Long Island Iced Tea Soars 500% After Changing Its Name to Long Blockchain

Don't know what (some amount), Anything else (little bit), Unknown item (in large portions)

1. That I have been drinking

Hyper-deflationary token systems that not only don't scale but lose their utility when adopted are horrible currencies. The more people use a particular block chain the less utility it has because the system doesn't scale in either transaction volume or token price stability.

You just described the value in your question. A wealth store/transfer platform that does require armies to protect its "banks", as they are distributed/global, does not encourage wars.

I see something about price stability but then there's a chart and it does not appear stable at all.

In the startup world we say if nobody can tell what your company does after 10-20 seconds on the site, you have a problem. At the very least they should be able to get the gist like "this is a networking company that does computer network stuff" or "this is for writing web apps."

Hi! Serious question: can you explain more about what you mean here? I'm having trouble imagining what "development platform" means here, or how/why a division would use Ethereum as one. I'm guessing you mean something other than software development?

If, in the mania of the 2000s, things could head towards $6.7tn, I don't believe that this bubble will be smaller in the age of loose monetary policy.

Money is essentially free today. A few weeks ago, Saudi Arabia paid $450m for a painting. If that isn't a sign of how money has lost its value, I don't know what is.

Would I bet everything I own on crypto? No, of course not. Can you still get a 10x return on money you invest today? I wouldn't be surprised. Even knowing there will be a major correction at some point, it's probably a mistake not to own at least some.

I specifically remember hearing him address the question (it might have been rhetorical or from the audience) as to how this was sustainable given that most of companies involved didn't actually earn any profits.

Most of the overvalued companies involved during the bubble was consultancy companies making web pages for other companies.

I still remember being somewhat stunned by the answer he gave. He explained that that was not an issue since the new economy worked differently compared to the old one.

At that point I shook my head, focused my attention back on the servers and came to the conclusion that the bubble would burst sooner than later.

People say this, but I maintain it isn't true. The only thing the blockchain is good for is when you cannot have any kind of central trusted authority. "Central authority" typically meaning government institutions like regulations and the legal system. Once you remove a central trusted authority, transaction costs get very expensive very fast. If you can't trust anybody but yourself it means you bear the cost of validating every single part of a transaction. You see this in the blockchain--it is massively more expensive to process a transaction than using a simple database. You see this in "smart contracts" because without a legal system to fallback on, you have to code every single edge case no matter how remote or you'll get fucked (which is actually impossible anyway, and is one of the reasons why the entire idea of "smart contracts" is a bunch of baloney...).

My point is, for 99.9% of every day things we have no need for any kind of distributed trustless ledger. The transaction costs for them outweigh the alternative of simply trusting people and using our legal system when something goes bad.

The only real use case for trustless distributed ledgers are for stuff that cannot use the legal system--eg organized crime, crypto-ransomware software, illegal drug trade, etc. For everything else, a database is all you need.

By the way, I'm not even going to go into the fact that "The Blockchain" only functions with mining, and the only way to incentivize mining is to bolt a "currency" on top like Bitcoin or ETH and then find a market to sell all the "coins" the miners generate. Take away that, and who the hell pays for the mining? If your answer is "the banks would" or "the parties would"... well, if they are gonna do that why the hell wouldn't they just pay for a traditional database instead? After all, that kind of cooperation sounds pretty centralized anyway and a large Postgres instance is a lot cheaper than thousands and thousands of miners....

Hey don't diss Kozmo. I remember being a punk teenager and ordering a single 20oz bottle of soda and having it delivered by some dude in a car an hour later. Clearly, it wasn't a bubble :-)

In fact, if they sell today, they'd probably be set for life.

But that doesn't mean that it will all be bubble. In the end, the potential of cryptocurrencies competing with central banks is still there. But if they will, and which one, and which one is now under- or over-valued, is anyone's (calculated) guess.

> You do realize that economic bubbles rise and fall in the span of years, right?

Yes. And everyone making these bubble / tulip comparisons should acknowledge how the view is unfalsifiable.

Is this implying that cryptocurrencies have not evolved over that time period? I think you know that this is false.

Edit: 32 with over a billion dollar cap.

That's not what the parent said. They said "detect one".

"detect" != "identifies the potential"

no?

Ultimately I am probably lucky that I learned my lesson with "Captain Furball Cheezburger" instead of losing my mortgage when Bitcoin pops.

According to the CIA there is 80 Trillion dollars in the world in soft money. With 21 million Bitcoins, if 1% of all the worlds money was transferred to Bitcoin, each Bitcoin would be worth $38,000.

We are basically half way there. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets that high, but we I don't understand how people think it could keep going past that even theoretically. If someone understands the reasoning behind the $500,000 predictions, I would love to have that explained.

With bitcoin, you have to sign up for/transfer money to various sketchy exchanges that you've never previously used.

You mean click a mouse? Buying a stock in 1999 was a lot like buying a stock now. I don’t recall how fast one could go from account creation to trading, but eTrade has been around for a while. A lot of folks had a 401K account that probably had a trading account of sort as well, so there might not have even been a barrier.

Not saying you might not be right, but buying stocks wasn’t all that hard in the 90s, either.

I've only got in it what I can afford to lose, personally, which isn't a whole lot, but it's still some skin in the game, at least.

Even the rumors show that this is going in the same direction.

Group B is talking about bitcoin a lot to mutually reassure themselves that staying out of it was the right decision (and also a bit to keep others out since all new paper money entering the exchanges weakens their arguments, at least superficially)

I think that defection rates between those groups are already very low and will keep shrinking.

It's also a lot harder to accidentally lose.