The Bubbly Bitcoin Thread -- Merged Threads

[dugsbody]

5 hours ago, ThePrufeshanul said:

Yes but the original vision of Satoshi, as outlined in his White Paper, is that Bitcoin worked as a peer-to-peer system of electronic cash not as a form of digital gold. 

Whilst there is obvious value in creating a form of digital gold, that vision isn't "Bitcoin". 

Hence Bitcoin Cash.

Except they're still missing the most obvious reason bitcoin isn't going to fulfil the original intention and so neither will bitcoin cash. In the presence of both bitcoin and regular fiat money, people will hoard bitcoin and spend fiat money. Because bitcoin (and bitcoin cash) are deflationary and fiat money isn't. And fiat money isn't going anywhere.

[scb]

3 hours ago, guest_northshore said:

Use VISA to use Bitcoin. Errm

Don't see the issue. I went to France last week and bought things in Euro but still paid on my VISA that converted my pounds. This is no different. Once it takes off obviously the need to convert will be eradicated.

[guest_northshore]

18 minutes ago, scb said:

Don't see the issue. I went to France last week and bought things in Euro but still paid on my VISA that converted my pounds. This is no different. Once it takes off obviously the need to convert will be eradicated.

I think it's backwards. Cryptos should be developing into alternative private means to e.g. transfer, clear, settle euros or other currencies/assets.

While not necessarily my priority rationales, the VISA approach seems to undermine every common rationale for Bitcoin - trustless, security, decentralised, privacy, autonomy.

[Inoperational Bumblebee]

4 hours ago, guest_northshore said:

Use VISA to use Bitcoin. Errm

Surely this is equivalent to any other off-chain scaling solution like Lightning Network?

[EDIT] There doesn't necessarily just have to be one, exclusive to Bitcoin. You wouldn't argue that gold is not an effective store of value; even though you can't spend it in the shops there are multiple routes to translating it's store of value to something more 'spendable'. That doesn't undermine its inherent 'features'.

[FURTHER EDIT] Just because it doesn't fulfil it's original intention in the way it was originally envisioned, it doesn't mean that interim methods seemingly contrary to its purpose won't help to achieve the end goal.

Edited November 17, 2017 by Inoperational Bumblebee

[guest_northshore]

25 minutes ago, Inoperational Bumblebee said:

Surely this is equivalent to any other off-chain scaling solution like Lightning Network?

[EDIT] There doesn't necessarily just have to be one, exclusive to Bitcoin. You wouldn't argue that gold is not an effective store of value; even though you can't spend it in the shops there are multiple routes to translating it's store of value to something more 'spendable'. That doesn't undermine its inherent 'features'.

[FURTHER EDIT] Just because it doesn't fulfil it's original intention in the way it was originally envisioned, it doesn't mean that interim methods seemingly contrary to its purpose won't help to achieve the end goal.

I don't buy a hoarding/VISA/CME interim approach as steps to empowered progress or real change. But I seem to have different crypto hopes to most.

[goldbug9999]

1 hour ago, guest_northshore said:

I think it's backwards. Cryptos should be developing into alternative private means to e.g. transfer, clear, settle euros or other currencies/assets.

While not necessarily my priority rationales, the VISA approach seems to undermine every common rationale for Bitcoin - trustless, security, decentralised, privacy, autonomy.

Well I see it as a progression like this:

1. Save in fiat, spend in fiat
2. Save in crypto, spend in fiat
3. Save in crypto, spend in crypto

Right now at least 99% of the world is at stage 1 so were probably going to move to stage 2 to some degree before 3. As far as stage 2 options go, visa seems like as good an option as any other, although we may transition from 1 to 3 more directly as appropriate tech becomes available.

Edited November 17, 2017 by goldbug9999

[Wurzel Of Highbridge]

I got some super rare tulip bulbs if anyone is interested. Word is they could be worth £100k next year, a bargain at £4k each!!

[Inoperational Bumblebee]

21 minutes ago, guest_northshore said:

I don't buy a hoarding/VISA/CME interim approach as steps to empowered progress or real change. But I seem to have different crypto hopes to most.

Maybe I am misinterpreting, but I do understand your idealogical point of view. I don't personally believe that Bitcoin will meet the needs of a currency replacement, probably Dash or Ripple will, but I feel there will be multiple steps along the way to achieve the end goal of full crypto. What is your ideal end result, and are you willing to propose intermediate steps that achieve that?

13 minutes ago, goldbug9999 said:

Well I see it as a progression like this:

1. Save in fiat, spend in fiat
2. Save in crypto, spend in fiat
3. Save in crypto, spend in crypto

Right now at least 99% of the world is at stage 1 so were probably going to move to stage 2 to some degree before 3. As far as stage 2 options go, visa seems like as good an option as any other, although we may transition from 1 to 3 more directly as appropriate tech becomes available.

I'm in general agreement with this, and as I am personally saving at least some in crypto, it made sense to put the bulk in a deflationary asset like Bitcoin when measured in inflationary pounds Sterling. It hasn't proved me wrong so far.

[guest_northshore]

20 minutes ago, goldbug9999 said:

Well I see it as a progression like this:

1. Save in fiat, spend in fiat
2. Save in crypto, spend in fiat
3. Save in crypto, spend in crypto

Right now at least 99% of the world is at stage 1 so were probably going to move to stage 2 to some degree before 3. As far as stage 2 options go, visa seems like as good an option as any other, although we may transition from 1 to 3 more directly as appropriate tech becomes available.

I see the transactional and clearing utility as being potentially transformative. Otherwise I think money should be a free market subject to forces of the real economy, not associated to any particular asset or interest group or favouring pre-determined monetary/price inflation or deflation.

[guest_northshore]

18 minutes ago, Inoperational Bumblebee said:

Maybe I am misinterpreting, but I do understand your idealogical point of view. I don't personally believe that Bitcoin will meet the needs of a currency replacement, probably Dash or Ripple will, but I feel there will be multiple steps along the way to achieve the end goal of full crypto. What is your ideal end result, and are you willing to propose intermediate steps that achieve that?

I'm in general agreement with this, and as I am personally saving at least some in crypto, it made sense to put the bulk in a deflationary asset like Bitcoin when measured in inflationary pounds Sterling. It hasn't proved me wrong so far.

Honestly, I don't know. Something more than currency or asset. Transaction, transfer, clearing for multi-asset or currency claims. Infrastructure not money.

I'm not fundamentally interested in another scheme to enrich individuals, rather than means of empowering the public to bypass or challenge authority/rentseeker interests.

I'm not bothered by the Bitcoin as digital gold angle. Only insofar as it may slow other developments, or when the narrative starts to use youth-interest as a smokescreen for own wealth accumulation interets.

[doomed]

People still blind to what is actually going on. I have ordered extra popcorn for next weekend. 

[Jonesy74]

20 minutes ago, doomed said:

People still blind to what is actually going on. I have ordered extra popcorn for next weekend. 

Please enlighten us. No sarcasm intended.  I for one am interested in what you mean.

[dugsbody]

9 hours ago, goldbug9999 said:

Well I see it as a progression like this:

1. Save in fiat, spend in fiat
2. Save in crypto, spend in fiat
3. Save in crypto, spend in crypto

Right now at least 99% of the world is at stage 1 so were probably going to move to stage 2 to some degree before 3. As far as stage 2 options go, visa seems like as good an option as any other, although we may transition from 1 to 3 more directly as appropriate tech becomes available.

We will never get to point 3. Governments will never sanction a currency they cannot control or transactions they cannot tax (btw, tax is part of our social contract and is a good thing). Governments are not going anywhere, neither is fiat, and therefore the most that bitcoin can hope to be is a store of wealth with perhaps the early adopters who got rich on it slowly spending it.

Edited November 18, 2017 by dugsbody

[Eddie_George]

8 hours ago, dannyf said:

Please enlighten us. No sarcasm intended.  I for one am interested in what you mean.

Probably another pump and dump like last weekend. BCash is a scam, run by criminals. Don't let them take your money.

[Inoperational Bumblebee]

10 hours ago, doomed said:

People still blind to what is actually going on. I have ordered extra popcorn for next weekend. 

What appears to actually be going on is miners gaming the difficulty adjustments. It's no coincidence that when one is up the other is down.

[goldbug9999]

12 hours ago, guest_northshore said:

I see the transactional and clearing utility as being potentially transformative.

For me the transformation thing is a form of sound money available to everyone, a form of money noone can devalue or control, that was what made me go "aha" when I first heard of bitcoin. The end game being a reduction in financial and political power of central banks - bitcoin will probably never replace national currencies but it could get large enough that they have to be managed much better or risk a mass flight to bitcoin/crypto. 

Of course the decentralised trust mechanism has other uses, especially combined with the idea of smart contracts, some of which are quite far reaching but  ... were still 5-10 years away from crypto being at the level of ubiquity required to make most of these ideas viable. It would be like trying to launch facebook in the early 90s when most people on the internet were probably the only person in their social circle that was.

 

Quote

Otherwise I think money should be a free market subject to forces of the real economy, not associated to any particular asset or interest group or favouring pre-determined monetary/price inflation or deflation.

At the end of the day you have to have a mechanism to assign value to medium of exchange. You can tie it to fiat (e.g. tether) or you can bake in a fiat-neutral monetary policy and let people bid it up (or down) to a value (e.g. bitcoin and 90% of other cryptos). What other option do you think is available ?.

Edited November 18, 2017 by goldbug9999

[guest_northshore]

1 hour ago, goldbug9999 said:

For me the transformation thing is a form of sound money available to everyone, a form of money noone can devalue or control, that was what made me go "aha" when I first heard of bitcoin. The end game being a reduction in financial and political power of central banks - bitcoin will probably never replace national currencies but it could get large enough that they have to be managed much better or risk a mass flight to bitcoin/crypto. 

Of course the decentralised trust mechanism has other uses, especially combined with the idea of smart contracts, some of which are quite far reaching but  ... were still 5-10 years away from crypto being at the level of ubiquity required to make most of these ideas viable. It would be like trying to launch facebook in the early 90s when most people on the internet were probably the only person in their social circle that was.

At the end of the day you have to have a mechanism to assign value to medium of exchange. You can tie it to fiat (e.g. tether) or you can bake in a fiat-neutral monetary policy and let people bid it up (or down) to a value (e.g. bitcoin and 90% of other cryptos). What other option do you think is available ?.

If you're motivated by 'sound money' that's obviously up to you. But absolute monetary determination is encoded and it's not neutral. Deflationary money is as skewed as inflationary money; switching the winner/loser dynamic but not resolving financial and political power concentration.

As I said, I think money should reflect competition & underlying supply and demand. I like the experimentation going on but I'm not in favour of supply monopolisation and rent extraction - be that fiat, land or crypto driven.

Other option - I'm not clever enough to have the solution. It's possible to conclude on what isn't mutually optimal without knowing exactly what is. Crypto focus to date is on price not value, and on universal not local. I think that's a mistake in terms of foundations and potential. It may be optimal for price speculation, but that's not what I'm referring to.

[goldbug9999]

1 hour ago, guest_northshore said:

Deflationary money is as skewed as inflationary money; switching the winner/loser dynamic but not resolving financial and political power concentration.

Deflationary/sound money is key, it is the global game changer, its the thing that empowers the little guy, everything else is detail. All the other things like censorship resistance, decentralised trust et al are only important (in the short to medium term) in so far as they are necessary to safeguard the sound money from attack and control from the vested interests of the current inflationary system. 

Yes bitcoin ownership is skewed but PoW ensures that even these large holders do not control the creation of new money (unlike PoS as an aside). To be fair I probably would not have personally chosen roger ver and the winklevoss twins to be the next rothschilds if bitcoin keeps on course but they have both kept faith in it over some very lean times, watching their holding dip by 10s or even 100's of millions and yet not selling up, hats off to them that took some balls, I'm sure most of us would have bottled it and cashed out several times over, possible driving bitcoin into obscurity in the process.

Control over money creation is the thing which changes power and wealth structures profoundly, it allows people to earn money which someone else cannot devalue. No longer can a central bank arbitrarily decide how much of someone else's wealth it is going to steal. No longer can it continually drive up the price of houses by creating money out thin air for people to buy them. Bitcoin doesn't have to replace fiat for that to happen, it merely has to be there with a strong enough presence to provide competition to fiat.

Quote

Other option - I'm not clever enough to have the solution. It's possible to conclude on what isn't mutually optimal without knowing exactly what is.

Yeah possible but unlikely given that the whole crypto movement has had nearly 10 years to come up with whatever-it-is your alluding to.

[guest_northshore]

2 hours ago, goldbug9999 said:

Deflationary/sound money is key, it is the global game changer, its the thing that empowers the little guy, everything else is detail. All the other things like censorship resistance, decentralised trust et al are only important (in the short to medium term) in so far as they are necessary to safeguard the sound money from attack and control from the vested interests of the current inflationary system. 

Yes bitcoin ownership is skewed but PoW ensures that even these large holders do not control the creation of new money (unlike PoS as an aside). To be fair I probably would not have personally chosen roger ver and the winklevoss twins to be the next rothschilds if bitcoin keeps on course but they have both kept faith in it over some very lean times, watching their holding dip by 10s or even 100's of millions and yet not selling up, hats off to them that took some balls, I'm sure most of us would have bottled it and cashed out several times over, possible driving bitcoin into obscurity in the process.

Control over money creation is the thing which changes power and wealth structures profoundly, it allows people to earn money which someone else cannot devalue. No longer can a central bank arbitrarily decide how much of someone else's wealth it is going to steal. No longer can it continually drive up the price of houses by creating money out thin air for people to buy them. Bitcoin doesn't have to replace fiat for that to happen, it merely has to be there with a strong enough presence to provide competition to fiat.

Yeah possible but unlikely given that the whole crypto movement has had nearly 10 years to come up with whatever-it-is your alluding to.

The idea that a deflationary currency empowers equal or better incentive and outcome to say a farmer buying seed in India & a car salesman in England, or commerce in general, is obviously wrong. But we've both been here long enough to have debated money/price inflation/deflation, and won't agree.

I'm glad you recognise Bitcoin as a system that tends towards new Rothschilds, and submission to the whims of new Rothschilds, particularly given their means of accumulation - rent seeking. I'm not ok with that as something to strive for. We have money and natural resources and stuff and people. Replicating a power structure in reverse doesn't address my fundamental problem with it - the distribution of power over them.

I'm sure you're aware that money creation isn't arbitrarily decided by central banks. I don't know if the solution is a new measure of value or an infrastructure as adjunct to existing measures.

[adamLancs]

There are only new Rothschilds if the money stays concentrated in Bitcoin and those people keep their holdings concentrated in Bitcoin. So far, it's true. For me, early adoption will be the Achilles heel of Bitcoin in the end. The question, "Why have this Bitcoin with 100 early adopters when I can have *this* Bitcoin with 10,000 early adopters". Same with Ethereum etc. It is open-source, anybody can clone the code. Only the miners or the stakers need be on side. For me it is only a question of time and we are seeing with Bitcoin Cash and so on, the early stages of that sort of mutiny. (We saw it with early alts, too.) History is littered with examples of the well-to-do ultimately being undone by a small disgruntled minority. You cannot create your own fiat currency and do anything tangible with it because of the confines of the system. But Bitcoin...

What is interesting from an investment P.O.V. is that Bitcoin continues to lead the charge with over 1000 crypto's now on the table, the ICO thing has been quashed by governments and regulations, fees are increasing and Bitcoin can no longer be used to buy coffee or subscriptions or other small items. Actually, if you compare the current transaction fee of $6 to a VISA merchant fee of 2%, then you need to spend $300 before it is worthwhile to a business to even consider Bitcoin as a viable alternative. That's not pegging it at an advantage...that's before it's even on an equal footing. When the network is under attack, you are looking at $900 transactions as we saw recently. It's utility as a currency is currently removed. But it's true, that first mover advantage quells all else.

For me, that Bitcoin functions as a store of value does not make it worthwhile as a store of value. In the beginning, it was worthwhile as a store of value because of it's potential as a currency and vision that many of the early adopters and the libertarians had for it, in 2009 this was a time of QE and banking elitism, crony capitalism and bank runs. Bitcoin was hope... for the future, for themselves, for their children etc.

Adoption of Bitcoin by business now seems to be moving in reverse. Those that were open to the idea have been disenfranchised by it's failure to live up to the hype and fulfil it's role as currency - the main criteria btw, used to repel the "no intrinsic value" attack by gold bugs - a feature which is now defunct.

I do not advocate Bitcoin Cash btw... I just see the gaping hole in Bitcoin's armor that it is exploiting right now. I think whilst adoption is growing so strongly, Bitcoin will continue to hold steady. It has been through many trials since 2009. But there will be fights to come. Bitcoin has to answer to the utility as a currency question, I think right now that answer is LN and we will have to see what that does.

 

[Frizzers]

deleted

Edited November 19, 2017 by Frizzers

[markyh]

Well had a bad car crash Monday so been off the scene. But that segwit 2x fork seems to be a damp squib. What happened ? what is the new coin called? Lol even Bitcoin Gold doesn't seem to be trading and is at number 1000 in the coinmarketcap charts.

Digit assets up to £42k this morning. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[goldbug9999]

1 hour ago, adamLancs said:

There are only new Rothschilds if the money stays concentrated in Bitcoin and those people keep their holdings concentrated in Bitcoin. So far, it's true. For me, early adoption will be the Achilles heel of Bitcoin in the end. The question, "Why have this Bitcoin with 100 early adopters when I can have *this* Bitcoin with 10,000 early adopters".

...

If you were start a new crypto right now or in the future, how would you propose to do a fairer distribution ?, if you just say have at it everyone, mine/bid away the youl almost certainly end up with the same highly skewed distribution as the whales dive in to bag large chunks of it, but it will be worse than bitcoin because the whales will be wall street guys rather than tech enthusiasts. You can see this on etherium where a good chuck of it was bought up in the early days by the hedge fund guy mike novogratz. I really don't see any signs of the kind of resentment and mutiny that you describe, other than you I don't see anyone else who is at all bothered, if you take for example this guy as being even remotely representative of the millennials just getting into it, its a non issue.

Quote

What is interesting from an investment P.O.V. is that Bitcoin continues to lead the charge with over 1000 crypto's now on the table, the ICO thing has been quashed by governments and regulations, fees are increasing and Bitcoin can no longer be used to buy coffee or subscriptions or other small items. 

Bitcoin is going through a period of vulnerability here, I foresee this period going on for another 6 months or so until the layer 2/ side-chain projects start to appear on the scene, its first mover brand momentum will carry it that far but probably not much beyond that without these other projects staring to show that they can provide some serious scaling and utility.

Quote

For me, that Bitcoin functions as a store of value does not make it worthwhile as a store of value. 

I tend agree actually hence my previous point.

 

Edited November 19, 2017 by goldbug9999

[jiltedjen]

It’s early days, last bubble the exchanges didn’t even stand up, this time they are fine.

this time transaction fees went mental, next bubble that will be sorted.

you can’t attack a developing currency before it’s even had a chance to develop. it’s growing and has a lot of unrealised potential. 

people are moaning that bitcoin is not all things too all people at this early stage. I mean the internet will never catch on, it will only be used by a few scientists. 

have a little faith people. 

[goldbug9999]

52 minutes ago, markyh said:

Well had a bad car crash Monday so been off the scene. But that segwit 2x fork seems to be a damp squib. What happened ?

They cancelled it.

There was a monumental pump of BCH to try to take over which failed.

Some miner actually tried to go ahead with the fork anyway and it didnt work because of bugs in the code.