Bitcoin now looks like a mature technology. The software has settled down, there's been a modest level of merchant adoption, the transaction rate hasn't increased all that much over the last six months, and the legal status has become clear. The mining side is running into power consumption cost as a limit. Bitcoin isn't a new thing any more.
With Bitcoin out of its startup phase, what happens now? It's starting to look like a niche product, positioned somewhat like gift cards. There are a number of pseudo-currencies like that - airline frequent flyer miles, all those "reward point" schemes, and the big array of prepaid cards available at retail outlets. They're just little convenience things; they have no significant impact on the financial system. It looks like that's where Bitcoin is settling.
John, you've been consistently wrong analyzing bitcoin's ecosystem and long-term prospects for years. Aggressively wrong, in fact:
We might see $3. After each big drop, there's been some recovery. But each top was lower than the last, and each recovery lasted no more than three days.
no one's listening to you.
Actually, I've received several private messages recently thanking me for keeping them from making a big financial mistake.
Now let's have a look at "cypherdoc"'s track record:
- September 3, 2011: "while the falloff has been dramatic, it appears to be stabilizing around this 8-10 range. i keep accumulating on the way down. just give it time. they can't stop it."
- August 4, 2011: "Re: $10,000 Bet that Bitcoins will outperform Gold, Silver by 100X !!! --- i happen to agree and i've staked my money on it!!!!"
- July 9, 2011: "i will also bet any or all of you btc bears/trolls in this thread 100 BTC each to be held in escrow that the USD price of 1 BTC will exceed $20 in one year."
If he's telling the truth, he's lost a lot of money in Bitcoin. Anybody fool enough to listen to him did, too.
Those people you kept from "making a big financial mistake"....you actually prevented from making a 5000%-10000% return!
A few more quotes:
I've been saying "long slow slide" for months. That happened. Now we're seeing the endgame, which looks like the endgame for most penny stocks. The volume is low, around $50,000 per day. Some of that is 'bots running the same money back and forth; the actual volume out of the market is smaller. The price moves around whenever anybody makes a sizable transaction. I'm not expecting a big drop, just random noise with a long-term downtrend.
Bitcoin is now useless as a currency, because liquidating the day's receipts for one reasonably sized store would crash the market.
The end is coming not with a bang, but with a whimper.
...It's zombie mode, the fate of many startups. They're not going anywhere, they can't pay back their investors, but they generate just enough activity to keep alive.
And I just briefly looked at your post history cuz I remember your trolling from 2011. You have many months worth of posts predicting the "endgame" of bitcoin as a result of the 2011 ramp and fall. There are probably a good deal more blantantly wrong predictions/statements from you that one could dig up.
A couple interesting quotes, though:
...
I'd like to see a digital currency that works well enough to compete with Paypal. I've seen Digicash, Beenz, and Flooz tank. Bitcoin isn't going to do much better.
...
Bitcoin's innovation is not that it prevents double-spending. That was invented by David Chaum in the 1990s and formed the basis of DigiCash. Nor is "mining" new; that's from Hashcash in the 1990s. Bitcoin combines the two concepts. The end result is a lot like Digicash, but distributed.
Despite the fact that you seem to realize that bitcoin is the first decentralized digital cash (and hence, the first *actual* realization of the efforts of all those early digital-money guys from the 80s and 90s; ie, their "holy grail" of money), you dump it into the same bucket as Digicash, Beenz, and Flooz. THAT is possibly the core source of your intellectual errors. Bitcoin is indeed not the first digital cash system. It's just the first decentralized one, and therefore, the first ideal money for modern times. That makes it a different beast entirely.
Hindsight is 20/20. It's 2014 now and you're completely right, but you should really put those posts into perspective. 2011 was a completely different world compared to now and many of the points he stated were perfectly valid for the time they were posted in.
The world found out about Bitcoin in 2011. Because of this, money started flooding in and the price of a single bitcoin exploded at around this time. After the bubble popped and the price crashed by 90%, what was left remaining were the original early adopters and - far outnumbering them - a whole bunch of people who had just discovered Bitcoin and - in the space of a few weeks, saw their investments vaporize and were convinced that Bitcoin was a failure. Most of them subsequently left in the weeks and months afterwards and almost as quickly as it began, the world soon forgot about Bitcoin.
In fact, not long after the great crash, Wired Magazine published "The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin", an article that pretty much sums up the spirit and atmosphere of the Bitcoin community at the time:
http://www.wired.com/2011/11/mf_bitcoin/all/Relevant quote:
In the public’s imagination, overnight the bitcoin went from being the currency of tomorrow to a dystopian joke. The Electronic Frontier Foundation quietly stopped accepting bitcoin donations. Two Irish scholars specializing in network analysis demonstrated that bitcoin wasn’t nearly as anonymous as many had assumed: They were able to identify the handles of a number of people who had donated bitcoins to Wikileaks. (The organization announced in June 2011 that it was accepting such donations.) Nontechnical newcomers to the currency, expecting it to be easy to use, were disappointed to find that an extraordinary amount of effort was required to obtain, hold, and spend bitcoins. For a time, one of the easier ways to buy them was to first use Paypal to buy Linden dollars, the virtual currency in Second Life, then trade them within that make-believe universe for bitcoins. As the tone of media coverage shifted from gee-whiz to skeptical, attention that had once been thrilling became a source of resentment.
