Topic: The current Bitcoin economic model doesn't work (Read 96510 times)

An interesting thread after so much time, but the question remains: how did the first pump turn out? Was the price just doubled?

Ever? It'll never become a currency and forever remain a store of value?

You release something like this out into the wild and you longer have agency over it. It no longer matters what Satoshi had in mind or what the early developers thought Bitcoin was going to be. All that matters now is what it is, and it's definitely not a viable currency. It's only now being more widely accepted as a store of value.  I don't expect these two things to change.

Bump. Been fun reading up on this ancient thread. The Suggester, for all his angry childishness, had been proven at least somewhat right by time.

The thing that gets me, however, is the fact that although the narrative has gone from a medium of exchange to a store of value, none of the early adopters and more disturbingly, core developers, especially Satoshi, had anything like this in mind, when they laid the foundation.

Bump. OP was right, good thing bitcoin's dominance is weakening

Bumping this, wondering if in 2018 we won't see the limits of bitcoin as described in the original post.
The OP was spot on about the speculative quality of the coin (that not many would spend) and many other things.

Please, not this again.  The difficulty is a self correcting system.  It's high now because so many people are competing for the block reward, which is still subsidized.  The subsidy cuts in half every 4 years, and will be inconsequential before all 21 million bitcoins have been issued around 2140 AD.  Either way, it won't be an issue I'll live to have to worry about, and probably not you either; and it would still outlive every fiat currency the world has yet seen.  Please search the forum history before asking the same questions that have been asked for 6 years.

But what happens when all the halving has taken place and we hit the proposed 21 000 000 total bitcoins.
The difficulty is already knocking out the small individuals who are presumably the life and blood of the whole system...
Does the whole currency then get sold back to highest bidder ie: illuminati banksters and we are back to square one again..??
How does mining carry on after that if there are no rewards coming from the blockchain ... ??
How does the whole currency perpetuate into the future ... ??

Economic "law" written around the idea of infinite money creation and money based on debt is hilarious, just hilarious.

to say it doesn't work is laughable.  Perfect, no far from it but Bitcoin is spreading around the globe so yea it is doing something right if you ask me and I believe many others feel the same way.

I'd also like to refute the whole "OMG early adopters are making a fortune!" argument: for an early adopter to maximize their profits from hoarding while the price rises, they would have to never lose faith in Bitcoin.  As soon as they do, they sell, and then they're at the same level as newcomers.

Not everyone is holding forever for various reasons. Some people need to cash out to cover living expenses, some freak out like the past few days and sell, there is an equilibrium of sorts. Yes, bubbling and then popping, rinse and repeat, so what. Besides, other crypto currencies that came into existence since the original post are making sure bitcoin is being traded for them and spent at stores that recently started accepting them. This ensures people are getting less religous about holding bitcoin and developing more practical attitude just like to any other asset class.

People always tend to look at things as just black or white, but the truth is always somewhere in the middle.

What doesn't have characteristics of a ponzi after all?

Economic law has not changed in the past 4 years, so this post is no more correct today than it wasn't 4 years ago.  Go take an economics class.

Is bearish necroing of ancient threads a bullish sign?

Every word of this 4-year old post is holding true and if nothing changes, bitcoin faces the danger of the conclusion of this post.

I know the cost all too well, my friend... I'm about to be homeless -- again.
Even at age 31, I do still feel like a kid at times.  Ya take the good with the bad, ya know?

You should have responded like this...

"If we agree with the generally accepted definition of self-evident truths – those which do not require hard evidence in order to evince acceptance – we run into two problems. The first is that at some time there surely must have been some evidence that caused universal acceptance of these truths; as in, it is self-evident that the Sun rises in the east every morning because the ancients and we have seen it there; as in, every human being has material needs to stay alive because the ancients and we have gotten hungry and cold and awkward at nakedness; as in, all things are subject to the laws of cause and effect, except for the uncaused cause, whom believers call God and our secular colleagues call Nature. These observations of the Sun and realizations of our own self-needs are, in fact, evidence for their universal acceptance. But the universality of these "truisms" (another way of saying self-evident truths) allows us to dispense with the need to provide scientific evidence in support of them whenever we articulate them. Stated differently, no rational person can seriously challenge truisms when we use them as building blocks for our arguments."

-Judge Neopolitano

But as soon as you had, I would have been inclined to point out that this is one truism, and economics is a set of same.  A set of natural laws that cannot be denied without a "cost" in some other aspect of the economy.  So just as no one gets out of life alive, nor do you get to ignore economics without a cost to yourself, whether you are aware of the loss or not.

Seriously, you kids are slow.

"Everybody dies", then?

And even if I can't prove it's true, I can prove it's a classic deathmetal / grindcore album by Hateplow! 

BTW, no one can prove that "no one makes it out of life alive" because, although it's pretty obvious that it's close enough to be true, you can't prove a negative absolute. 

Almost all human history that we in the modern age consider to be factual is based upon independent documented references.  The New Testament references itself, which is not trustworthy, but there are literally dozens of independent documents that claim that Jesus of Nazareth was a real person who was executed by a Roman official.  There is more evidence that Jesus was not a work of fiction than there is that Homer was more than a pseudonym or that, excluding his own written texts, that Plato was a real person and not a pseudonym for a collection of students of Socrates.  Yet I have encountered many who doubt that Jesus lived at all who wouldn't question that Plato was a real and singular person.  Do you really think that you get to exclude the perspectives of those who disagree with you, based primarily on your personal assessments of the quality of references?  Do you think that, because you have a particular belief, that those who do not share your belief are to be discounted or derided?  If you make a statement, you have the obligation to support the statement.