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Bitcoin and Other Cryptocurrencies Are Useless, The Economist Says (economist.com)
With few uses to anchor their value, and little in the way of regulation, cryptocurrencies have instead become a focus for speculation, The Economist magazine said this week. From the story, which may be paywalled: Some people have made fortunes as cryptocurrency prices have zoomed and dived; many early punters have cashed out. Others have lost money. It seems unlikely that this latest boom-bust cycle will be the last. Economists define a currency as something that can be at once a medium of exchange, a store of value and a unit of account. Lack of adoption and loads of volatility mean that cryptocurrencies satisfy none of those criteria. That does not mean they are going to go away (though scrutiny from regulators concerned about the fraud and sharp practice that is rife in the industry may dampen excitement in future). But as things stand there is little reason to think that cryptocurrencies will remain more than an overcomplicated, untrustworthy casino.
Can blockchains -- the underlying technology that powers cryptocurrencies -- do better? These are best thought of as an idiosyncratic form of database, in which records are copied among all the system's users rather than maintained by a central authority, and where entries cannot be altered once written. Proponents believe these features can help solve all sorts of problems, from streamlining bank payments and guaranteeing the provenance of medicines to securing property rights and providing unforgeable identity documents for refugees. Those are big claims. Many are made by cryptocurrency speculators, who hope that stoking excitement around blockchains will boost the value of their related cryptocurrency holdings.
Can blockchains -- the underlying technology that powers cryptocurrencies -- do better? These are best thought of as an idiosyncratic form of database, in which records are copied among all the system's users rather than maintained by a central authority, and where entries cannot be altered once written. Proponents believe these features can help solve all sorts of problems, from streamlining bank payments and guaranteeing the provenance of medicines to securing property rights and providing unforgeable identity documents for refugees. Those are big claims. Many are made by cryptocurrency speculators, who hope that stoking excitement around blockchains will boost the value of their related cryptocurrency holdings.
I bet they'll say my Magic cards & Beanie Babies are useless as well!
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
" It seems unlikely that this latest boom-bust cycle will be the last. " - so until it goes away the premise they're positing is false, people are doing "something" with it. Has it supplanted regular money, credits or assets? Of course not.
Unrealistic questions, unrealistic stale paradigms, unreasonably stupid articles, the whole thing continues for better or worse.
'The Economist' might not see evading capital controls as useful, but they are wrong.
Not an investment vehicle, but for 'in and out' in a day, good enough.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Bitcoin is useless until big players enter the game then suddenly it'll become vital for the country.
You're looking for domething useless and dangerous ? Look no further than high frequency trading.
If people who wrote things knew what they were talking about they would be rich instead of writing stupid crap that's always wrong in publications like this.
work, click, borrow slave population heaves sigh of relief?
The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
Will all of u buy it
"All art is quite useless." - Oscar Wilde
It's not their best headline writing, but TFA makes the point clear: cryptocurrencies are not currencies, let alone useful currencies. Their only "use" is speculation, and to an economist, that doesn't count as "useful".
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These are best thought of as an idiosyncratic form of database, in which records are copied among all the system's users rather than maintained by a central authority, and where entries cannot be altered once written. Proponents believe these features can help solve all sorts of problems, from streamlining bank payments and guaranteeing the provenance of medicines to securing property rights and providing unforgeable identity documents for refugees.
I don't see how blockchain is better than a centralized database in any of these use cases. The refugee example especially has many humorous angles: are refugees going to start mining identity-coin on their phones to keep the database up?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You forgot their greatest two benefits: money laundering and international transfers of an interloping currency state.
Yes, it's currency, bizarre as that might seem. Consider the state of the Turkish Lira. Or the fates of Iran, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and a dozen more nations where there are either controls in place for international transfers, or worse, hyper-inflation.
The world's alternate currency used to be the US Dollar, Swiss Francs, the Euro, and pounds sterling. Even the yuan has caved to the whims of "the west". If you wanted an alternate currency to say: Fuck You, or change out that truck load of dope, crypto currency has its attractions.
Just like the Internet has pseudoanonymity, so does BTC. For now, no one knows you're a dog.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Correct. It needs to be an 'exchange' vehicle, not an investment vehicle. I'm not sure what to attach it too, but the value of a single bitcoin needs to be tied to something else, and it's worth the exact same value when you put it in as it is when you take it out.
For example...if, lets say, 1 bitcoin is worth $100 (USD). You put in $100 USD and you get 1 Bitcoin. Many years later, you 'cash out' and for your 1 Bitcoin you get $100 (USD). (Depending on inflation that $100 might not be 'worth' as much as it was before...but it's still $100.)
The trouble was because they wanted it to be it's own currency...not tied to anything at all... with the idea of 'exchange rates' and official stuff like that. Instead, it should have been more like the coins and cash of a currency. It represents an amount of a currency and it's used to enable transactions, but it doesn't have any intrinsic worth. (Or rather, its intrinsic worth is unrelated to its face value.)
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
All cryptocurrencies are underpinned by the belief that people will trade something of value for them. That usually means currency, but it could also be material goods or intellectual property.
On top of that value, you have speculation based on other factors; in this case, scarcity and demand. The more the perceived mania continues, the more volatility there will be.
What is different here is that a number of early adopters held onto the currency, and others bought in late. That distorted people's perception of the cryptocurrency where they thought they could all make money fast. Well, lo and behold, the currency crashed since its peak, and seems to be teetering currently.
That there are systemic problems with exchanges and blockchain goes without saying. This is unlike traditional currency because the transaction costs are increasing exponentially and putting additional pressure that a normal paper currency managed by a sovereign central bank doesn't have. That reduces monetary velocity through the system and impedes cryptocurrency use for fine-grained transactions. I won't get into the back door idea or breaking the cryptography, although those might become factors in the future. These translate to additional volatility and uncertainty that hurt the value.
The other big difference between an independent cryptocurrency and a regular currency is who and what backs it. That's probably the greatest concern for The Economist and for those who favor classic economics. This is uncharted territory, and uncertainty will always be punished by the market by participatory withdrawal and diminished value. Only time will tell, but something tells me that Bitcoin and the like may be a game of musical chairs.
.. but not accepted in the major places to buy stuff :/
Note that this publication totally controlled by status quo finance.
Money rejection by ordinary technology savvy people mean the usual economic guns pointed at the masses can now move 180 degrees to point at bankers because consensus gives the vote back to you!
http://www.aisnota.com/slashdot/ Welcome to Logic and the Future
I honestly believe the single biggest impediment to the public accepting crypto as an alternative currency were all the hacks and corrupt coin exchanges that took people's funds and vanished.
Crypto-coins had the promise of being extremely secure and anonymous, but we quickly saw that unravel as folks learned how to trace transactions back through blockchains and as all of the web site compromises and coin-stealing malware arrived.
It's still too complicated for the average person to take a payment or spend crypto-currency. The unique wallet ID, alone, is a big, long, messy string of characters that nobody can remember. So they have to pretty much launch their wallet app and copy/paste the thing any time they want to instruct someone else to pay them. So that's another big problem. But really, a lot of this stuff can be coded into a more user-friendly UI, if someone is motivated to do it. (I think that's one of the promises of the new project out there to let independent musicians get paid directly for use of their music, without needing a middle man.)
But we're far from seeing the whole thing get stable enough so folks have a good handle on just what a given crypto-coin is worth. Everyone I know hanging onto any of them does so with a hope of reselling them at a profit at some later point in time. They're not keeping them like folks collect spare change in jars at home.
Some people love to gamble. To them it's a chance to win money. Losing or the thought of losing doesn't really register. They're hooked on the game and the possibilities.
With a bitcoin or a non-voting, non-dividend-paying stock, or art, they're all inherently useless. But once that pool of gamblers becomes "large enough", I think the system becomes self sustaining. An emergent property of such a game perhaps, kind of like a siphon becomes self sustaining. As long as there is more money coming in than leaving the game, prices should rise; vice versa for more money leaving than coming in.
But what about historic bubbles? Tulips, South Sea, etc? What prevents an item with little or no use from going to zero? Note that making people feel a certain way, no matter how silly it seems, is a use.
Speculation creates liquidity. Liquidity is the economic action of being able to sell off quickly. It has a 'use'. But when the entire action becomes about speculation there is nothing to buy or sell and the 'usefullness' is gone.
And I completely disapprove of this message!
You are mean mean, stupid little people. I hate you.
Central planning is useless, it has been a failure whenever and wherever it has been implemented. Central Banks are useless, BIS is worse than useless. Central banking and fractional reserve ponzi schemes only benefit the crooks running them. No wonder they see cryptocurrencies as useless.
BitCoin has so many flaws it's hard to believe it has received so much attention. It's an interesting thought experiment, but it is not a workable currency. For example:
1. It takes a real world commodity (electricity and computer time) and converts it into something which has value only in the minds of BitCoin participants. The same is of course true of minting currency, but the overhead is much less. I've heard this idea described as making something, burning it, and then trading the ash.
2. It heavily favours early adopters. Essentially it is equivalent to saying "I've created a new currency; my friends and I already own the bulk of it: wanna join?"
3. No central authority means no backing. If the Bank of England suddenly refuses to accept Stirling, there massive consequences. If the BitCoin network switches off, users are left with nothing (apart from an electricity bill).
4. It's deflationary...
Color me surprised.
Ugh...
I tend to rant.
If I was in a repressive country, that limited what I could do with my own money, then I wouldn't find it worthless.
But if I knew I was in the Illuminati, then I'd be against cryptos.
So irrelevant.
The fact it's existence depends on other actual currency means it is worthless on its own. Everyone who owns bitcoin is hoping to cash out for real money.
The scale and scope of crypto is going to take a long time to work out because its such a large, world changing idea. Crypto maximalists know this fully, its not a feeling of 'if' its a feeling of 'when' no matter who talks shit
And then you pay something in Dogecoins and your cover is blown.
#DeleteFacebook
Much like the compression algorithm behind DivX survived even after the business model of DivX fell flat on it's face, blockchain technology, apparently showing many legitimate, legal uses will survive the fall of so-called 'cryptocurrency', which only really seems to have been useful for criminal activities.
... from when 1 BTC value was a fraction of a dollar.
I don't see what Blockchain offers beyond a catchy name.
1. Distributed ledger - since internet connectivity is needed anyways, exactly how is this functionally different than just going through a bank? That I don't have a complete copy of the transaction ledger is not a problem for anything I can imagine. The lack of it prevents nothing.
2. Cryptographically secure - this has been around since the 70s, see Merkle Trees.
Other than being "outside the banks", what is it actually good for in the realm of money? I'm also coming up short for medicines, but I know less about those and don't want to completely assume. Is there some supplier out there who is somehow not trustworthy enough to provide what they say they're going to ship, but where them having a blockchain database would make their shipment unforgable? I don't get it...
I originally heard about BTC on /. when people had "faucets" which would just give you BTC now worth hundreds of dollars. At first they didn't even try to stop you from using it multiple times. These things were relatively common for a time.
"vote back to you" - no it doesn't. it gives the vote to the existing whales, which for the hoi poloi entering the field, means "not you". it's like people trumpeting how the right to bear arms keeps them safe from "tyranny", when they have no chance to fight against an entity that can field APCs and drones.
Crypto coins can not be turned into a real asset if itâ(TM)s value is zero. At least gold has an industrial use. MTG or Beanie babies or barbies or hockey cards or comic books do their own devalueing by having their seals broken but their value only goes to zero if nobody is willing to trade for the physical asset. With crypto coins, you can not get back the energy wasted generating it. It in effect is an carbon currency. If you own a crypto coin, it likely cost some 100$ in energy cost to generate it.
Just to be pendantic.. But it need not have been generated with carbon. It _could_ have been generated with Solar or Hydro...
Just sayin'..
US money fails the test:
Economists define a currency as something that can be at once:
- a medium of exchange: True
- a store of value: False. Tell me what you can convert US money to.
- and a unit of account: True
Bitcoin:
- a medium of exchange: True.
- a store of value: Questionable at best. It is technically a store of computing value, but I understand the skepticism behind that. So I will say false.
- and a unit of account: True
What a shitty magazine. Unless they want to discount every fiat currency ever, which is pretty much all of them. Gold standard, anyone?
Like I said before, these currencies still have the problem of "99% of it being owned by the 1%" - with that 1% being the geeks this time around.
AC comments get piped to
Your understanding of how Coinbase and others work is lacking. You can trade dollars for cryptocurrency readily. Yes, they take a fee if you change it back to another currency, say BTC to USD.
The US hasn't used gold as a currency backer for decades. The price of gold mirrors paranoia more than any other perceived trait. You can buy crypto coins easily, and you used no energy, someone else did. Maybe their energy was cheap Probably not.
You can mint your own coins. Takes hardware and brains and electricity. Some coins are easier to make with one kind of hardware vs another. Some really need ASICs. Some do not, but accumulate asset values at a different rate, made non-linear by moment-to-moment trading.
You won't be a millionaire using your laptop, unless you're a thief. But if you have a data center that has too much hardware for the current workload, and cheap electricity, making coins might work.
Today, my Coinbase account is a real asset. I can change BTC/etc into any "hard" currency that I want. Takes seconds. I'm not sure you understand the topic sufficiently.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Not stuff that's blindingly obvious and has been from the start.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Both of which were built by machines and or factories which relied on carbon based fuels.
Why would anybody believe their shit?
The publication belongs to the Economist Group. It is 50% owned by the English branch of the Rothschild family and by the Agnelli family through its holding company Exor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist
Hydrogen is relatively hard to find.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Bitcoin is a terrible design from a technical standpoint, and there are many other coins that are so better designed and actually provide the things which bitcoin promised but does not deliver, like privacy, security etc.
Bitcoin is 100% traceable, and if it gets adopted the government will track every single transaction and probably send you a bill for the taxes seconds after every trade of coins. With that sort of massive limitation and no privacy it is worse then cash, and will never ever be as useful and no one will ever use it instead of cash.
Until people stop being blinded by the name and first to market popularity of the bitcoin name fades away and we can start to honestly look at what better designs are out there, then no crypto will have a chance of being useful.
Let's not forget that the power consumption is crazy high for what is really a minuscule fraction of the global economy.
If it *were* to scale to significant portion of the economy, we'd have to magically find more energy than the rest of our uses combined.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
as it is it's like "idling your car all day to generate completed sukoku's which you can trade for heroin (from a cartoon)"
Distributed ledger without the hashing arms race might work. Let's see that protocol.
"All art is quite useless." - Oscar Wilde
Not a great comparison, I suspect Wilde was making a point about judging art, art has no intrinsic value, it's true value is entirely subjective.
But I don't think people want Bitcoin so they can admire the blockchain, they expect an eventual payoff.
It's not their best headline writing, but TFA makes the point clear: cryptocurrencies are not currencies, let alone useful currencies. Their only "use" is speculation, and to an economist, that doesn't count as "useful".
Because it's not useful, aside from gambling (which is a losing proposition for everyone but the bookie) speculation relies on an eventual practical payoff. Tomorrow if everyone realized that the value of cryptocurrencies was purely for speculation their value would vanish overnight. Heck, if every non-motenary use of gold vanished tomorrow it would become worthless in short order as well.
As mentioned by others the only two things crypto currencies are good at are facilitating illegal activities and taking monetary power out of failing states. But people in failing states already have access to other currencies, and if the only crypto-currency activity is illegal then governments will eventually ban the buying and selling of crypto currency, and when that happens they'll die.
I stole this Sig
Bitcoin is literally useless.
Nearly useless as money but it is useful as a money transfer system. Convert a real currency to bitcoins, transfer to whoever, they convert to a real currency. For the very short time the bitcoins are held the volatility isn't a problem.
Now if you want to argue that proof of work algorithms are useless given the power consumption, there is that, but Bitcoin does not have to use proof of work, there are other way to maintain a blockchain.
And speaking of blockchain, Bitcoin is use as a field test of that technology. Bitcoin may not be with us in the future, there is no reason it cannot be displaced by some other crypto coin, but blockchain will likely be with us and not just in the cryptocurrency sense.
What do you think about tether and its relationship to bitcoin prices?
It's so far superior to traditional money, that any argument against it is automatically a freakin' joke. It's truly an amazing system that frees the people.
You company held bitcoins to pay salaries? That is surprising. Not the paying a salary in bitcoins but the holding of bitcoins. What I've typically seen is a salary is denominated in USD, EUR, etc and on the payday a realtime fiat/bitcoin exchange rate is determined and the equivalent amount of bitcoin is transferred. The recipient typically immediately exchange it for their local fiat immediately unless we're talking zimbabwe, venezuela or some other country in the midst of economic collapse.
Don't worry, the way things are going, the dollar and the Euro are going to follow suit. The days of fiat currencies are numbered, and with it the ability of central banks to manipulate the market for the benefit of the rich and powerful.
And while Bitcoin has too many technical problems to replace it, some cryptography-based medium of exchange will replace it.
People are given points before it's possible to do so. This website is nothing but a joke.
The dingleberries hanging off my anal hairs are worth more, much more. Good eatin' too for those who like that sort of thing.
Bitcoin is like a 1000-unit apartment complex served by a single two-inch water main. As long as most of the apartments are vacant, flipping from one absentee owner to another at ever-higher prices, no one notices anything wrong. Seven transactions per second is woefully inadequate for a global currency. Miners steadfastly refuse to raise this limit, preferring to cherry-pick the transactions offering the highest fees.
Fees are down lately only because so many vendors have stopped accepting Bitcoin. You even have to pay dollars to attend Bitcoin conferences!
The other problem, which Monero has solved, is that all transactions are publicly visible. Laundering is expensive because fake transactions cost as much as real ones. Criminals often buy and sell Monero to launder their ill-gotten Bitcoins; in the future they'll probably abandon Bitcoin and use Monero directly.
Bitcoin and alts are showing a strong week with lots of good press and impressive reach/significant projects. Queue the bad press for shorts to make a profit.
All the existing blockchain schemes use public-key algorithms that are susceptible to Shor's Algorithm running on a quantum computer, which would allow transactions to be forged at will. Sure, quantum computers may be a decade or two away, but why would anyone invest in any technology that has such a limited shelf-life? (Apart from pump-and-dump speculators).
I did not RTFA, but I was intrigued by the phrase about blockchains in the summary: about a database "where entries cannot be altered once written"
As I understand from reading dumbed down for the laymen explanations, blockchains are computationally expensive because they enlist a large number of players to maintain them, this being so no one player can outcompute everybody else and thus game the system. I gather this computation is mainly to do with encrypting or creating a sort of signature for transactions similar to the way one creates a digital signature with Pretty Good Privacy.
I just wonder if there couldn't possibly be some other less expensive way of recording a transaction that is unalterable? According to some of the dumbed down for the laymen descrptions of quantum mechanics, information can't be lost. Maybe there's something in physics that could be used. Two parties have to participate in the transaction, in somehow 'signing' the instrument (the contract or receipt or whatever), but then it's permanent. Would that do the work of the blockchain?
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
The cats are licking my bunghole! I'm about to blow my load!
Are you saying imaginary internet money was a poor investment on my part?
Things that you speculate with are by definition a very poor thing to use as a currency.
Without a stabile value, bitcoin is a complete failure as a currency. When I give somebody X amount of bitcoin to pay for a washing machine it would need to remain close to the value of the washing machine for at least a medium-term amount of time.
People can dink around with it speculating, but that destroys it as a currency. It can't even be planted to grow nice looking tulips.
Hydro or solar power that could have displaced energy used that was created using fossil fuel.
If you want to turn a hand crank generator to make bitcoin go ahead. Otherwise you're effectively comitting an environmental crime.
Get rich quick. Most of the ones that got in early, cashed out won this one, but the suckers who invested within the rise/fall/boom are the ones that lost out.
I use them to buy drugs. Definitively not useless.
Exchanging value all over the world without a middleman is totally fucking useless.
I hope you don't consider the dollar to be a stable store of value. If you do, might want to check its value over the past 100 years or so.
.. after they short BItcoin big time!
Shut thread fuck up you stupid faggot
No... just.. no
You tree huggers.. For fuck's sake....
A person can have a home that is 100% solar. They CAN use their own electricity to generate those coins.. They don't have to back feed into the grid... Sometimes they don't even have the option to dump excess into the grid.. So take your holier-than-thou and cram it.
You people hate everything that makes our society what it is.. Life wasn't better before technology. It was WAY FUCKING WORSE. You dropped dead at 45.. Every cut or scrape was a potential death sentence. And every animal in nature is 1 of 2 things.. It's food or you are it's food.
Take off the rose colored glasses.
Environmental crime.... Go fuck off.
DIVX the defunct Video CD rental company and DivX, the MPEG4 video and MP3 audio in an AVI (or in later versions MKV) container video file format are two completely separate things.
Whadya tallkin bout, a majority of the bright shiny things you see in the sky are made out of hydrogen... it may be tough to get in some cases, but any place you can get water or a hydrocarbon you can get hydrogen if you put enough effort in.
You say that but Bitcoin is accepted in most countries on some level, not so with anything except US dollars. You can send it outside of traditional currency controls, for two, that's a "use" good or bad. People DO use it, three. QED.
It seems clear that prices are being manipulated by some of the bigger players. With mining concentrated in some dubious countries as well, expect this to continue
You can own Bitcoin Cash without having a bank account. You can transfer and receive it with sms, handy apps, etc. The main problem with cryptocurrencies in general for bankers, economists, lawyers, etc. is that it makes many of them completely redundant.
Tell that to New Hampshire and Venezuela and all the other places seeing increasing acceptance in the real world. Not to mention online usage. My company accepts crypto currencies from users around the world. We're based out of New Hampshire and ship mostly outside of the state and from Europe to elsewhere. We've had employees who've asked and been paid entirely in crypto currencies. I myself regularly spend crypto currencies both in my professional life and private life. From workers compensation and business insurance to vehicles. I have dozens of restaurants in my small town where every single employee knows how to accept payment in crypto and each receives regularly- daily-in most cases coming in and paying in crypto. My dentist takes it, my car mechanic takes it, and all of the places I spend the majority of my money take it. Crypto currencies offer a significant savings over credit cards and my business saves around 40% via use of crypto currencies give or take whether or not something is paid for in crypto and we can take advantage of liquidity in the market in the purchase of goods from upstream suppliers. The idea that fluctuation in the value of a currency somehow makes it unusable are mostly non-sense. The Canadian dollar dropped 40% in four years. Comparatively Bitcoin has rarely seen a year where it didn't increase in value substantially. Despite almost hitting $20,000 USD it's still up from $2,000 last year this time. For those unaware it's at $7,000. Anybody who wasn't a total moron and understands the basics and been on board with it has done extremely well over the past seven or so years. I'm not an investor and would not advise people to mortgage a house or anything like that. But you'd most likely have done significantly better with crypto as an investment than anything else in spite of that view. crypto currencies value is amazing in its ability to cut costs of conducting business and I wish more people would get on board faster. Compared to credit cards we make less on profit margins on some products than the credit card companies take. Meaning we can more than double our profit margins by accepting crypto currencies. We have customers who pay with wire transfers and have had businesses pay $120 or so in wire transfer fees for $117 worth of product. It's absolutely batshit insane to think crypto currencies don't have significant value. $105 or so of that wire was to send the wire, but also includes intermediary bank fees. Then $45 was charged by the receiving bank to receive it. None of this factors in that fiat currencies are subsidized by taxes. And as far as environmental impact nobody has ever been able to account for the environmental costs of all the financial systems in place, but what we can summarize about environmental cost is from the fact it reflects the transactional costs and based on that crypto currencies are significantly better for the environment than fiat currencies and that doesn't even begin to take into account the fact fiat currencies are subsidized by taxes so we don't know the actual transactional costs of said fiat currencies.
A work colleague was trading bitcoin most of last year. towards the end of the year he chased his losses one weekend and came into work on the Monday stating "he was now down overall" - he didn't look to happy about it so I can only guess how bad things were for him. He was sacked on the Friday for not paying enough attention at work, he'd been under review for a year or so and had failed to show any improvement - I guess he thought bitcoin trading was his way out. The story that more than 95% of bitcoins are held by just 4 addresses is enough to put me off getting involved (whether it's true or not.)
>/dev/null 2>&1
Betting real money on anything the government can simply declare illegal on a whim is stupid.
The other day I was at a lunch with a buddy which happened to be at the track. he gave me $50 cash so i could bet on a race since I didn't have cash. I paid him 50 in btc on the spot by scanning a qr code so i wouldn't have to be bothered to get him cash later. It was the most convenient way to pay him back. Hard to deny the utility of btc when it can do that.
Let's see.
'The Economist is an English-language weekly magazine-format newspaper owned by the Economist Group and edited at offices in London."
So who owns the Economist Group ?
Aside from the Agnelli family, smaller shareholders in the company include Cadbury, Rothschild, Schroder, Layton and other family interests as well as a number of staff and former staff shareholders.[3]
Literally Rothschild. WOW who would have thunk it.
Except, as I understand it, the transaction costs will kill you unless the amounts in play are fairly large.
just a tabloid rag that backs minions like Rodham Clinton. Move along.
Buy crypto!!
slashdot, stop promoting hot air!
(Or, for the layman: Go into the direction of the visible lights.)
That would be the same military with APCs and drones that can't beat a bunch of savages armed with assault rifles? Even after 17 years and trillions of dollars spent?
Have we already come full circle on this? Who remembers right after Trump was elected, when liberals suddenly discovered they needed guns for protection against fascism? http://monsterhunternation.com...
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
You could look at the price of gold in the same time, and you will see a much larger fluctuation. If you take the value of the dollar from 1918, and you calculate the Federal Interest Rate into it from year to year, the dollar is amazingly stable. The interest rate for gold is nil. No one will pay you gold for being able to hold onto your gold coins for some time. Instead, they will charge you a deposit fee.
That would be the same military with APCs and drones that can't beat a bunch of savages armed with assault rifles? Even after 17 years and trillions of dollars spent?
That's because those savages with assault rifles aren't facing tyranny.
They're facing a military that is (by and large) operating under rules and trying to (whether the plan would work or not, that's the ultimate goal, yes?) establish order such that a democracy can form.
(also, the main threat isn't the assault rifles, but IEDs and other booby traps that a military trying to maintain order is vulnerable to)
If you're facing true tyranny, having assault rifles won't help. If you're not facing true tyranny, you don't need them.
about Bitcoin, or supremely butt-hurt for having lost the occasion of their life.
This one is for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg
What are you talking about.. Btc has flat fees, not % based. You pay. 0005 BTC if it's 0.1 BTC or 10000. Of course, if it's a smaller transaction, you could use LTC, or a lightning payment.. I agree, guys who are overzealous are irritating (and wrong).. But do some basic research before talking shit..
You really are quite stupid if you didn't get it. you
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Just opened the article @ Economist. Absolutely useless. Bitcoin is a currency. Banks are afraid of it. This is why there are so many attacks on it. The problem is that bitcoin market can be manipulated because of large hodlers. Just give it more time and killer apps. It is a matter of time.
The reason we don't see more of the "value" of cryptocurrencies is because by definition, cryptocurrencies exist to hide financial activity. The vast majority of cryptocurrency "economics" isn't visible to the naked eye or recorded.
that can't beat a bunch of savages
That presumption right there (which, by the way, brands you as absolute trash) is why "the same military with APCs and drones" can't beat them.
name one documented use of blockchain technology that isn't a distributed ledger system like a cryptocurrency.
You can't, because there aren't any.
blockchain = bitcoin. Its the same thing.
All this fake news and "organic" posts throwing shade for what? It's been hyper-inflated. It's been shorted. Why are there still these retarded bias attempts to devalue it? Haven't the powers got their real money and cashed out?
Currency is that which proles use to pay taxes .... in states where Gub'mnt has the big-guns.
You've probaly burned more fossil fuel on airplane flights than are used for many crypto mining operations. Crypto-mining is concentrated around hydro and geothermal energy sources. Economics does more to help the environment than your indignation ever will.
See here. I dip my card at the store and by the time my stuff's in the bag I'm done and the bank has recorded the transaction and updated my balance. I know there are attempts to fix this (proof of stake coins come to mind) but they've got problems (proof of stake is open to all sorts of attacks from bad actors flush with cash).
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Apparently you can't read? Go back and read my comment again, every single word, before you make a dumb statement like that, okay? Sheesh.
No, they're not inseparable, but you on the other hand are dumb.
Is strong.
While i agree that bitcoin is 'gone' as a useful currency since its now entangled with futures trading, the concept is still good.
While many others say economists are useless. Still, I wonder how many of those negative economists are expressing sour grapes for not having invested in cryptocurrency earlier on?
People still care about their opinion? They're like Reuters; people still care about them? Don't think any of us millenials give a shit about what these ivory tower cucks think.
This time it'll be Tron that booms. Better buy up now, once it goes up you'll be kicking yourself.
People are already wise to Bitcoin and etherium. Next in line is Tron.
You are wrong though. DivX the discs did not use DivX the pirate file format. DivX the pirate file format came significantly after DivX the discs.
There are no technical links between the two. DivX the pirate file format was named DivX to joke about DivX the discs. The only thing linking them is the name and the joke.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I've used several wallets but they've been on computers. I have an iPhone and traditionally, Apple placed a lot of limitations on crypto-related apps they'd allow on the App Store, so I never really bothered to try to use one on there.
"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In my town ever summer people used line up at the grocery store to Western union money back to South America and Jamaica. Its not "Useless" to them
In the many country's that undergoing currency crisis like Venezuela Bitcoin is the difference between your family loosing everything or loosing nothing at all.
You people hate everything that makes our society what it is.. Life wasn't better before technology. It was WAY FUCKING WORSE.
You do know it's not either/or, right?
Technology is almost always three steps forward, one step back. We are heading in the right direction but we're kidding ourselves if we think anything is risk-free and drawback-free. And we're stupid if we think we can't do anything about that.
The ABS and seatbelts and airbags and other safety gear in my car are not anti-technology. They are technology.
I want technological progress and less pollution that we have now. I don't think that's unreasonable.
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The transaction fees spiked upwards when the volume of transactions was overloading the system but that was temporary. And the capacity of the system is being addressed.
And the high fees were not required unless you wanted a transaction to go through quickly. Offer a lower fee and it will likely still get processed more slowly, the lower the fee the more time required. During this past "fee crisis" many people simply waited for a day or time of day when the load on the system was not that great.
The fee is not flat as in predefined and relatively constant, it is flat in the sense that it doesn't matter what the amount being transferred is, as you say not a percentage. However that fee is based on bidding. When the system is overloaded one can offer a higher fee to make sure one's transaction gets processed quickly. This can create a bidding war and drive the fees up.
Also when bitcoin prices experience one of those occasional exponential increases the fees do not necessarily decline proportionally to the bitcoin/fiat exchange (ex. dollar price) increase, as you indicate the fee is denominated in a fractional bitcoin not in fiat. So such exponential price increases effectively drive up the fee from the perspective of fiat prices (USD, EUR, etc).
useless unless you tryna buy some weeds
Define "quickly" and "slowly". Both are just a few seconds, right? Because if someone thought slowly meant over an hour for payment transaction, I would disregard their opinion.
No, you're the idiot. It's not the other person's fault you're not funny. This isn't the first time your attempt at a joke fell flat.
Well, I'll give you this; you are one of the rare and reasonable ones.
And you are absolutely correct. New technology does bring new problems but unfortunately a large portion of those who dwell on the left side of center act like all technology is bad or.. maybe more correctly, they act like it makes our life worse in the long run.
Right now, in my state, there is this anti-plastic campaign.. Total disregard for the quality of life that plastics give us (sterile food, sterile medicine, etc). We don't have a plastic problem, we have a plastic disposal problem. But that's not how they see it.. They've got entire lists of things they want banned.... Back to paper straws in some cities.. Fuck the trees I guess...
We have to deal with the issue we create, but on the whole our life has improved dramatically since the industrial revolution. Anyone who says otherwise is delusional.. I'm quite happy that my life expectancy isn't 45.
bitcoin isn't for investing, dumbass, it's for buying sketch chinese drugs, and it works pretty fuckin good.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I'm not accusing you of this, but one big fallacy that the climate deniers in particular seem to make is to think that climate scientists are anti-technology.
They're fucking scientists. Only a non-Slashdotter could possibly think that scientists didn't want gadgets and gizmos.
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Define "quickly" and "slowly". Both are just a few seconds, right? Because if someone thought slowly meant over an hour for payment transaction, I would disregard their opinion.
You seem unfamiliar with the bitcoin system. New blocks in the blockchain take about 10 minutes to create. Confirmation of a transaction is often 6 verifying blocks so that is about an hour. So "quickly" is about an hour. You could go with less than 6 confirmations but then one is acting more on faith and less on verification. During the recently crisis where a lack of capacity caused fees to skyrocket, offering only a modest fee rather than the highly inflated fee could cause verification to take many hours, double digit hour, sometime a day or more.
Solutions to increase transaction capacity are being tested.
I think this statement is ridiculous:
"Tomorrow if everyone realized that the value of cryptocurrencies was purely for speculation their value would vanish overnight."
I think we can agree that most of the people buying bitcoin recognize the risk and are buying it -for- speculation. The value hasn't vanished, people bought bitcoin yesterday, they are buying bitcoin today, and they'll buy bitcoin tomorrow. The price on the exchanges is from people buying (and selling) bitcoins which is still happening constantly.
You sound like one of the apologists for the e-currencies. All you do is shout random facts and waggle your eyebrows meaningfully. Or you claim certain problems that will "certainly lead to ruin", or even misrepresent well-known systems of control as "currency manipulation".
The reputation of the Economist is established. It is based upon such matters as:
1). Editorial independence;
2). Good writing;
3). Ideas that survive and thrive, even if the Economist weren't writing about them.
As opposed to an AC on /.? Waggles eyebrows meaningfully...
An advanced modern military can’t win a long-term conflict against an armed population. The military will win every battle, but loose the war. The last hundred years has illustrated this repeatedly. A military fighting on its own turf is in an even worse situation as it depends on its enemy for food and supplies. Asymmetrical warfare will wear down an occupying army just as water wears away mountains. The locals attack then blend back into the population and military reprisals against civilian populations will just recruit more enemies. Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan; battles won but gains can't be held.
You could look at the price of gold in the same time, and you will see a much larger fluctuation. If you take the value of the dollar from 1918, and you calculate the Federal Interest Rate into it from year to year, the dollar is amazingly stable. The interest rate for gold is nil. No one will pay you gold for being able to hold onto your gold coins for some time. Instead, they will charge you a deposit fee.
The interest rate for gold is zero but inflation means that it holds its value better than currency. Inflation is a negative interest rate which effectively taxes currency.