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This Whole Bitcoin Thing Could Be Big, Says Bank of America
Nerval's Lobster writes "Bank of America has issued a research report suggesting that the crypto-currency Bitcoin could become 'a major means of payment for e-commerce' on its way to emerging as 'a serious competitor to traditional money transfer providers.' The bank attaches a 'maximum market capitalization' of Bitcoin at roughly $1,300, based on its position as a 'major player in both e-commerce and money transfer' as well as 'a significant store of value with a reputation close to silver.' Bitcoin has come close to exceeding that theoretical ceiling in recent weeks, although its valuation dove today after the People's Bank of China decided to declare it a volatile 'currency' without real legal status; that financial institution is also concerned about its use in money laundering and black markets. Bank of America sees Bitcoins' advantages as low transaction costs, its finite supply (which will protect its value), and its increasing attractiveness as an alternative to 'traditional' cash. As with the People's Bank of China, however, the bank sees the currency's extreme volatility and lack of legal backing as a bad thing, and frowns at the possibility that regulators could step in and increase transaction costs. 'A 50 minute wait before payment receipt confirmation is received will prohibit wider use,' the report adds. 'This is less of an issue for two parties that know each other because they trust the other will not double spend, but when dealing with an anonymous counterparty this creates a high level of unhedgeable risk.' Without a 'central counterparty' to verify transactions and thus mitigate that risk, Bitcoin could fail to break into wider use."
Bank of America is always looking for new ways to screw over their "customers", be it through fees, lying, or trying to steal their (paid off) houses through foreclosure (and blaming it on "computer error" when caught). They're probably drooling like hungry dogs over all the ways they can fleece people with Bitcoin...
"So after all this, you make my case for me. To end this stalemate, you must die..."
“I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.” -Sir Isaac Newton after losing a fortune in the South Sea Company bubble.
Honestly I find that one of the most interesting things about it. There is no intrinsic value. None! And yet it's indestructible* and peer to peer confirmed. Therefore (ultimately) the only cue anyone has to the value is what others value it at. Gold is sometimes considered to have become valuable for similar reasons. Sure, it's pretty, and that likely helped, but it doesn't have enough use to justify its value other than what everyone has previously valued it at.
* I can't say that with absolute certainty, given how software goes, but as a thought experiment it's fascinating.
I'm not going to argue that Bitcoin won't dip in value in the future, perhaps precipitously, but the fascinating thing about Bitcoin is that after that happens....it will still be there. They don't disappear, and other than signalling from other participants in the market, nothing will have changed about it.
Beanie babies fall apart. Penny stock companies go bankrupt. Tulip bulbs and all that eventually rot, burn, or get destroyed.
I don't think that persistent state is a trivial difference. Bitcoin will still be there, with a price history that will encourage speculators again. The Bitcoin network will be running on some networked computers on the planet for decades to come, no matter what. The net present value calculation for Bitcoin really does have to go out much much farther than almost any other object besides precious metals and gems.
Chill. Relax. Folks aren't going to throw money into an investment with no value beyond fleeting popular perception. Nothing like that will ever happen. Just calm down. Enjoy life. Stop and smell the tulips.
There is no such thing as intrinsic value to begin with. People place value in things.
BofA's angle is probably the same as with your money. Charge you to hold it, charge you to transfer it, charge you to talk to a phone support rep about holding it or transferring it, and while holding it for you, gamble with it on the side.
There is no such thing as intrinsic value to begin with. People place value in things.
Absolutely correct. However, it's that process of how humans value things that make it an interesting case. We have in our economy a network of things that have some generally agreed upon value. When people try to value something, they look at the activity its used for and the value of that activity within the current network, and so the value is subject to the changes in that object's use.
Ignoring mining, with Bitcoin there is no function within the current universe of things we value. The only cue I have is what others have previously valued it at, and what it is currently valued. I think that's very interesting, especially when you consider the kind of objects that humans have used as currency throughout history (gold, metals, durable objects like shells, etc.)
How long does it take a check to clear or do an ACH transfer? Longer than 50 minutes? In reality, you don't have to wait 50 minutes to be reasonably certain a transaction will complete. You can see the transaction broadcasted to multiple peers within seconds. For small transactions, that's probably enough. Usually a transaction will make it into the blockchain in about 10 minutes. At that point, the only way to invalidate the transaction would be for a miner to fork the blockchain by computing an alternate longer chain. Since there are many competing miners, in practice this would be very difficult. After a few more blocks have been added to the chain, it would be virtually impossible to reverse the transaction. For very large transactions involving thousands or millions of dollars, it probably makes sense to wait 50 minutes for multiple confirmations, but for smaller transactions it's definitely overkill.
Bank of America is always looking for new ways to screw over their "customers", be it through fees, lying, or trying to steal their (paid off) houses through foreclosure (and blaming it on "computer error" when caught). They're probably drooling like hungry dogs over all the ways they can fleece people with Bitcoin...
I'm afraid that Bank of America is not the ONLY bank which screws their customers.
In fact, I have yet to find a bank which has failed to screw their customers.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Miners will still receive the transaction fees for all the transactions included in the blocks they mine. There's a recommended transaction fee formula built into the clients, but you set any transaction fee you want. Set it too low and some miners may choose not to include your transaction in their block, causing your transaction to take longer to complete. Thus, there will be incentive to pay miners sufficient transaction fees to make it worthwhile to process your transactions.
There's no particular reason to assume that bitcoin is the cryptocurrency that will win the future.
There are plenty of contenders and nothing to stop [large financial institution] from latching on to one of those.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Miners will still receive the transaction fees for all the transactions included in the blocks they mine.
Transaction fees are key but there's a subtle issue here: while there are a finite number of bitcoins, there are an infinite number of (possible) digital currencies.
Sure, a few years from now bitcoin is going to be supported by transaction fees. But what happens when, say, Google, comes along with their own digital currency and offers lower (or even no) transaction fees? And what happens when (not if) someone develops a currency that is clearly technically superior to bitcoin - e.g. with a more (space) efficient mechanism to record transaction in the block chain.
One way or another there's eventually going to be another digital currency that is clearly superior to bitcoin. And people are going to start flocking to the hip new digital currency. So, not only will bitcoin be fundamentally inferior, it will also be losing value (i.e. massive inflation) - while the other currency will gaining value making it all that much more attractive.
That's not to say that there isn't a lot more money to be made it bitcoin before that happens - just that eventually someone's going to be left holding the bag (i.e. a whole lot of nearly worthless bitcoins.
We should all like this Bitcoin *concept* even if we don't all like Bitcoin itself or the culture that has evolved around it (and the get-rich-quick Bitcoin fan-boys). But all the bashing of the Bitcoin concept is disappointing, because Bitcoin represents everything that us nerds reading slashdot should like: It's a mix of cryptography, freedom of speech, computing, networking, finance, economics, and even politics. Most of us here dig that stuff.
Get over the hype and take Bitcoin for what it really is: a fascinating experiment that has, so far, withstood the amazing barrage of publicity, hacking attempts, legal uncertainties, and remains valuable for reasons completely contrary to everyone that says it's worthless. It may become worthless one day, but consider the possibility that Bitcoin is disproving all your wildly oversimplified assumptions about what makes something valuable. It is completely different than anything else we know, and there's plenty of reasons to believe that it could succeed as much as it could fail. (and in many ways it has already succeeded as a proof-of-concept of the idea of decentralized currency)
Why does gold have value? Nothing is backing gold, and if it was for its material properties alone, its value would only be a fraction of $1,300/oz. Yet it maintains value because of its properties to behave as a transferable store of value: scarcity, fungibility, density, identifiability, etc. Bitcoin shares a lot of those qualities and adds some new ones: ease of transfer over the internet, negligible transfer fees, fungibility, scarcity, storage efficiency, near-anonymity and built-in escrow. I don't think it's any more ludicrous for Bitcoin to have value than it is for gold to have value. And in the end, when I want to sell WoW weapons, buy webserver space, or play a few games of poker online, why would I use credit cards or paypal, which all require me to remember log-in creditials, give away personal information to be [improperly] protected by a third-party and/or pay a bunch of fees. There's plenty of value in being able to pay people across the world, instantaneously, without sacrificing your privacy, and without paying any fees. Why is that not valuable?
When you want to bash Bitcoin by saying it has no intrinsic value, ask yourself this: "what other system of payment/transfers allows someone to move $10,000,000 worth of value, to or from anywhere in the world, 24/7, nearly instantaneously, without fees, can't be debased or printed, irreverible, and without anyone being able to freeze or seize it (without direct access to your wallet)?" Regardless of its downsides, that's pretty f***ing powerful. There's a reason it's "could be a big deal."
When you buy a Bitcoin you are not buying equity in the Bitcoin environment. Wonder what model BoA valuers have in mind for this. It weirds me out.
Almost certainly they are using a Commodity Futures Contract model that is used for precious metals, oil/petroleum, wheat and so on, on places like the Chicago Board of Trade or the London Metals Exchange. With those, there is a finite new supply of "product" and for the vast majority of people dealing with them, there is no physical product - the contracts being traded are for future delivery of a specific quantity of a specific product on a specific date. The product will be delivered to a specified place, and it is the responsibility of the person receiving the product (the contract owner as of the contract maturity date/product delivery date) to move it from that delivery point to a storage location of their choice.
As such, the traders who buy and sell these contracts do not want to hold them until maturity, because they have no storage space, so they buy the contracts (for example) 12 months before the delivery date for a specified price, and sell them before maturity, hopefully for a profit.
With bitcoins, there are no physical deliverables, but in every other important sense they resemble these Commodities Futures contracts.
If they became widely accepted and centrally traded, with a central body guaranteeing transaction integrity (basic ESCROW systems would probably be the starting point for that), they would almost certainly be traded as a "standard" currency on FX markets (exchanging Bitcoins for US Dollars, Euros, Japanese Yen, etc.), but without that central body guaranteeing the transactions, they would probably be traded as Commodities Futures.
The "problem" with both of those routes is that there is heavy auditing on every stage of every transaction, so the anonymity aspect of Bitcoin goes right out of the window. The parties involved in any given transaction would be known and recorded, and even if those are brokers acting on behalf of the real Bitcoin owners, the brokers would still need to have records showing who the real owner is.