Topic: Bitcoin Shrinking - The Long View - page 7. (Read 19400 times)

Yes, I did read the rest of the post. How did you arrive at those numbers?

Okay Bob. May I call you Bob? I like to call you Bob.

Here's the deal. Bitcoin has no inherent value. It is a merchantilistic item of trade for whom people are willing to pay a price. The total of all those prices willing to be paid somewhat constitute the market value demand side. Then you have the market value supply side, which gets defined by the amount of bitcoins available for sale. This supply side may grow or shrink here or there a little bit, depending on what the miners and/or long-term investors had for breakfast. Do you have any idea of what would happen to the value of bitcoins if just one large investor decided it would be a riot to just purchase 20mio bitcoins for a dollar? Even if you never had more than twice the 200k bitcoin adaptors we have as of now, you'd have no more than 2.5 bitcoins available per person on average - and every time those guys like to make a 100$ transaction, they will either have to buy more bitcoins or drive up the price to $40, at which point the large investor could just attempt to slowly release 1mio of his coins (thus doubling the supply side, lowering the price to $20) just to receive his initial investment back, while still still sitting on 19mio more bitcoins!

Now look at the amount of ongoing daily transactions, the amount of people doing those transactions, and the amount of possible large investors. They exceed $100, 400k people and 1 by far!

So go ahead, keep pushing your agendas - but the only absurd idiot in this forum is you. All the more so for calling people names, while actually attempting to justify a realistic sub-parity dollar denominated bitcoin valuation on the grounds of openly rigged GDP data, which is dollar denominated by nature to begin with! God be with you if we ever saw a large USD crash. You could consider yourself lucky if you even were to receive a single bitcoin for your monthly dollar paycheck then.

Now please do yourself and all of us a huge favor - go educate someplace else.

I'll just say:

Did you even bother to read the rest of the post?

Idiot...

I've learned to simply ignore the meandering political ramblings (e.g., Atlas & co), and I agree that this by itself doesn't affect the project in any meaningful way (except, perhaps, scaring off more serious investors/contributors).  It's just annoying, and if the libertarians simply produced a product that I could use without having to have my ear chewed off with their world-domination blather, I'd be perfectly happy to use it.

The portion that to me is really a shame is how, on top of the technically beautiful system for solving double-spending and building consensus on a network that lacks trust, has been layered a cultlike devotion to deflationary/goldbug economics that I *can't* extricate myself from.  I and many others have certainly argued why elsewhere, but principally, deflation seems to me like it will choke trade and investment, and keep Bitcoin from growing into the truly useful backbone for worldwide transactions that it could in principle become.  At best, I see things stabilizing long-term to a low trade volume that's an unhappy equilibrium between hoarders and people who are no longer able/willing to hold their coins; on top of this might piggyback transactions like the international transfer I described that simply use BTCs as a 10-20 minute intermediary.  At worst, I see the project dying off because of this.  This is why the economics that's built into Bitcoin, and not just the technical issues, *do* affect the project.

For the record, what I think (and hope) will actually happen is that some other Bitcoin 2.0 with better economics comes online and outcompetes the current implementation.  Presumably, such a virtual currency would be technically similar to Bitcoin, so that the effort already invested into complementary projects, like your Bitcoin-qt client (which I really respect and hope succeeds) or the exchanges, can be leveraged easily and not be lost.  I think the technical underpinnings of Bitcoin, and their potential to change the world if implemented more sensibly, are simply too good to just die off without them being picked up by someone else.


+1

Another Godlike assertion, but no evidence whatsoever.

To repeat. How did you arrive at those numbers?

And after you've answered this question, I'll repeat the other questions that you've carefully avoided. One at a time though.

Any valuation above relative parity with USD/EUR/AUD/GBP etc. is extremely suspect as there are absolutely zero real reasons for it to be above parity.

A number of people have mentioned how great BTC are for international currency transport and exchange and they're correct, though this use doesn't require any valuation higher than relative parity with the strongest currencies; In fact it still works perfectly fine at 10:1 or even 100:1, the only reason for it to be higher is greedy miners hoarding to artificially restrict supply.

It's just patently absurd to say that BTC has any value above the strong fiat currencies that have the GDP of ENTIRE FUCKING NATIONS behind their value, and bitcoin has absolutely jack shit. The only reason for it to hold parity is for conveniences sake anyway.

So why did I even suggest anything above parity in the first place, say, below $10?  Because bitcoin speculators are still idiots and the die hards will still inject paycheck after paycheck into the market hoping to extract some small profit.  So my wild variance between $0.01 and $10 is solely because I honestly have no idea how tenacious these idiots are, or exactly how many of them are stupid enough to continue to artificially inflate the value long term.

But one thing is certain and that is that the super-fantastic cryptoararchojerkoffism inherent to the design of bitcoins is a FAR fucking cry from the economic value of the GDP of motherfucking NATIONS that floats their fiat value to where it exists today, and that all the bitcoiners who believe otherwise are fucking fools. liberal vulgarity included for emphasis

Your OP starts with "The long term trend for bitcoin value is contraction, not expansion". You then precede to give evidence that has nothing to do with the long term.


You're asserting this, but with what evidence? The long term contraction/expansion of Bitcoin depends on the developments in the Bitcoin economy over the next couple of years, not press coverage and market moves over its first couple of months. What evidence for long term contraction is there?

I'm not predicting the long term success of bitcoin I'm telling you that the market value relative to other currencies will continue to shrink until it reaches it's highest sustainable point somewhere below $10 and above $0.01. You're just twisting my observations relative to your own worthless antithetical agenda.

Bitcoin can be "successful" by a number of measures, yet still have little to no value in real currencies.

So I'll give up on the Synaptic's first point. Xephan, I appreciate your points, but I'm trying to pin Synaptic down here like I'd try to pin down someone on Fox News peddling tripe.

Next point.


How can you predict the long term success of Bitcoin on the basis of a short term transient market move the first time it became widely known?

Playing the devil's advocate, Synaptic would probably rubbish it off as clones created by the diehard 10,000~15000 natives

Unfortunately this is similar to forum memberships. Unless somebody is checking the links periodically and removing dead entries (no longer accepting bitcoins or closed, doesn't work or whatever), it won't prove that a economy is growing around bitcoin.


This is a good sign though, the next question is then how many people actually uses it and how long will it be sustainable. It would be good if the community supports this effort by paying exclusively using bitcoin on Amazon. It will drive up the volume and it would really be a coup if Amazon starts accepting bitcoin directly.

Well, at least the entries on the trade page from the wiki seems to be growing nicely:

(according discussion at https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=26047)

Personally I find the possibility to buy all the stuff from amazon.com with Bitcoins through spendbitcoins.com as the greatest step forward recently. I mean: what more can you ask for? Everybody asking me what you can do with Bitcoins was pretty impressed to hear that you can shop at amazon with it.

Granted, it's through a gift code, but it is at the current market rate without any fees!

I think he was having problems bringing his point across due to his English and mannerism. The way I see it, he's trying to say that the price increase in bitcoin was due to media hype and there is nothing he could imagine that would drive it up again, because there is no economy to back up the bitcoin currency and the declining price since the hype is his alleged evidence. While I quite disagree with the point about not possibly being newsworthy again, the latter about not having much of an economy to back bitcoin is unfortunately relatively true at this point.

Until the community or somebody can kickstart something that uses bitcoin in significant volume relative to the generation, the long term outlook is not that bright barring drastic changes in the socio-economic environment.

There might be slight practical issues with logging on to Tor from a prison cell.

Sure, if a vibrant Bitcoin economy doesn't develop in the long term then Bitcoin will stagnate in the long term. That's self evident. Synaptic was saying that because the press interest has died down after the initial surge that's proof that Bitcoin won't prosper long term. That's not self evident. That's meaningless waffle.

I believe there is a saying that share prices does not reflect the performance of the company, only the public expectations of it. So I doubt this episode tells us anything significant about the future of Bitcoin that wasn't obvious before. The fundamental remains, there must be a sufficiently vibrant economy (be it games, services, drugs or porn) in which bitcoin is a preferred currency. Otherwise, it will die off just as Synaptic believes.

But what can we learn about the long term prospects of Bitcoin from this episode? Does this tell us anything about where Bitcoin is going to be in 2 years? I'm attempting to deconstruct Synaptic's OP bit by bit here, and show what a pile of meaningless speculation it is.