Slashdot Mirror
The Case that Bitcoin Is a Bubble (economist.com)
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the Economist: It seems that every day, Bitcoin seems to hit a new high. But the reported price can move up and down by $1,000 or so within a few hours. This might have made it a great investment for those who got in at the right price and are nimble enough to get out in time. But it doesn't make it a useful means of exchange (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source). When the price is rising fast, those who use bitcoin will be reluctant to part with it; when the price falls, those who sell goods will be reluctant to accept it.
Yes. Bitcoin does come with some risk associated with it. You can get hacked and lose everything. The value could drop. But why is Wallstreet and the traditional currency peddlers putting in so much effort to denounce it? Hmmmm...
That many are against it for their own greedy reasons does not constitute evidence that it isn't flawed.
If it looks like a tulip and smells like a tulip...
Bitcoin is not valuable. Gold and silver are valuable because it has uses outside of money, but bitcoin does not. That is the difference between gold/silver and fiat currency.
Unstable is a matter of degree. Is the dollar unstable? relative to what? Relative to bitcoin it is one of the most stable things you can get. I doubt you will see a price swing of nearly 50% ever, as we have seen with bitcoin.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
The fundamental problem with BitCoin is not its volatility. The volatility will eventually go away if the underlying technology turns out to be sound.
The fundamental problem with BitCoin is that the number of transactions it can handle is orders of magnitude below what is necessary for a reasonably liquid currency with a total value in the billions of dollars. As it is, BitCoin only works as long as most of that money either sits still or moves around in huge transactions of at least thousands of dollars at a time.
It is entirely possible that the problems get solved. However, a quadrupling like BitCoin Cash has done is just nowhere near orders of magnitude improvement.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
From Twitter:
Tulips are not durable, not scarce, not programmable, not fungible, not verifiable, not divisible, and hard to transfer. But tell me more about your analogy...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley