wellinever

Governments should be forcing these operators to place the bike deposits in a trust account, rather than using the money for capital to fund expansion. I paid $50 USD as a "deposit" for oBike, however in the future when one of these companies fails, they will take millions in deposits with them. Especially if the bikes are getting stolen or wrecked.

Yes.. I think the ship has sailed now however because in the big league ICO's (eg. BAT) it is almost impossible to buy in time

There is still massive FOMO when you go over an ICO, decide its stupid, and then post ICO it goes up 1000%. Its a ponzi scheme, sure, but people are still making 1000% in 2 weeks. So what do you do? Stick to your guns and ignore it? Or have a cheeky swing at it?

Its like the r/investing reddit since 2011 - twice a week someone asks "should I invest in bitcoin/ethereum?" and the knowledgeable investors like clockwork say "no, its not an investment". Meanwhile, everyone who did is up 10,000%-100,000%, while the average r/investing poster is happy to make 2% above the S&P500 return. Many things are sort of a bubble or ponzi, the people who really make truckloads of money are either very lucky, very stupid, or mentally ill in some way.. This goes for property markets - where the spoils go to the people who con the banks for as much credit as possible and buy house after house in a manic way, or in business eg. uber, where someone with a god complex raises some ridiculous amount of money and just expands as fast as they possibly can.

Andreas Antonopoulos made a good point that a "countrycoin" would always have a trusted key held by the country's monetary issuing authority which would basically then provide an enormous honeypot to tempt attackers to target it/steal it. OTOH, currencies like bitcoin with fixed monetary policy don't have a backdoor mechanism for money creation (without overwhelming consensus to fork).

Also, I see Political intervention in currency as a bug rather than a feature.

Excellent point.

No, in the US it was 4 trillion dollars of money printed and transferred to banks. I know, it seems ridiculous.

The idea that we should trust entire fields of experts just because they are the experts is flawed.

Many of the "basic concepts" of economics are not empirically proven. This is not newtonian physics; it is a vague social science.

The economist will tell you that "the jury is still out on QE". http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/03/ec...

Many of the fed workers who did the QE admit that it was largely ineffectual other than inflating bank profits. https://www.wsj.com/articles/qe-the-greatest-backdoor-bailou...

Money printing has occurred up until now because there was no viable alternative to government issued fiat currency. Satoshi Nakamoto changed that.

" If the currency were successful, bitcoin's fixed supply (a constant denominator) wouldn't keep up with global growth (a growing numerator), which would make the currency more valuable over time. This would result in a deflationary spiral (no one spends the money b/c they're better off waiting and letting it appreciate, which leads to less spending, which leads to even more deflation, etc.)"

One of the best things about crypto is that its actually going to test keynesian economic dogma in a free market of competing currencies.

The fed firehosed 6 trillion dollars into the accounts of big banks since the GFC, which hasn't done much other than inflate the stock market or sit idle. Is that extreme care?

Don't bother arguing - within a few years we will find out the truth.