rpietila, what do you think will now happen when Wall Street started trading Bitcoin. Do you think it's good or bad?
Good initially. Bad over the long run. Good initially because they'll pump the price getting in. After that, they have a million tricks to play.
They certainly have a million tricks - manipulating news, huge liquidity to move the price, etc. But, there is the rest of the world involved
here, and no derivatives, naked short selling, etc. which they no longer have at there disposal - I get the feeling once BTC gets going, there bag of
tricks will be much smaller.
But, ass long as they have "the" or "a" reserve currency at their disposal, they can certainly make things extremely
ugly. Buying and selling huge amounts to make BTC very volatile (like we have not yet seen) is a worry. They might be able to effectively neuter it.
Could you imagine them buying the complete order book up, then dumping everything? When you can print money, why not? When you can hide
behind countries, people, etc. why not?
But I think rather than that they will try to utilize it...
IAS
Re tricks: Would you pay dollars for a contract to be able to sometime in the future, not to receive a certain weight of gold, but to receive dollars for that weight at the current gold price? That is essentially the paper gold market. Maybe you would, because you can not buy a bank quality gold bar, divide it in parts, keep them for a while, sell one part to someone in India, another part to someone in China, without incurring cost for storage, protection, transport, regeneration and assaying. You also get, with paper, near perfect liquidity.
But would you do the same with bitcoin? Probably not.
The paper gold adds volume to the physical gold, and thus depresses the price of gold. I'm quite convinced that paper bitcoin (in the gold paper sense, not paper wallets!) will be offered, but will not play an important role.
We are talking about something Disruptive in BTC. We all know how powerful, manipulative and dangerous, etc. the derivatives market is. My hope is that the disruptive force spawns more disruptions, which I think is a given. Little Black Swans are among us... (And the event horizon is short, hard to see imo.) I don't think it can be easily steered, at least past a point in time. Sometimes those in control, only think they are in control, and when they realize they are not, well, then they are not. We seem to be approaching that space in time.
I don't see bitcoin as the solution. It is still money and if it exists in 50 years or further into the future, I think we will have failed as a species. But, it is a destabilizing step in the right direction. It gets us questioning what money is and such. That is more important than BTC imo. Taking away the power of others to create our realities. I am very open to a money that just acts as an exchange, and can in no way give you power over others. Perhaps that is just understanding, but in the interim it might be time based or involve other "stepping stones".
To answer your question, I will not get involved in contracts and that form of speculation. Not being evasive, I'm just saying it doesn't much matter to me. The quicker that profiting/manipulative system is gone, the better. I'm glad in a way that we at least have a chance for some change. I am, or rather was, extremely familiar with the manipulated precious metals markets, but still have something resembling hope, but not exactly that. Maybe trust?
As Terrence McKenna said, We are a part of Nature, we come from it. Just as an apple tree apples, the Earth peoples.
And to think that we can actually guide it, is a bit illusory (or something like that).
Its about sharing
