Topic: Watching amateur finance types flail - page 13. (Read 35339 times)

Hmm, low startup 100%-1000% profit margins(if you started by early may) compared to high trading startup fiat currency markets ?

This is more fun, more profitable with low startup funds(big margins on trades), damn its so obvious why this is worth doing. I dont say if you succesfully trade other markets that you should invest all your time in bitcoins however investing a few hours a day can bring you alot of profit for very little stress.

Or, you would have made enough to comfortably surf the forums and watch everyone get BTC valuation completely and utterly wrong. I haven't seen so much 'bubble' talk since reading up on the South Sea Trading Company. I wouldn't be in equities if you paid me, because the dollar is about to keel over and die a horrible death. Good luck moving anything out of that deathtrap once it collapses.

That goes for standard banks too, I wouldn't have anything in there you aren't prepared to lose. Because when it happens, you better believe they'll clamp down on anyone pulling out any funds at all.

Best of luck!

I think the reason why he's wrong, and your wrong for believing him is because bitcoin is not some type of company, or group of people trying to take advantage of an original idea. I think that bitcoins are a divine currency that everyone has equal access to, whether it's praise or concern, this community proves it. We are all bitcoin, bitcoin isn't some exchanger, or business, or group, bitcoin just is, like the Internet itself. We are creating an entirely new web of powerful encrypted transactions that not even the best hackers in the world can crack. Tell me how that's not value people?

The OP was entertaining, to say the least.

First, you can look at Bitcoins in a lot of ways.  But to compare it to Digicash and Beenz really shows that you haven't done your homework.  Probably a lot like predicting "the dot-com crash over the last Decade".  (That would have been a little more impressive if done in 1998, and not over the last decade.)  Digicash and Beenz have only a very little bit in common with Bitcoin.

If you look at Bitcoins as analogous to the Gold Rush of 1849, it might provide a better parallel.  Early miners made a lot of money, while later miners "made a living".  If you had never heard of a gold rush, and 1849 hit, and you heard of a lot of people getting rich on gold, you (as an uneducated person) might be tempted to buy gold.  This, of course, would be silly, except that a lot of people buying gold drives the price of gold up, and so as gold gets attention, people see that others have made money buying gold, and so you get the bubble.  People buying Bitcoin is a lot like people buying gold in 1849 - it doesn't make a lot of sense, unless you believe that it either is a) a good store of wealth, or b) going to rise in utility /value in the future.

Bitcoin is going to get more attention primarily because it has solved a problem that has never been solved before - Beenz and Digicash didn't solve it.  Paypal and Mastercard didn't solve it.  Cash doesn't solve it.  Bitcoin has a very clever solution to a very difficult problem.  And it's the first to solve it.  So Bitcoin is going to get attention.  And with attention comes investment.  And with investment comes a rise in value.  As long as Bitcoin continues to GROW in the attention it gets, chances are good that people will try to figure out how to invest in it.  And to see that there were only 61,000 accounts in the Mt. Gox leaked database, that shows how truly tiny the Bitcoin community is.  In fact, there were less than 10,000 prior to May 15th or so.

It will take YEARS for the Bitcoin infrastructure to approach that of regular currencies.  That's obvious.

Many people who have taken a close look at Bitcoin from a mathematical standpoint see the beauty of it, and instantly want to "invest".  Unfortunately, there's no "Bitcoin Corp" that is a reasonable investment, so the best they can do is buy the currency.  This will continue until some obvious leader becomes "invest-able" at which time, a significant amount of "Bitcoin speculative investments" will go that route.



Currency speculation isn't the best way to make money in Bitcoin.  Building the infrastructure is.  (There's a reason why the remnants of the Gold Rush of 1849 are Wells Fargo and Levis Jeans.  They made sound investments "around" the gold rush, not in it.)  But there's a short term opportunity to make some cash on speculation, and there's nothing wrong with that.

If Bitcoin reaches Paypal's level of success in a decade, then you can do the math - there's a limited number of Bitcoins, and that number needs to support the sort of environment that Paypal supports.  So that means they will be worth over $100 in about 7.5 years.   Not thousands.  Not mllions.  But between $100 and $200.

But if you build a nice Bitcoin Company that will benefit from this trend, and go public, the public will flock to you (assuming you have a decent plan, and Bitcoins keep gaining in mindshare.)

The "rabid fanboys" certainly do exist, as can be seen from the replies in this thread. To prop up Bitcoin, they have to back their rabid fanaticism with substantial amounts of hard cash.

I think your right, I think most of the people here are expert IT people who understand the technology that is at hand. Sure there can be competing crypto-currency operators who can duplicate our code. Just how gold and silver compete today, we will be the gold standard, and any other crypto currency that trys to ride off our backs will be silver or bronze.

one thing is for sure, nobody on this forum is actually good at making money in the real financial market.  If you are good, you would not be here, you would be managing portfolios and dishing out advice for wealthy clients while raking in huge consulting/management fees.

Dear John,

you are right on everything. But you forget that we love the idea of a decentralized crypto currency. I don't trust in dollar, yuan or euro. Everyone for a particular reason. The dollar is just printed like the us government needs it. Yuan is good protected and artificial underrated by the chinese government. And the euro isn't safe, because eu isn't really stabilized. Where is the world currency, which we need for a global connected market?
No it isn't bitcoin. But i see it as worldwide crypto currency version 0.1 and somewhere it has to start.

ooo, oo, that looks just like another graph I have seen.

He did recommend a movie back in September...... Gordon Gekko's back!!!

John, if these problems are as classic as you claim, then surely their solutions are also classic, and will be straightforward to implement.

What then is the issue here?

Gold is tangible.  Bitcoin in intellectual property.  More specifically, intellectual property with no patent.  

For Bitcoin to be successful, it must not only provide a service that differentiates itself from other payment mediums, it must also protect it's business model or concept.  You can't create gold, alchemists have tried for thousands of years.  You can create an exact copy of Bitcoin and just slap some other name on it.  That's the real problem here, some of you are so amazed by this idea that you can't see the simple fact that while it may have been a really ingenious idea, it can be copied to infinity.

Gold has value because of its scarcity.  Everyone is so hung up on the fact that Bitcoin is naturally deflationary when in reality it's exponentially inflationary because anyone can copy this idea at any time.

The counterpoint to this is that all money is in a state of permanent bubble - the value of money is always higher then it's substrate - that's like the very thing that defines money.  Also that additional value comes from speculation - the source of money value is the speculation that in the future someone will accept it as a payment for something else.  Historically (as it is very well explained in http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html) this additional value was gained gradually.  It was growing from real barter value of things and from how easy it was to use something as money.  But this small steps process is only the way evolution works - it is reasonable to think that we can also 'engineer' money and leap over the many evolutionary steps.  It is also plausible to think that the appreciation we have of art (and of gold as something used to make it) is the evolutionary effect (or co-effect) of the fact that it is useful as money.  Of course all of this is very risky - and there is no guarantee that the value of bitcoin will not drop down to zero very quickly (due to it's bubbly nature) - but this is fair for a 'startup' currency.

Another possible counterpoint is that bitcoin in it's core is also a money transfer mechanism that can be used in all the places where PayPal is now used.  Sure it is not yet there - but again - this is the startup phase.  A $1.5 billion evaluation for a system like that is not unreasonable - as we have seen.

Not possible.

If you're in, you're in and if you're out, you're out.
Nobody is neutral.
Next you'll be telling us that there are no absolutes.

For a guy whose entire raison d'etre is dooming everything to failure, this is a piss-poor example of the art.

Money has to have revenue?  What are you on about mate?

Your criticisms could be levied against gold or any commodity as an investment vehicle. Yes, Bitcoins are not stocks, but that doesn't mean they aren't worth investing in. Or are you suggesting that every non-revenue generating asset is a zero-sum game for patsies?

Bitcoin is still a 'baby' in its development stage. It would be folly to judge where it will stand in even 2 years from now.

The U.S. Dollar doesn't generate revenue. Gold doesn't generate revenue. Oil doesn't generate revenue. Are they worthless?

Anything that reduces transaction costs has monetary value. The patsies are the miners who sell cheap.  

Hi Mr. Nagle, I dont think you should own a computer, being IT illiterate and making claims about something that revolves around IT experience is very important.

On a more genuine note, you are no different from alot of other so-called experts who are making claims about something that isnt even remotely provable.

kiba, we need you!

Of course, Bitcoin does not generate revenue - but neither does gold, right?
Bitcoin has unique properties that make it useful in some contexts (just like gold) and that is its baseline value. Everything above is speculation or hope of growing use in the future (again the same as with gold).

Bitcoin is a new web-technology that enables people and startups to do new things which were previously impossible. Nobody can accurately determine the true value of this, but we all place our bets and that's what makes up the price.

I personally would not underestimate the creative potential of the community which Bitcoin has managed to gather.