Also this from James A. Donald, the
first person who communicated with Satoshi on the mailing list where Bitcoin was announced:
A bad time to invest in BitcoinOctober 8th, 2017
Back in 2013 I urged people to invest in Bitcoin.
Yesterday someone asked my cleaning lady to invest in Bitcoin.
Now if someone had asked her to accept payment in Bitcoin, or send payment in Bitcoin, then this would be compelling evidence that one should invest in Bitcoin.
But when cleaning ladies are asked to invest in Bitcoin, not a good investment.
When Bitcoin began, everyone was a miner, and everyone was a peer, everyone stored the entire blockchain. Which was great, but did not scale. And now people are struggling with half assed ideas about how to get it to scale. Bitcoin can no longer deliver on its original promises, has not figured out what new promises to make, and many of the new promises are unworkable, or are scams, or are likely to turn into scams.
Note
I also advised others to invest in BTC back in 2013.
A good time to invest in bitcoinIn 2013 I recommended investing in bitcoin.
Quite recently
I recommended not investing in bitcoin, because my cleaning lady who has no idea what to do when her computer freezes up, is investing in bitcoin. When the widows and orphans start buying stocks, it is time to sell.
Lately I have heard tell of thought criminals opening bitcoin accounts, because they noticed “Nazis” getting their accounts blocked, and figured that come the terror, they would need some money that could not be blocked.
That, people getting bitcoin accounts for actual monetary use, is a mighty good reason to invest in bitcoin. Time was when these people would have purchased gold or uncut diamonds.
Total value of Bitcoin it is currently around two hundred billion. People hold gold for roughly the same purpose as they hold cryptocurrency. It is reasonable that the total value of all crypto currencies should be comparable to the total value of gold, which is at present ten trillion.
Some other crypto currency may, and quite likely will, replace bitcoin.
But at the present moment, Bitcoin is where it is at. The aggregate value of all the various cryptocurrencies out there is dominated by aggregate value of bitcoin.
Which gives room for Bitcoin to rise by a factor of fifty.
Bitcoin was originated by an international traveler with many identities and many passports (not me, alas). Bitcoin governance is now primarily located in mainland China, which is to say, located in the place most inaccessible to American power. A crypto currency is a crypto state, and the bitcoin crypto state is substantially influenced by white people who are not all the time located in white countries, or are located much of the time in white countries rather distant from the centers of US Government power. Location in China does not imply as much actual Chinese control as one might expect.
Bitcoin is a speculation on the continued functioning of the economy outside the state, and to which the state is hostile. Its major monetary (non speculative) use is evading Chinese currency controls and evading present and likely future US government controls.
If the Federal Reserve issues its own cryptocurrency, will Bitcoin retain its luster?
Every single person that I know of who is an actual end user, who is using bitcoin for monetary rather than speculative purposes, has good reason to believe that the Federal Reserve is hostile to him, and that if it had full knowledge of his doings would be murderously hostile.
Gold is a tulip mania bubble that has not popped in three thousand years.
Money is a bubble that does not pop.
Lightning network is a very bad idea, but something rather like lightning network can be made to work.
Yes, Bitcoin is broken. It has hit its scalability limits.
But these problems are fixable, and with this much wealth looking for a safe place to hide, someone is going to fix them.
Not necessarily in Bitcoin though. Possibly with an altcoin.
And either way, the security of bitcoin is ensured by the miners
This is a very bad design flaw. We need a crypto currency where control is by weight of money, rather than by weight of computing power.
But how can one implement weight of money when the biggest accounts are likely deliberately disconnected from the internet for long periods, and often located in places where the internet is extremely bad, so that even when intentionally connected, are connected by a low bandwidth and highly unreliable connection?
Easy: We have client/peer arrangement. The client, seldom connected to the internet, and connected by a low bandwidth connection when it is connected, logs in to a peer from time to time. The peer is always on, and always connected to all the other peers by a very high bandwidth connection. A peer has influence over the currency according to the weight of the money controlled by its clients. Its clients can easily move from one peer to the next, taking influence over the currency and over the governance of the crypto currency from the previous peer and granting it to the new peer.
You have a lot of catching up to do
on the flaws of DPoS. Find his blog post on consortium blockchains for more refutation of the stake voting paradigm.
You're correct that
"other guys" are far ahead of you on the scaling issue and maintaining decentralization.
Contrast the above comments on what gives Bitcoin value to the misunderstanding in the mass media:
Nearly a decade after its introduction, and with nearly $100bn in market capitalisation, a list of all legitimate merchants willing to accept Bitcoin
fits comfortably on a single web page.
[...]
Like most financial bubbles, Bitcoin begins with a claim to have invented a new way of doing business. If people lose faith in that claim, the entire edifice is merely a record of some pointless calculations. At the moment, there’s little evidence to support the idea that Bitcoin will ever become a usable currency.
Bitcoin is a PRIVATIZED reserve currency, store-of-value asset, not a medium-of-exchange! As faith in PUBLIC institutions collapses, Bitcoin is the new gold, precisely as was written in the original Bitcoin whitepaper. Which correlates with Martin Armstrong's
51.6 year oscillating shift between PRIVATE assets (e.g. gold and now Bitcoin) and PUBLIC institution assets (e.g. sovereign bonds). Real estate isn't entirely a private asset, because taxes have to be paid to the government, no one has an allodial title, and the government can seize the land for emminent domain.
