So bitcoin is designed wrong?
Remember bitcoin too is designed to produce a constant number of coins for four years.
So until we hit four years we are no different. Since you don't think four years ahead is relevant what are you proposing, a pre-mined coin in which there is no inflation because the Tome owns all coins from block one and if anyone ever wants one they will have to get it from them?
I never said there should be no inflation. I'm saying inflation has to be controlled or adjusted on the fly so that the value in $ of the coin stays within a certain level while the coin is expanding. Once plenty of people are using the coin the inflation rate should decrease more and more until it reaches around 1-3% which is near the rate of population growth.
We always want more jobs than people so we have to limit inflation.
Or You want a instamine coin maybe, half the coins minted the first month, another quarter the second month, another eighth the third month and so on so that in siz months when the problems you expect come along there is already by then no inflation?
You sound like a bit of a nutbar frankly, no different from those who insist bitcoin will die because it does NOT make the same amount of coins forever, except you take the opposite position.
When did I ever said Bitcoin is going to die? Just because I don't have faith in Devcoin it does not mean I have no faith in Bitcoin. And I said nothing about a premine. Where are you getting this script from?
The reason the coin is going down in price is because it is being given out to opportunists who are no different from the miners whose opportunism was limited in DeVCoin by only giving them 10% of the coins.
So now you think the coin is going down because people aren't hoarding it? And you're claiming people who refuse to hoard it are opportunists? If you give something to someone or someone earns something from you then they can do anything with it that they want.
You have no right to judge other people by how they choose to use their coins. If the currency is designed right this shouldn't even matter.
Maybe a partial solution would be to only let 10% of the coins be written-for just like only 10% can be mined.
And why pick on writers? What about everyone else?
The best method you can think of to fix Devcoin is to somehow convince even less people to work for it? Basically too many people want to work so we gotta lower the hiring rate to fix the economy? This is starting to sound a lot like what is wrong with the global economy being imported into Devcoin. Let's lay people off and reduce their pay and call it austerity?
The point is, if Devcoin were designed to work there would be no crisis in the first place. Blame me for pointing out the crisis and calling for a hard fork. You can diagree with me or even ignore my warnings, and then deal with what happens 10 months to a year from now if Devcoin can even last that long.
Bitcoins have been going down too lately, have you noticed? Same reason: people dumping them. Maybe people are giving them all to asIC companies who are in turn turning them into fiat to buy parts or something, I don't know, but ultimately if the value goes down it traces back to people dumping.
That is the free market. People can pump and dump. I don't care what people do with their money. I know Bitcoins will be going up because the long term trend of Bitcoins is up and has been for years. I also know only 21 million will ever exist, unlike Devcoin where there seems to be no end to the dumping if the dumping starts because there is no cap. I'm not saying a cap is even necessary but the fact that there isn't one built in provides people with no psychological safety.
i read a mention earlier that we need people to buy things with devcoin, and was tempted to point out right there that actually a lot seems to depend on WHAT people buy, or maybe on WHERE/HOW they buy it.
The what/how part is because maybe buying fiat is not the core reason the value goes down, maybe the core reason is the fiat is being bought on a certain style of market. Maybe no matter what you buy if you buy it on that format/form of market you inevitably drive price down, because the players who play those markets earn their money by trying to make sure that you need to sell more and more for less and less to sell in volume and need to buy less and less for more and more in order to buy in any volume.
With Bitcoin I can see the big picture and can see how it can work. I can do things with Bitcoin that I cannot do with Paypal. There is no reason for me to believe I can do things with Devcoin that I cannot do with Bitcoin. The only thing Devcoin offers is receiver shares and Devtome. Until we can do more with it, it's utility is not enough that it will survive competition and no I'm not going to buy and hoard on it just to try to manipulate the market. If I have to take irrational charity courses of action to save this coin then it should be forked.
So writers are like miners, they will jump on each new instamined / insta-written-for coin, there will be a few new coins a day for a while, hmm are there still a few more each day right now, i haven't even bothered to watch, more useless crap blah blah blah. let them, once they have a few hundred wallets maybe they will look back and see writing for a hundred tomes a month is enough, they can afford to drop a couple hundred from their daily grind...
-MarkM-
Why is everyone blaming the writers? Do you think if writing were removed that Devcoin would suddenly become a success? I don't see how it would change anything. I think if you remove writers okay what about artists? What about podcasters? Or are you saying Devcoin is only for programmers?
If Devcoin is only for programmers then it will never be anything more than a coin for computer nerds because 90% of the human population are not programmers and even the majority of programmers aren't going to work for Devcoin when they can write their own coin which is better than Devcoin and become a hero to all the writers and artists.
Whether you like it or not, the Bitcoin community isn't going to be made up of computer nerds forever. If you ever want to bring women into the community and non-nerds, you have to allow these people to contribute and gain wealth too.
My disagreements are on economic, financial and rationality grounds and not for philiosophical reasons (although I suppose every and any view could be defined as philiosophical). I have bitcoins, like you and most here and sure I'd love bitcoin to work. But it won't. The primary reasons for this are that of replication and deflation.
I won't reiterate my thoughts there again ad nauseum, but I do think you need to flip your points around to the perspective of somebody who doesn't own Bitcoins worth $100 or ASICminer shares worth 2.5 BTC and ask why such an individual or group would purchase Bitcoin rather than an alternative, when Bitcoin does not satisfy most basic criteria of a currency.
I'm not a billionaire. I'm not even a millionaire. Some people in this world are millionaires and billionaires. So why would I want to work in the USA, and buy shares in Google when they are so much more expensive than they were during the IPO? Why would I want to work when so many people before me became millionaires and billionaires from less work or from other peoples work?
The reason is I'm not trying to be a billionaire and never expected to be. Nor do I ever expect to be a millionaire. All I want is to work hard and at the end of the year have more money than when I started. All I want is progress, advancement, whether it makes me rich or not is irrelevant.
People dislike inflation because it makes this goal impossible. You'll never have more purchasing power next year than you had this year when inflation is high. Under deflation on the other hand you will. As technology becomes more advanced we need an economy which is more deflationary because it's more efficient. Robots will be doing most of the work and there is no point in having the traditional notions of what money is. People who are late to transition into the new economy will not be the leaders of the new economy but it does not mean we should replicate the flaws of the old economy so that the leaders of the old economy can better get a grip on the new economy.
Bitcoin is not about to go mainstream, it can't go mainstream as is. The issue is similar to the debates on this forum about fractional reserve lending, credit etc - the question is not whether these things are possible with bitcoin, it's why applying rationality and choice anybody would utilise bitcoin for such purposes. They wouldn't. It would make no sense to do so.
Bitcoin is missing some infrastructure which keeps it from going mainstream but it is experiencing the network effect and just like Facebook did, it's going mainstream whether the infrastructure is ready or not. I agree with you it's not ready for it yet, but it's happening because there is nothing else and there tens of millions waiting to try Bitcoin who are ready but who for technical or infrastructure reasons cannot actually figure out how to buy a Bitcoin. Once buying them becomes as easy as going to an ATM or a Walmart then it's going to go from having a few million users to having 20-30 million users or what I'll call the Myspace phase of development. It will probably go up to 100 million users over the course of a few years. 100 million users does not seem like a lot because it really isn't, but it's enough that the market cap will be in the trillion dollar range in my opinion because thats 100 times the amount of users we have today and I do believe that is possible within 3-5 years. I predict a trillion dollar market cap, I admit this isn't a scientific prediction it's just speculation and based on a gut feeling that if Bitcoin reaches a critical mass of around 50-100 million users that it's market cap will explode along with that. It's very possible that it could be 100 million computer programmers and male nerds and then the market cap might not grow as much but if it's a diverse 100 million the market cap will explode and the price of Bitcoins along with it.
I appreciate we don't agree and I welcome your perspective as it's structured and thought through, but if Bitcoin does not address some very straightforward problems any objective observer has to conclude it's either an outright scam, or a slightly less scammy pyramid scheme, or suffers such inherent flaws that it's rendered useless for the purposes claimed, or at best a Bitcoin 2.0 will be along to correct the flaws.
This isn't true. The idea that superior technology always wins isn't true. Myspace was a superior technology to Facebook and it did not win. Facebook won and offered nothing that Myspace didn't have and Myspace had groups, features for musicians, etc. Facebook offered the network effect and because it managed to get over 100 million users before Myspace could, it won. Bitcoin offers the network effect and even if it has nothing else this alone will make it cool. When the people buying Bitcoins now are talking about about how they bought Bitcoins at $100 when everyone was calling it a ponzi scheme and a scam then those people who called it a ponzi scheme and scam wont have people listening to them anymore. People listen to success, and all Bitcoin has to do is make enough people millionaires and the network effect of that will make people buy Bitcoins even if just to invest.
And once they buy them to invest then they'll spend some of them on investments and financial products and services or on paying bills. The point is the network effect cannot be reversed. It couldn't be reversed with the Internet, or with social media, and it's not going to be reversed with cryptocurrencies.
Either way, each of those options means there is a significant probability of Bitcoin 1.0 having a future value of 0 beyond a niche group or facilitation mechanism.
The only thing it would take to make Bitcoin be mainstream is infrastructure. When a human being can live off Bitcoins, pay their bills, rent, buy food, and Bitcoins are easy to use and buy, then it's ready to go mainstream. Right now Kashmir Hill has tried to live of Bitcoin and found it's still not ready. When this test takes place again and they find out its ready, then these journalists will begin hyping Bitcoin.
The reason I persist with these points is because it bothers me to view a group that could be affecting real change in societal empowerment and subversion of state dictates (which are not all bad, but as we have little choice I have a problem with them) instead prefering to remain in their own bubble.
Remaining blinkered to the reality that just waiting for change and for society's economic, demographic and financial structures to mould themselves to Bitcoin's economics will not happen. Rather will result in the forces that saw the promise of Bitcoin gain some initial credence over broad monetary failings and inequities doing the same to Bitcoin's monetary failings and inequities and finding a better alternative. This is not a philosophical point, it's just the way the world works.
And this is where we disagree. I don't think Bitcoin will be stopped once the technology is set up where people can live off them. It's not there yet. There needs to be Bitcoin banks, ATMs, credit/debit cards, secure hardware based wallets, distributed exchanges, and jobs which pay in Bitcoins along with the ability to buy anything with Bitcoins.
These problems are being solved this year. Sometime in 2014 most of these problems will be solved. Then it's just a matter of scaling up.
Ethicoin has the same problem. Devcoin is also not perfect, but the unlimited blockchain actually fascilitates much more than Bitcoin. I'm not sure if this was technically ever intended as such beyond the payout equity element, but it is what it is. If it persists Devcoin should over time settle to a price that gives me the ability to buy some, pay a plumber, who pays his window cleaner, who pays to have his computer repaired ...etc... over the long-term with some certainty of forward value until somebody in that chain needs and transfers to fiat. Constant exchange. This will never be possible with Bitcoin as is.
You shouldn't have to buy them. You should be able to work for them. The reason Bitcoin isn't mainstream is because there isn't enough infrastructure set up for people so they can work for them. Coinbase is solving this problem, and Bitcoin banks and credit unions solve the other half. Coupons which give discounts to people using Bitcoin will promote demand.
So you are probably correct that Bitcoin works very well for those who already have some, provided they realise their gains before they become losses. Alternatively yes a Bitcoin could be worth anything in the future as a commodity traded between a niche group, but that's a significant gamble and waste of resources in the meantime. I attribute far greater value to a medium of exchange that could in the future increasingly eliminate the requirement for fiat transactions in the fee-based private and state financial system. So yes that's my gamble but I work on probability not prayers, and I think the probability that at some point there is better broad appreciation of workable economic reality > probability that an economically flawed and skewed system will subvert reality. I don't know whether that will be devcoin but it will be a similar 'inflationary' concept, because it has to be to compensate for world realities.
There will be other coins. Bitcoin does not have to be a niche coin either. When the exchange problem is solved then anyone who wants to can buy portions of Bitcoins at any time from any ATM or Walmart. When that happens it's all over for Paypal and that along would make Bitcoin mainstream. Go into Walmart and buy a Bitcoin debit card. Go to the Bitcoin ATM to turn Bitcoin into fiat and fiat into Bitcoin. Go to the Bitcoin credit union to get loans. Receive discoints, points and rewards for buying products and services with Bitcoins.
It's an easy choice for anyone to use Bitcoins when they can get sales.
