Bitcoin does not have a central bank capable of printing and lending bitcoins; it has an "algorithm" which through some convoluted mechanism allows bitcoins to be "mined".
well this early sentence set off alarm bells for me, putting algorithm in quotes really seems disingenuous and condescending to computer scientists and mathmeticians
As a quick thought experiment, let's say demand for bitcoins grew as more people found out about them. Well, you'd expect the price of Bitcoin in dollars to grow rapidly. Now assume I own one bitcoin. I also have a dollar bill. I would like to purchase a Pepsi. Which one of those will I spend? Obviously the devaluing dollar gets spent before the skyrocketing bitcoin.
In the best case scenario [the one where it becomes popular] the limited supply of bitcoins will cause crippling deflation, drying up most Bitcoin-denominated commerce save whatever speculative buying and selling happens on exchanges. Some new world order. All that transparency and all those low interchange fees aren't going to do you much good if you don't ever want to spend these things and no one wants to give them to you anyway.
i don't follow, is the premise that it makes buying things you don't need/living within your means more intuitive, and that's destructive to the economy?
i think extreme language masks whatever point is trying to be made
As a result, my ability to turn a bitcoin into a dollar or a euro or a yen is no greater than my ability to sell my laptop on eBay. I can probably do it, but that doesn't mean I'm going to start measuring my bank account in MacBook Pros, because one day I might not be able to find a buyer, and then what?
Because of this, Bitcoin is not really a currency, it's an asset [and a particularly useless one at that].
i'm not sure what's up with the brackets, but that quote is unchanged.
he's saying bitcoin has ever increasing demand, and then compares it's sell-ability with something that devalues massively year over year?
i agree that MacBook Pros are an unappealing asset if you're measuring their value by sell-ability (only)—i think apple tries to unload them pretty quickly—but i'm not sure what that has to do with bitcoin
i thought i wouldn't ever want to sell my bitcoin, anyway
Bitcoin (and really, any e-currency) is inherently unstable. And with currency, stability is everything.
maybe, but i don't think his evidence leading to this point makes a ton of sense and i'm too tired to dig through the extreme language to find what is actually being said