Topic: Why Bitcoin is doomed to fail, and there's nothing you can do about it. - page 14. (Read 39330 times)

According to Barry Silbert, CEO at SecondMarket...

"Phase five

Family offices may be the largest investors now, but if, as Silbert believes, institutional investors get involved, they will be the largest group.

“Phase four is going to be Wall Street, so Wall Street [will have] bitcoin as an investable asset class,” he says, adding that we should expect to see this in the coming year.

All of this heralds the fifth and final phase of bitcoin, which will be mass consumer adoption, according to Silbert. That will happen in 2015, he says."

That promises to revolutionise the way people deal with money, driving efficiencies into the process and potentially saving people money. But for that to happen, the first four stages are necessary to evolve the virtual currency and drive liquidity into the market.

We’re still at the start of phase three, and liquidity is still limited, he says. That means that consumer users will lose a significant percentage on any exchange. This stops consumers from saving much money when using it as a form of money transfer, he says, adding:

    “The reason is there’s just not enough liquidity at either end of the transfer. But if the monetary base of bitcoin grows to be $20bn, $50bn, $100bn, all of that becomes possible. So I believe that the monetary base needs to grow first before the promise of bitcoin can be fulfilled.”

From:  http://www.coindesk.com/secondmarkets-bitcoin-investment-trust-amasses-61-1million-in-3-months/

Although I don't agree 100% with all points of the original poster, I do see several valid points there.

My personal "ranking" of BTC is an open-world experiment (and it isn't even clear if this is the first Globo test balloon injected by TPTB or a true "lone wolf" development as some hope - for now due to timing I do tend towards the first option, call me a sceptical guy in terms of "that fundamental change just happened by chance in the international financial world" ; I just don't buy that after working out the typical qui bono question).

Apart from all issues which may or may not get fixed or future developments...
Everywhere I looked in terms of BTC, greed and scams are literally everywhere. They just seem to vary in intensity.
Almost feels like an extended/experimental arm of Goldman Sachs or Wall St. Wherever I look, there are snake oil sellers around every corner it seems.
The best advice someone could give a BTC beginner probably is to : at first do nothing at all but read, research, calculate, verify, double-check and read up some more... (in an environment where time is BTC, almost literally)

So far, that (not BTC itself or its philosophy) is the clearest impression I witnessed, some of the hardest part working with BTC seems to find anyone not trying to rip you off or at least skim you a little bit. Maybe its users (the human with all its fear & greed) might turn out to be BTC's biggest shortcoming even if fully legit and there's definitely no firmware patch available for that

IMHO, when it comes to high finance and big money (any type), there are no nice guys to happen to better the world for free. Never have been, never will be, short of a reincarnation of Jesus or something (if you're into that kinda stuff). It's a nice dream but that's all.

Whatever the true case will turn out to be with BTC, I will remain extremely wary of its future and treat it like a hobby.
Being an IT guy for over 30 years, I kinda learned how much trust 0's and 1's deserve and in BTC mine just turns out to be very low.
I'm already extremely skeptical of the established 0's and 1's (M2, digital bank accounts, central banks print-athlon etc.), the closest we've seen to "2nd Life economics" so far just doesn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling.

(Disclaimer : I'm a very core-valuation guy, so I prefer stuff that has inherent value recognized worldwide regardless of age, issuer, governments or intended use. Bytes to me will always be Bytes, nothing more, no matter how the story is spun. Doesn't take much to make them flip and machines are only as "smart" as their creators & operators we often don't even know; herd mentality from mass movement quickly can create a false sense of security which needs to be sanity checked every day. Reserving some sceptical thoughts has always paid off over time.)

PS.
Funny thought experiment with a maybe somewhat surprising outcome :

Considering the worst-case scenario (BTC an invention of evil governments and central bankers, the Globo "Prologue")...
If that was the case, they actually couldn't afford to let it entirely crash & burn, as this would sabotage any future concepts of a one world government, globally traded currency.
Basically, they would have to transform it at some point to enable full control & power over it (their religion). As soon as sufficient governments take active steps to legalize and tax Bitcoin aka incorporate/assimilate it (one small step for BTC, one giant leap for TPTB), that's when I would head for the nearest exit.
(seeing very first developments in that area but too early to tell)

To make Bitcoin illegal, USA need to bomb some of their civilians again. message tv and say that terract was paid with bitcoin and we cant track who did it, that is all. thats is the way for big countries to achieve what they want..

have fate in bitcoin! be strong! speculations = speculations

You'll be very surprised to know how http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing the British computer scientist were dead.

Yes #1 is the biggest one...when the USA, EU, and China, India, etc, ban the use of BTC and make it a felony, then usage will die off really quick.  If they can make homosexuality illegal in some of these countries, they can certainly make bitcoin illegal.

Ignorant and annoying as always.

Instead of just calling him a troll why don't we try to debate some of his points? That's how discussion works.

The first question anyone should be asking is, why is a guy who doesn't believe in bitcoins, thinks that they are a useless commodity, and is convinced that ultimately they will fail, posting his unsolicited opinion on a forum dedicated to the advancement of bitcoins, the desimination of information about bitcoins, and how to become part of the bitcoin community?

It's called trolling--no matter how long he's been on the forum--it's trolling.

So, I have seen all the OP's points refuted except for 2.

1. Tyrant hostility & centralization because tyrants hate to lose power (he titled it "decentralized currency"). The history of seizures and shutdowns of companies like egold is proof of their willingness to do so. The way the EU is centralizing their power over bitcoin is also very worrying.

2. 51% attack. The latter is especially worrying with the fact ASICs have ruined the decentralized nature of the currency. What is to stop the NSA from threatening the people in butterfly labs into stopping public production and manufacturing just for them until they have enough? Or heck, just have armed blue clad thugs seize the factories, blueprints, and all existing unsold product. OR just commissioning boing and some other military contractor to manufacture a ton of ASICs for them?

Honestly I don't understand why everyone didn't abandon bitcoin for litecoin already when ASIC problem became an issue

Just let his thread die, he works very hard to keep this bs alive, he presents nothing new and everything is based on his bs/assumptions.

 
It took decades and almost bankrupcy for Apple to achieve their "dominant" position and compete with Microsoft... and not even 1% of the population had computers by the end the 70s so lets just all chill down and enjoy the ride of this new and quite revolutionary technology, whether doomed or successful we won't find out until its too late anyway  

Huh Some of the reasons why bitcoin will fail are the very same reasons I use it.

I believe the Hero Member +1

the price dosn't need to drop it needs to go to the moon, and their needs to be a tonne more digits added on the end too, 1 satoshi is gotta be worth more than a Zimbabwe dollar i rekon, so their needs to be lower denominations otherwise such countries cannot effective factor it in, that being said i just kinda wrote that last bit on the fly

Decide what you have in your scenario , cause it starts without small people entering the system and because of that it ends with millions of users losing purchasing power.

cause he went full retard 

Unless small people get an incentive to exchange fiat int btc and spend it on something they want bitcoin is going nowhere.

Think of it as shares of a great payment system.
Only right now you have HUGE shareholders holding like 70-80% that are not using their own service. Speculators made them rich But speculators are not using it to buy anything as well.
Whales could get bored and decide to cash in their huge gains and retire.
That would bring the marked down and introduce a huge drop that would cause millions of small time, real bitcoin user to loose their purchasing power and loose the trust into the payment system for good.

Speculators are betting on market but they are a huge factor as well in this.

The thing is we don't need huge market cap to make bitcoin work. We just need to make it circulate.
If the market cap i HUGE in comparison to coins spend on daily goods and services. That means that hoarders could tank the market.

To bet on the fact that dollar is overvalued is OK, but don't bet on Bitcoin to skyrocket if the US government decides to invent something newer-digital to replace it to hide the fact that it is debased so much. I mean it will in USD/BTC but the purchasing power will not.

IMO it would be best if the whales dumped now. Sure value would go down, but that would be great cause there would be no more such risk of huge price drops, cause millions of merchants and small consumers would buy it cheap.

Prices would rise and merchants would have some capital gains to reinvest in incentives for buyers to buy with bitcoin.
And we would be ready to start using in in massive proportions.