Topic: Pitfalls of Bitcoin (Read 2460 times)

I didn't write that last post very well. I meant it in terms of using it strictly as a currency, instead of using it as an investment opportunity. I fully understand the mechanics of monetary exchanges. The difficult part doesn't come up when you view it as an investment or an exercise speculation.

The difficult part comes when you see the opportunity to use it as a currency. A majority of real world commerce ignores exchange rates. If the dollar went down against the yen yesterday, you don't see prices change at WalMart today. Long term financial trends impact prices, especially in international commerce, but most people aren't ever aware of it except as soundbites from their favorite finance show.

Hypothetically: I charge 50 BitCoins as a flat rate to develop a forum sig. I'm an awesome artist, and well worth the price (I said hypothetically, ok? ) I get some 400 people buying sigs, and thus the market has determined that Mountain Man sigs are worth 50 BTC.

How do you get to the point where people think of the value as being 50 BTC, natively, instead of... "50 BTC is currently $700, therefore the sig is worth $700!"

From what I've learned over the last few days, the only way that people start using BTC as a reference is if the BTC "native" economy gets big. Use it often enough for enough different things and the perception stabilizes.

The way things are now, people use bitcoin as a proxy for their favorite currency, using the exchange rates to measure value. That will change and people will be able to make (and lose) money when/while that happens.

It shouldn't be that hard to "grok" (the expression is grating on me, but I'll get over it). The short answer is if you hold BTC you will gain if it strengthens against the dollar and lose if it weakens in dollar terms. Spending before a rise in BTC/USD is bad, but spending before a fall is good.

Say you bought 50 BitCoins at 1BTC/$10 on Monday, spent them on oh, say, 10 grams of cocaine @ $50 per, and the following day BitCoin 'strengthened' to 1BTC/$15, you will be sad and very wired.
Because if you had only waited a day, you could have had all that smack for just BTC33.3 (33.3*$15=$499.5) and you would have still had 16.7BTC left (16.7*$15=$250).

And the reverse is true, if you did the same deal and then BTC suddenly weakened to 1BTC/$5 on Tuesday, you would have had quite a bargain on all that charlie _ you now have $500 worth of coke, and the dealer is left holding lousy bitcoins. You could snort half, sell the other half for $250, and use that $250 to buy back your original 50BTC.

Anyhow, it's rational to hoard if you believe BitCoin will go up in dollar terms, and rational to dump if you think it will go down (I'm in the latter camp).

Keep it simple, mentally convert BTC to dollars and do your best to reason out whether you think BTC is going to rise or fall. Consider all you know about the amount of BTC out there and who may be holding it, versus the BitCoin economy and its potential to grow _ in short, whether buyers or sellers will be more eager in the future.

I'll resist more bashing BitCoin and just say the most important thing to decide is how confident you are about your opinion, how much you're willing to 'risk' on it.

PS for fun, run those same numbers and pretend you bought 100BTC on the first day, but managed to only spend your usual 50BTC/$500 worth on blow. The results may surprise you and introduce you to the benefits of 'hedging your bets.'

This. The "store of value" concept is where volatility in BitCoin transfers difficult to grok. Am I losing value if I spend BitCoins and the price goes up the next day/week/month? If so, then am I growing wealth by hoarding? And so on. Definitely takes some thinking about.

A slightly more serious answer: try traveling in foreign countries for a while. You'll find out pretty quick that you'll tend to choose a reference currency or maybe two _ even in your head _ to see whether something is cheap or expensive.

In practical terms, in the United States that reference point is going to be the dollar in almost every scenario, the exception being that there's a real currency collapse, since the dollar hasn't had any serious competition (no, not even from gold) in any of our lifetimes. And in case of a dollar collapse, it's going to take people some time to figure out new reference points, and a lot of things more serious than the BitCoin experiment are going to be changing in the real world.

The only thing that's close to what you're imagining is that the BitCoin economy would become large enough that its exchange rate to the dollar would stop being so volatile. That's within the realm of the possible (but still unlikely in my view).

Fortunately for BitCoin dreamers, technology is on their side in that they can weather just about any volatility if BitCoin is truly destined for an enduring, if niche, place in the real economy. Computers will continue to do the 'price checking' for them, presumably by having a look at the current exchange rate at MtGox or whatever dominant forum for discovering spot prices emerges.

All of this is a major argument for keeping your real money in dollars as a store of value and changing into BitCoin only when you want to carry out a transaction. Unless of course you want to speculate on the future of BitCoin one way or another.

I'm not in the business of giving financial advice, but my opinion is that those who go "short" will do better than those that are "long" BTC vs USD.

By classical econonic models, bitcoin has lots of weakness and is still very unmature, but if we are planning the future with a worldwide currency, every existing rules could be changed given good implementation

wealth is not labor, it is desire, the more desire, the more wealth

This could be the bubble for the next 10 years, maybe 10 times bigger than housing bubble(measured in USD)!

uploaded.to just started accepting bitcoins. If more companies like this join will we get our pizza price? I don't know much about economy, but I don't see how can this stop the market speculation...

As an economic news junkie, this is a really interesting discussion.  Perhaps BC is the birth of a new medium of exchange, albeit a floating measure that mirrors fiat values?

^^
I agree. There's still a lot of ground to cover, but I'm hopeful that the project has reached critical mass already.

The best thing about BitCoin so far, for me, is that it's smart people money. There's a noticable lack of morons in this community, and it makes discussing things so much easier.

Merchants will be looking for any Bitcoin POS system to integrate seamlessly with their existing EFTPOS  platform, to offer a similar level of automatic record-keeping, and which offers excellent merchant support.  All of these things can be developed but it's naive to believe that merchants will be falling over themselves to adopt Bitcoin before it can reliably offer the same advantages as other payment processing systems at a lower cost.  Ideally, it needs to be able to handle both transactions where identifying the customer making the payment is essential (by tying the transaction to a customer reference number) as well as those where that information is unimportant.  It also needs to be as hassle-free as possible from the viewpoint of both the vendor and the customer and it's nowhere near that point yet.  

As the majority of merchants will be more interested in adding Bitcoin to their currently accepted payment methods rather than only accepting Bitcoin, the issue of easily converting Bitcoin to local currency in near real time will also need to be solved.  The current standard for settlement of credit and debit card transactions is overnight cleared funds and merchants are going to need the capacity for being able to get funds from conversion into both their local currency and their Bitcoin accounts at least that fast without any hassle.  

A Point Of Sale system would be easier to implement with BitCoins than normal currency. I think people underestimate the flexibility and ease of use this presents to developers. That offsets the cost of entry into regulated markets significantly, because security and regulation compliant software can be developed and implemented at a fraction of the cost. What remains is licensing fees and proper registration.

BitCoin is not itself a disruptive technology. The internet is, and BitCoin is part of how the internet is disruptive. I think people do overestimate BitCoin's significance, but at the same time, we're nowhere near the saturation point in terms of how people will use, value, and perceive BitCoin. There's huge potential here, even if it is driven underground.

The infrastructure which underlies the financial services you've mentioned is enormous and I don't believe that it can be duplicated at no cost.  While Bitcoin is well suited to being a means of exchange in grey and black markets, the kind of confidence you're talking about probably depends on it operating within a regulated environment and there are significant barriers to entering the regulated financial services industry.

I also think that many people seriously underestimate how much Bitcoin will have to evolve before accepting it becomes attractive to merchants.

To be honest, I'm deeply skeptical of bitcoin...

Yeah, no. I'm not saying it becomes the primary measure of value in the universe. I am saying that there is potential for a singular market in which BitCoin becomes the standard of exchange. It would define its own measure of value. Not the other way around - it doesn't become valuable unless people perceive it as having worth. Right now, people are mostly gambling with it, instead of using it as a currency, which I see as a net negative.

Imagine people constantly adjusting their prices in USD to accommodate minor changes in the foreign exchange markets. Chaos would ensue... amply demonstrated by the wild daily swings in the BTC exchanges, and the silly argument over payment of 1 BitCoin here in the forums, etc.

I'm not arguing that BitCoin replace the dollar or anything like that... that would be ridiculous. I see BitCoin replacing, or at least reforming, various services that are currently dominated by PayPal, Credit Card companies, and banks. If BitCoin stabilizes, then people will be able to use it confidently as a means of exchanging value.

Any other flaws in the network either destroy it (susceptibility to quantum or other paradigm shift computing revolutions) or can be mitigated or sidestepped entirely by the community as a whole (invalidating and rolling back gamed blockchains, forking, third party services, escrow, and so on.)

The only problem I see long term is how does the BTC network go from where it is now to people using it regularly and confidently without the prospect of losing a significant % of the value in a transaction simply by paying early?

People are going to keep trading it as a commodity for as long as doing so returns more value than spending it as a currency.  Even when there are many more goods and services available to spend Bitcoins on, it will often make more sense to purchase them using hard currency than to buy them with Bitcoins because of the potential for Bitcoins to be worth more a few hours or days later.

I'll keep this short. I think you are deeply confused.

"I think that those things create value, and alongside the cost to produce, with a healthy (bitcoin) market, should combine to create a conventional BTC value outside of its relationship to the USD or other traded currencies."

No matter *how* you define BitCoin (asset, commodity, currency, or total BS), it's always going to have some value relative to other currencies, assets and commodities. I would argue the correct value is 1BTC=$0.

If you're imagining that it will become the primary measure of value on Earth (the way the dollar is now, for most people), you need to put down the bong and back away from your computer before you damage yourself financially.

Ok, well and thoroughly derailed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsic_theory_of_value
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsic

Such that the features of the BitCoin system allow a currency unit to be traded securely and conveniently, with various and sundry positive side effects, and such that those features are a valuable, inherent, and essential part of the BitCoin system, BitCoin has intrinsic value.

If you want to argue the nihilistic point of view or get into some sort of solipsistic argument in which nothing external can have intrinsic value, then please... start a new thread.

Let's try to get back to what BitCoin can do to get back to being a currency, rather than primarily a commodity? I'd find that infinitely more interesting.

Bitcoins have intrinsic value if anything else does. It's properties are advantageous

Ok, so the use of BitCoin has intrinsic value (the aforementioned security, etc.) Back on topic maybe?

All value is extrinsic, any perceived intrinsic value is a result of cultural bias and ideology.

I dont plan to post it anymore times. Other than i agree with you "No utilization = no value", to me its the utilization that holds the true value.