Why invest in something that is clearly being driving up and down by bots? Virtual currency will never work so long as there is speculation. Fools gold.
Is that no longer a thing? Does the cryptocurrency community acknowledge that their product is just a big gambling machine requiring the energy a medium country?
I recently was listening to a podcast (Sam Harris maybe?) where they were talking about the possibility of super intelligent AI being set to a complex task... but then finds itself spending some huge amount of resources churning out paperclips because of some erroneous assumptions about their value to solution.
If we're the super intelligent AI designed by some other "real" intelligence for a purpose, I'd say cryptocurrency is our paperclip moment.
To stay with the analogy, cryptocurrency may be such an auxiliary task for the actual goal (whatever that is, I'm not really convinced that Coherent Extrapolated Volition can be made to work).
There's an interesting game about the paperclip optimizer that was submitted to HN recently: http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
> Speculation is unquestionably a good thing.
Maybe, but usual only if the resulting volatility results in lower price for the consumer, or makes a market.
But then again, BTC has no market for goods nor services compared to the currency it is bought and sold with (its legitimate non-fictional market is so low as to be non-existent).
Care to explain this a little more? At face value I'm not sure I agree with that statement, but I get the feeling I'm not understanding what you're trying to say.