It's Not Just a Bitcoin Bubble – It's Far Worse
seekingalpha.com
seekingalpha.com
Researching stocks - I finding these "wisdom" advisory gems from seekingalpha:
"While I wish I had held on to [stock that shoot up] until now (instead of selling post-Q2), I wouldn't be holding past this point."
In other words the writer affirms that he is a bad stock picker and immediately offers stock picking advise.
Lol
People keep saying this but what exactly is the value proposition of blockchain again?
An example is Bitcoin. It is in your best interest not to spend too much. Spend exactly the amount required, not more, and you are done.
Double-entry accounting made it much harder to cook the books (a record of where money is coming from and a record of where it is going). Blockchains store every transaction within the coin itself and are validated by the entire network as valid transactions.
People promote Bitcoin as anonymous, but it's actually the opposite - every transaction is traceable and open source, even if the accounts are not tied to a person directly.
There are uses for this but I think the unintended consequences remain to be seen. I think of how people were able to be identified by that Netflix ratings datadump a few years ago, so imagine how easy it would be if Bitcoin became a common currency? I am not positive this is possible (I think it is?) but imagine I buy an apple from Whole Foods and pay with Bitcoin. Now I know what account they use and I can go back through the blockchain to see every other transaction they've ever made: bam, now I know all financial data about Whole Foods over Bitcoin including which accounts pay them the most and the datestamps of those transactions.
>Blockchains store every transaction within the coin itself and are validated by the entire network as valid transactions.
Is true for bitcoin, but is not necessarily true for all blockchains. Bitcoin != blockchain, even though Bitcoin is the original blockchain.
An application like this would use a new address for every transaction, and never use it again. There are desktop software wallets that do this, in the interests of privacy.
https://hackernoon.com/why-everyone-missed-the-most-importan...
Compare this:
"Let's all meet on avenue A at noon to protest the panopticon."
to this:
"If some function applied to block 1234 reduces to zero, let's meet at avenue A at noon, or else let's meet at avenue B at noon."
By using a blockchain you just increased the number of barricades that must be constructed from 1 to 2.
Spoiler: nothing, “blockchain” is one piece of what makes Bitcoin interesting.
For Etherium contracts to be useful they need to interface with the outside word. That means you need to trust someone to insert that data (e.g. a stock price) into the contract, and they might cheat and put bad data in.
However, if they do it is publicly visible and they are shamed and not trusted.
If they do stay honest, everything else about the contract will execute as expected and they can be no shenanigans (modulo bugs in the contract).
This isn't perfect but it is arguably better than company takes your money, hopefully they give you back what they owe.
Not all apps benefit by being on blockchain, on the contrary they are needlessly complicated.
There is a reason Netflix does not use torrents, centralized systems are efficient. Unless the application demands "trustless", no point touching it.
Contrastingly, decentralization is an extremely complicated way of achieving your goal, and anyone who is building an application should be 100% honest with themselves about whether it truly needs to be decentralized.
Especially when that decentralization is both technological and political, both of which have their own unique difficulties.
Instead of technologically literate individuals being ignorant towards a lack of comprehension we should treat this as an opportunity to educate them. Why would I want to use blockchain, why would I not want to use it?
Its condescending to expect everyone to understanding technology.
Given how quickly we as a civilisation need to be moving away from fossil fuels, I don't buy that this is a better use than using your solar PV panels to feed back into the grid and thus reduce demand on non-renewable generators.
It's equivalent to 0, compared to usage for heating and cooling.
Proof of stake is one example of how that doesn't "doom" blockchains.
Transactions are limited in number. Each transaction costs.
1. Cryptocurrency is a bubble.
2. Surface-level associations or mere mentions of associations with cryptocurrency is a bubble.
Both are reliant on the vague “bubble” term, but I think #2 is the conversation that not enough people are having. Most people I know who discuss cryptocurrency on a daily basis care next to nothing about what it is for, or the technology involved. They are entirely captivated by something limited to buzz, and anything beyond that or in oppositition to it is processed by them as unsavory.
This observation, at least, decidingly bysteps debate over whether cryptocurrency has value, and points to the incredible amount of willful delusion invited by it’s fans. This phenomenon is of course attributed to so much of how late capitalism persists. But, when it happens on such a bloated level around something that should by any sober account be a critical ordeal, there is some significance to that conversation.
The particular observations of mere phonetical and marginal associations with blockchain leading to overnight exhorbitant values should be understood as a very seperate discussion from “Is crypto a bubble?”.
Bitcoin adopters continue to religiously engage the same fraud that was adopted by initial promoters, peddling fantasies about decentralization, anonymity, transaction costs and taking on the global banking system. None of this is real, and on the last the slightest hint of adoption by the establishment send prices soaring and palpable excitement among supporters.
So if it has no utility, with supporters who lie, then where are the absurd valuations coming from? Bitcoin exists without relation to economics, demand, utility or value, and with negative externalities for efficiency and the environment making rational discussion redundant.
Why bother creating value to generate revenue, when you can print the revenue, literally. It's like a group of people get together to make IOU tokens and are convinced the world will one day accept their paper. Well if it has some utility the world may, but not simply because you want to gain something for nothing.
I use Bitcoin to transact with my brother overseas. It's decentralized. It works.
Yes there is an absurd bubble going on. But bubbles are expected with revolutionary technologies (18th century train companies, 19th century car companies, 1990s dot com bubble...)
What is SeekingAlpha.com truly worth? What is a fake newspaper on your electronic screen truly worth? What is the software you used to write the article worth?
The value of digital assets lies in their usefulness, and how many people use them. The usefulness of the software "Bitcoin" is that it allows people to store a record of value -- like the numbers in your bank account -- in a reliable, secure, trust-worthy, fungible way that is practically immune to corruption, control, and seizure, and can be transferred to anyone else anywhere in the world almost instantly, for practically free.
But that's just Bitcoin, the very first of its kind. The thriving technology ecosystem that Bitcoin birthed is boiling over with potential.
I worked during the dot-com bubble when my company added a ".com" to the company name. I remember being told to drop what I was doing and go through all our UI and make sure the .com branding was there so marketing can UAT it by 3pm.
>What is a fake coin in your electronic wallet truly worth?
How much is the piece of paper in your wallet worth?
Maybe bitcoin will burn and crash or maybe it will be a million dollars a piece. We don't know. People are buying bitcoin and that is driving the prices up. South Korea has been the biggest buyer of BTC (perhaps fear of NK?)
Don't confuse the value of a cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) with companies that are riding it's wave
That "fake coin" in my electronic wallet is backed by algorithms. The greater fools giving it value are and have been, as far as I can see, excited mostly by profiting on the speculation of it. Who actually uses bitcoin outside of trying to profit from the bubble or just for the novelty of using it?
The dollar is backed by the wealth and economy of the nation, the coin exclusively by greater fools and it's rarity.
I don´t think so, clickbait
Bitcoin has some serious problems to overcome as a real consumer currency, but it seems clear that some crypto-currency will eventually become ubiquitous.
As far as the speculation game, Bitcoin is just barely starting to reach consumer investors. Whether it's a bubble or not, I'm not sure, but it has a long way to go.