. The worlds' middle class just got royally screwed by
financial elites - billions in financial wealth evaporated and billions more went into offshore hedge fund accounts.

Anyone with half a brain is looking to exit the fraudulent system the MOTU have created... enter bitcoin...

What high margins? It's not about "helping" them, it's about a need that is already there. You do realize that oversea shopping, online or offline, is an enormous business in many developing nations right? A lot of things are way cheaper in developed nations, many are not even purchasable locally. I am not going to tell you the number of payment requests people like me are going to receive the year around, but suffice to say it is staggering. One of my friends runs a business just by doing oversea shopping for several skincare brands, and even he sometimes has problems with payments.

What I meant by "hawala", is that a wide variety of people could get in the money sending business, even yourself, as long as you can get hold of some bitcoins.

And yeah, as I have said, we don't need to rely on Mt.Gox.

So what you are basically saying is that 3rd would population being able to buy services from 1st world companies operating on high margins would help them?
If so how are they supposed to get their Bitcoins anyway? Oh they should issue T/T to mtgox paying premium transaction fees to western banks in the process?

This is brilliant! 

No that's ripple.

http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/pay-another-way-bitcoin/

The Wordpress guy pretty much got it actually, the status quo is if folks in my nation, and many other third world nations wanna pay for, let's say a wordpress or megaupload subscription, or just simply buying goods in a U.S online store, soon they will find many of the times their only option is to ask people like me(oversea students/workers) to help them out, all current payment methods would not work for one reason or another. Credit cards issued in many nations are not accepted, you can't blame the merchants for this, the issuing banks most likely would not give a shit once you are frauded, let alone pay for your losses, and even if you could locate the fraudster, the chance of a successful prosecution is superslim.  Paypal does not do business with perhaps more than half of the world's population, and is not allowed to process foreign currency transactions in China, even in those nations it operates, there are very often draconian restrictions, see here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal#Local_restrictions , the chance that other online payment business/digital currency issuers could operate where Paypal could not is, of course, even slimmer. And don't get me started on the wire transfer, even if the merchant accepts it and you are fine with the exorbitant fees, your fund could be intercepted anytime by an intermediary bank if the amount is slightly large, on the pretext of financial crime prevention of course, and you are left to find out yourself why your fund has not arrived, no one is going to inform you, i had personal experience with that.

Bitcoin, on the other hand, could prove to be very useful, I don't know about other nations, but in China, it's a piece of cake to buy bitcoins with existing domestic online payment system like Alipay, even if the government decides to crack down on the exchanges, the online shops could still sell them under all kinds of pretenses, it is nearly impossible the authority would find out what is the good really being delivered. On the oversea merchants side, all they have to do is to use a payment processor, which adds very little cost. Of course, whether bitcoin could really succeed will have to depend on the size and liquidity of the market, in the end.

Bitcoin, it seems to me, is basically a digital version of hawala http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala, except that hawala is nowhere near as versatile as bitcoin is. The decentralization aspect is not just libertarian ideology, it's very tangible in nations where financial barriers are real.

Ohh that's gonna be interesting. Please tell me how the 3rd world population is supposed to benefit from BTC in any way because I cannot think of any.

I'm serious.


true dat.

It's exactly because you are living in the first world, that you may not understand why the rest of the world needs it, and its uniqueness.

and don't forget the mountain of gox!

Well yes, it's an advantage but it doesn't tell the whole story. For once I have yet to see a completely decentralized system of any kind, I would appreciate if if it were to exist some day.
Bitcoin is centralized at the source code and it is centralized in terms of wealth distribution, other system may be more centralized in more different kinds however that is not the only issue:

Many people do not want to use a decentralized system, for whatever reason. We live in the world we live in all we can do is try to change it while many people simply do not want that change.
I am an Anarchist myself (not a Libertarian though) and would very much like to live in a society where power isn't arbitrarily. I realize this is a chicken and egg problem but that's perhaps the topic for another day.

Started looking through, seemed a quite a few were centralized (not all however).
"While Bitcoin’s critics are wary of it lack of commodity backing, its main advantage is its decentralized model. This decentralization makes it arguably the most resilient digital currency currently available."

Todays bear post is about the so called uniqueness of Bitcoin.

There is not much to write about it, for all practical purposes Bitcoin is innovative but certainly not unique.
Take a look around at the Digital Currency Wiki and tell me why you think Bitcoin is destined for greatness and all those other solutions are not.

When doing that keep in mind that the rest of the world doesn't necessarily agree with libertarian ideology.

Good luck with that, don't drop the soap but if you do you can always think about your bitcoins.  

[emphasis added]

No alternative? How about default on the fiat, but keep the btc? For the set of people buying btc on credit with no ability to repay if they get squeezed, I contend that there's a large demographic crossover with the sort that simply defaults on credit-cards.

I beg to differ here. I think the number of "healthy investors" could match that of reckless investors who would be deeply in debt and panic sell to cut losses, so the healthy guys could easily stop the price from falling that low by buying off at a higher, though still quite low bottom price(e.g. $7.22),  if the reckless investors were such a  dominant force here, their collective buying power would already have pushed the price way higher than it's now, like in June 2011, when the price jumped 20 dollars in just one week.

I was mainly referring to the price discovery mechanism being the same.  Whether the asset in question is of a different nature is not that important imho.

I am afraid you have mistaken me with one of my alter egos.  I don't know what KAFA is.

We can't jump from here to there.  Payment processors will make bitcoin usable to those who aren't willing to take on unnecessary risk.  This will lead to more comfort with the idea of bitcoin and eventually to holding part of the income in bitcoin.  The processors allow you to set what percentage you want to keep in bitcoin, so merchants can start with 100% USD and adjust is as they wish.

As for now...


The topic of Wordpress and Reddit "accepting" bitcoin.
They do not. They accept USD from third parties, which in turn sell the bitcoins to obtain the currency or take the equivalent loan for the payment (which has been confirmed at least for bitpay). That this has become the common settlement for accepting bitcoin is irrelevant. Only a complete economic cycle constitutes real economic growth.
In this state Bitcoin acts not as a currency and is essentially a trading game with the possibility to cash out into certain goods and services. The missing essential part are cases where business are paying their expenses to other business as well as re-investing their profits for expansion using bitcoin. Payment processors negate this effect to the extent that it could already be happening, so in a economic sense they hindering development.

The effect this has is that investors get even more entrenched in the idea that all Bitcoin needs is more publicity, think that sites dealing with payment processors will supply it and enlarge their position.


Addendum to yesterdays post: Worse as I mentioned above there is a strong possibility that the payment processors do not sell a large portion of their Bitcoin in order to not impact the market which requires them to get in debt in the fiat economy. Essentially it means that core infrastructure might be affected by the same kind of debt trap some of the private speculators are in. Of course the extent of this happening is all speculative but I am fairly confident that this happens.