aitrean

Hahahahahaha... ha... you probably haven't read their codebase if you really think that. Tell me, how many of their promised features do you think they've implemented?

"useless to pretend that's not the case" is a dumb, paint brush response. Yes, many, if not most, capitalists do so. That said, consumers don't tend to reward good behaviour either. Even when I put a minimal amount of effort into making purchases from "ethical" companies, I get people questioning what the hell I'm doing. Why don't I go for the cheapest, brand-namest, most-marketed, child labor made, etc equivalent from <Big Corporation Co>.

If anyone is going to start rambling off about the evils of capitalism, I suggest they stick their foot in their mouth until they've already stopped buying from companies that benefit from exploitative behaviour. But since I've met almost nobody who falls into that category, then it's time to admit that capitalists aren't inherently unethical, it's just that consumers, including you (and even me) have decided to reward the ones who aren't.

Time for the monthly cryptocurrency panic thread. While I fully agree that most cryptocurrencies are grossly overvalued, these articles always pretend a 20% selloff is the beginning of the end, when, in crypto land, 20% selloffs are a pretty standard bad day for the market.

You have to make sure they get the message the first time.

Day trading crypto is a zero sum game. You can profit if you're able to somewhat predict the madness and stupidity of the market just before the market acts that way.

1. There is an upper bound on price, same as any other asset. The upper bound has yet to be determined, however.

2. Everyone who thought the price wouldn't* continue to exponentially increase was wrong. So far. But this statement totally forgets the fact that shit changes. Anyone who said Yahoo was overvalued before 1999 was proven dead wrong. But after 1999, they were pretty much dead on.

Everything else you said has a 0% chance of happening. Objectively speaking, Bitcoin will probably never become legitimized by any government. We're just testing how big a bubble gets.

Actually it is limited to units. You can still divide a Bitcoin into satoshis, and these satoshis are limited in their printing. He used 21 million units of Bitcoin, but since you want to get technical, it's actually 21,000,000,000,000,000 satoshi. I don't know what possible source gave you the idea that divisibility == unlimited, but sadly, it's wrong.

Also, please take your "digital gold" meme and use it on r/Bitcoin. Not only does Bitcoin's price contain the speculative valuation of a million people who call it a currency (regardless of your particular vision) but that vision also has a million flaws. It's rather funny, when someone points out its flaws as "digital gold" then the Bitcoin troglodites come out and call it a currency. When you point out its flaws as a currency, they correct you that it is, in fact, digital gold. When in fact, it's just a technology medium for transmitting value without the economic mechanisms to be a currency, nor the historical/economic/political/social mechanisms to be a 'digital gold'.

Smart contract auditing and development work is massively in-demand thanks to these speculative valuations. I'm doing a certification in Solidity development from B9 Lab to target this market.

Don't get me wrong, Blockchain is valuable - but I feel like it's in the same delusional market state as the internet was in the late 90's.

I'll take a look at those essays, thank you. Although, regardless of opinion, current economic policy is largely influenced by Keynesian economic ideology. These policies have at least correlated with some of the best GDP growth ever before seen. Switching to an economic model that utilizes a currency which fluctuates by up to tens of percent per-day might prove possible to the delight of free-market economists. However, that's an enormous MIGHT, and will probably be shot down by politics before it ever becomes policy.

Additionally, your point in D means nothing. Banking and economics is also "decentralized" by your definition. There is no absolute central authority of banking, but rather a small conglomerate of strong authorities with different powers. Fed controls the money outflow - mining pools control the money outflow. Big banks control the market movements - whales control the market movements (with much greater influence). Government controls the money policy - Bitcoin core controls the Bitcoin policy. It's the same system with a different name.

I get the feeling that you fall under the camp of Bitcoin holders who believe in it as a settlement layer, or a digital gold. Your points are correct. Although I believe settlements over a smart contract make far more sense than settlements through a cryptocurency with extreme market inefficiency.

However, my points are less about addressing the small minority of holders who understand the currency, and more to address the vast, overwhelming majority who hold false beliefs. I've had to explain to too many people that Bitcoin cannot be used to pay for takeout. I've had to explain that it isn't a gold standard for money laundering. I've had to explain that deflationary does not provably mean good.

Regardless of what your vision for the currency is, its price (and the price of cryptocurrencies in general) relfect a lot of delusional market thinking, and an extreme case of market inefficiencies.

You are correct about F. Pseudo-anonymous is what I was trying to emphasize. But by itself, Bitcoin's anonymity would crumble under pressure to identify users at PoS endpoints.

You are correct, and if the article said "Bitcoin is open source money", I would say "yeah, I knew that". But the article uses such a statement as the core component of an article arguing that cryptocurrencies aren't a speculative bubble.

Perhaps part of my frustration is that this is the latest in a long series of articles that beats around the bushes and fails to address any kind of meaty argument. They attack the weakest arguments, and lie or misdirect the stronger ones. Yes, we all know Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon aaren't so great with computers, so why does that make Bitcoin any less of a speculative bubble?

As somebody who has held cryptocurrency for years and codes Solidity, never before have I seen a dumber market than this. Every time valid criticisms come forward, they're met with articles like this. The articles are usually convincing to people with limited understanding of economics or technology, so they keep quiet. "Open source money" and "blockchain is the future" sound like very convincing arguments to justify these ludicrous sums of money. What they neglect to address is that...

A) Bitcoin is congested with transactions and takes hours to process some of them

B) Bitcoin fees are through the roof, it sometimes costs as much as 25% of the value of a transaction to send it

C) The upgrades to fix these problems are extremely slow - scaling hasn't been solved for years, because different parties keep fighting for control over the currency codebase and shooting down each others' attempts to upgrade it

D) Bitcoin is still, objectively, centralized. Almost all of the miners are based in industrial regions like China, and belong to a small monopoly of mining pools. All of the exchanges are centralized, and are well-known for losing clients' money. The big banks are replaced by big whales, who will do anything in their power to manipulate markets for their gain.

E) Bitcoin addresses the technology perspective of sending money, but doesn't address any of the macroeconomic problems that arise from a deflationary, uncontrolled currency.

F) Bitcoin is not actually anonymous. Data science techniques can parse the blockchain and see sending patterns between different accounts. They map these patterns to various identities. If those identities can be mapped to a real person, say, when they cash out of an exchange, then it's known exactly how much Bitcoin they have.

If someone could write an article addressing these facts, rather than throwing out slogans like 'open source money', that would be nice.