For brevity I will narrow the examples down to what many American's are unaware of, a few examples off the top of my head where intelligence agencies work on behave of private interests within the US:
writings go into detail with corporate involvement and the military industrial complex.
"The CIA and the big corporations were, in my experience, in step with each other. Later I realized that they may argue about details of strategy - a small war here or there. However, both are vigorously committed to supporting the system."
Recent Snowden leaks shows this is still prevalent:
.....but I strenuously disagree that more than a very small percentage of people who have studied public finance would say that more than half of an average federal dollar is wasted.
Nowhere did I refer to my disagreement being with wasteful spending. The fact that I was talking about ethics and mentioned agorism should have made my point abundantly clear. Suppose there was no waste, would that make such duplicitous, unethical, hypocritical behavior any better? I understand many human societies and individuals aren't perfect. I don't expect a utopia, but many Americans have been drinking the kool aid for so long that they either don't see the overt hypocrisy , they are apathetic, or they rationalize their support which you seem to be doing.
If you feel so strongly that 11-20% of what you pay supports human rights violations or policies that are bad for humanity why do you do it? There are ways you can directly and indirectly support aspects of the government you agree with.
Or if you really think the US is irredeemable, leave. There are plenty of places on this planet that are better by many measures. But staying here, and quietly trying to get out of paying your taxes, telling yourself that you are taking a principled stand because 51% of your tax dollar is wasted, is bullshit.
Why are you assuming I am an American citizen or haven't already left? To those living in the US I would suggest leaving but I can certainly understand those that decide to distance themselves as conscientious objectors within the US.
If the banks were truly too big to fail, they should have been nationalized, senior management at least fired, preferably arrested and charged and the banks broken into small pieces and sold.
Yes, completely. Whether it was fraud or incompetence it is sheer lunacy that we permitted such behavior.
Are you really insinuating that the wholesale murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians is eclipsed by the benefit of cheap oil?
No, I said the exact opposite. I said that in my opinion the cost is greater than the benefit. Your reading comprehension is terrible.
I understood the context just fine. You just are under the impression that it is morally justified to continue to support said behaviors with federal tax dollars because not doing so would have a much greater detrimental outcome for society. Some would suggest that their is a very good moral argument to be made by practicing agorism when more than half of federal tax dollars support activities many do not agree with.
This is probably what is so ethically offensive about your comments:
.....the vast majority of it is still net positive
.... and than you give examples to illustrate the above:
.....I don't like the heavy-handed Middle East adventurism, but it does get us cheap oil by keeping OPEC in check.
Are you really insinuating that the wholesale murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians is eclipsed by the benefit of cheap oil?
While I agree with you that certain Americans benefit off the corrupt policies of foreign interventionism and leveraging our power with exploited contracts and trade barriers, spying on foreign businesses to give US ones unfair advantages with the NSA, some of us recognize this isn't ethical. Rationalizing such behavior sounds cruel and insinuating that an emotional response isn't also backed up with good reasons and provable facts is unfair.
I don't care if its a government, corporation, religion, or individual committing these crimes against humanity, it doesn't ever justify cheap oil or a smooth highway. There is a line that is repeatedly being crossed where a person of good conscious should become intolerant to any entity despite some beneficial side effects. The ends do not justify the means and it is presumptuous to believe that their is even a net benefit for yourself.
You mean loaned out to banks. Banks either paid that back or they failed. Most of it was paid back.
You are repeating the banks' talking points. Some of it loaned out. Some of it was given out. Some of it was exchanged for worthless assets.
In the end the bottom line is most people were screwed and the the banks profited.
Were you offered extremely low interest loans which you immediately were allowed to profit massively off of by selling higher interest loans and dissolving your bad investments?
Why didn't the Fed do the right think and allow the irresponsible banks to fail and instead invest those trillions on paying directly to the consumers the raised 250k FDIC insurance? Why weren't the bad actors weeded out? Instead the banks were told quite clearly they must stay large so they become too big to fail and in a couple years they can start aggressively find new games to play with peoples life savings.
Not if you are actually considering the rest of the costs including currency exchange cost, opportunity cost, volatility risk and the rest.
I do not need to pay any currency exchange fees. I can directly spend my bitcoins with thousands of merchants directly or by git cards for 0 fees with the remaining ones like amazon or walmart. There is 0 need for exchanging back to fiat. If I needed, 1% or lower is much less than the 3-5 % avg for merchant processing fees. Volatility risk doesn't effect me either as I simply buy when its higher than what I purchase the coins at. So the volatility makes items less expensive.
You are also focusing entirely on the risks with bitcoin and not mentioning the many risks with debit cards or usd cash.
Do you seriously think I'm going to ask someone to waste a considerable amount of their time setting up to use bitcoin so that I can save at best a few cents on a money transfer at considerably higher risk to both of us? I honestly don't know anyone in real life who has done a single transaction in bitcoin.
Bitcoin isn't just about you but about others who are underbanked or unbanked. It benefits those that regularly have to send money so the little extra effort in initially setting things up and buying some coin is worth it. It is about countries where there is hyper-inflation or bail-ins where 60% of your savings disappear overnight. It may indeed be too much of a hassle for you now because you don't know anyone that uses it but once you join you will start to interact with the 2.5+ million and growing of our community and than you may find it actually much easier than traditional online banking.
Bitcoin does not eliminate counterparty risk from a transaction. At most it might shift the type of risk to worry about. Furthermore, escrow is nothing new at all in financial transactions.
You must be unfamiliar with the many services out their like https://www.bitrated.com/ and even hot wallets like https://www.bitgo.com/ which make it impossible for the third party escrow, bank, or arbitrator to independently steal your funds. How can this be done without a crypto-currency ledger system like bitcoin?
What about them? You're confusing the specific technology used with the function it serves. Those all have existing analogs that have nothing to do with bitcoin.
Can you cite any examples that do so with the efficiency and security of bitcoin?
Being a first mover is not necessarily an advantage. Second movers often can simply watch the mistakes of the first mover and act accordingly. Ask MySpace how being a first mover worked for them. Bitcoin isn't going to succeed because of "first mover advantage".
has the benefit of the networking effect
Bitcoin is not a central company or website so your example is poor. Bitcoin is an open source evolving protocol. Bitcoin has in the past incorporated code changes other 2nd movers like litecoin and can simply adopt other altcoins feature sets if they prove advantages. The networking effect is critical in not only open source protocols but currencies thus the stranglehold USD has on the world reserve currency and why Visa/Mastercard remain dominant above paypal. It takes something with unique features like bitcoin to start to carve out some market share.
Which presumes that there is no flaw in the implementation, does not account for future advances in computing power, etc. Just because it is currently secure does not mean it is safe to assume it will remain so. Are you an expert in cryptography? I'm sure as hell not and yet I'm expected to trust the code written by no one I know and certainly no one who is accountable to anyone? Yeah, not going to happen... Hell, someone doesn't have to launch an attach on bitcoin itself to make it not
"they are not charging you a red cent if they have a theft."
No, they socialize that to the government insurance, which you pay for with your taxes. Banks take zero risk here.
Really? You think when a thief steals $1000 from an ATM that the bank gets paid back by the government? What country do you live in? The government insurance only kicks in when a bank actually fails - then the depositors get the money - not the bank.
I seem to remember trillions of dollars in bailout insurance being paid to banks, not the customers through FDIC, while they remained open and more profitable than ever. This is socialized government insurance, where moral hazard is removed and its business as usual.
Can somebody explain to me WHY it matters if there is a fixed amount of coins when you can split a coin to something like 8 decimal places, price and buy things in fractions of a coin.
The dollar practically speaking can only be split into pennies. I can understand why you would need more money made. Bitcoin will probably ALWAYS have enough atomic satori to go around.
The reason 21 million coins matter is this is the limit that ultimately makes bitcoin deflationary instead of inflationary in the longterm. The divisibility of a coin does not devalue the currency but is akin to a 2 to 1 stock split where the value of the stock is half with double the shares thus the total value remains the same. When a government inflates the monetary supply it devalues the price of the currency unlike if they added more decimal places to the dollar. Currently, USD reduces in value between 5-8% a year minimum and other fiat currencies with greater rates of inflation. Bitcoin is likely to grow in value because it is designed to be deflationary in the longterm with most coins mined by 2040 and all by 2140.
Bitcoin for all its technical sophistication is more of a threat to "stock exchanges" or "equity allocation" than it ever will be to "currencies"
It is not suitable to a "drive-thru" transactions due to the number of "confirms" required to have veracity in the exchange.
However, it is VERY WELL SUITED to the exchange of equity -- and is, given the current settlement times, much more of a threat to public ledgers like TORRENS (property exchange logs) -- or stock/ownership exchanges.
Debit and Credit cards take much longer to confirm. Bitcoin takes between 10 minutes to an hour to confirm. Cards take 60 days to confirm and before than the transaction can be reversed as fraudulent instantly. In store purchases can be done instantly with either using a customer shopping card, allowing unconfirmed transactions for small transactions backed up by security camera footage, or payment processors like bitpay/coinbase who conduct investigations and could offer insurance like credit card companies.
What's curious about bitcoin is that functionally it's pretty much a digital money order. It seems to have some geek appeal but there isn't anything functionally novel about what it does. I think it is an intellectual curiosity that will be studied closely by economic researchers but practically speaking I don't really see much point in it. It carries a huge amount of risk and externalized cost for something that I can already do with a lot less bother.
What an odd statement. Can you name any other way to wire funds to another person or business instantly and securely for costs of half a penny to free? Is there any other secure system that allows for multisig authentications to remove the need for counter-party trust? What about Oracles, DAO's, smart contracts? There is long list of novel features that only exist within bitcoin. Sure some of these features could be copied and created outside of bitcoin but such a system would ultimately be insecure attacks. Bitcoin will remain novel as it has first movers advantage, has the benefit of the networking effect and the hashing power that makes it near impossible for any group or government to launch a successful attack on it.
All this, unfortunately, is irrelevant. Bitcoin in itself has no inherent value. Its only value lies in what its users, and ultimately what the public perceives it to be worth.
Are you suggesting their is no inherent value for a system that allows me to send thousands of dollars instantly and securely to anyone in the world with costs ranging from half a penny to 0? Are you suggesting a technology that allows me to use escrow/arbitration services that are free and remove all risks with counter-party trust has no value?
I would love for you to provide me an alternative solution that can accomplish these things. Until such, bitcoin has tremendous inherent and intrinsic value outside of merely what speculators perceive.
Money on stock exchanges is never lost. For every seller there is always a buyer. For every investment there is a payout. It's like the conservation of energy. Money changes hands, but it can not simply vanish, like BitCoins apparently can, unless you actively destroy cash currency.
Nonsense, money goes missing and unreported all the time through fraud and sloppy accounting with Bitcoin, stocks, or fiat. If Private keys to Bitcoin wallets are lost than that is simply a donation to the whole user base. In fact individuals will sometimes purposely destroy their bitcoins as a charitable act to the community as it is the easiest way to donate a little money to all Bitcoin users efficiently.
Actually, just like with dollars, the creator can choose to inject more BTC into thesystem at any time. That feature was designed into the currency.
Anyone can choose to fork the blockchain and inject more liquidity but that new blockchain will not be "bitcoin" but an alt and the new user will be hard pressed to convince anyone to devalue their savings by using that new coin.
There were a handful of accidental millionaires, but nobody predicted the heights of the bubbles and while many made some money, with the exception of the accidents, all others liquidated at 2-3x value, not 1000-10000x value.
The Bitcoin wealth distribution has been well studied and your statement is factually incorrect. There are a little under 1K new mufti-millionares and a couple billionaires because of Bitcoin at this moment. With the next bubble (~5k per bitcoin) one should expect this figure to shoot up to 5-10,000 new millionaires and even more billionaires.
lol...have you ever heard of FDIC? Consumer protections? None of these things apply to bicoin and never will. My bank can be vaporized out of existence and it wouldn't do shit to me.
Bitcoin Hot wallets can be insured if you want just like FDIC backed banks.Lloyds of London is one of the oldest and most trusted insurance companies in existence.
Nice try - but it still isn't legal tender. Here in the USA there is a legal definition that US money is legal tender and must be accepted for payment of all debts, public and private. Says it right on the money. Any country on the Earth with a functioning government makes the same assertion about their money within their borders. It's one of the basic sovereign powers which any world government is able to exercise (if they're truly a national government).
So . . . no, Republic Credits are no good here. I can buy stuff at the corner grocery store with money. I can pay my rent with money. I can buy gasoline with money. How's that bitcoin workin' for ya?
Nice try sidestepping my comment. Read it again:
USD Fiat has no legal enforcement as currency outside of the US either.. Bitcoin is merely a competing currency like any other.
Additionally, USD fiat is legal tender to pay all debts. There is no enforceability for accepting USD as payment for a good or service. All businesses and individuals can choose how they wish to be paid and who their potential clients are. Businesses within the US can choose to turn away people paying in USD and do so all the time. This is why an individual can pay taxes and debts in thousands of pennies in protest and businesses turn away clients all the time for this type of nonsense when a protestor does so with a new transaction.
Bitcoin isn't legal tender, but it is a form of money with the same rights and privileges as foreign currency in the US. This is why thieves are prosecuted in the US for stealing bitcoin, because its recognized as a valuable form of money.
Selling that BTC later on (for dollars) results in even further revenue. This just artificially drives up the "earned revenue" in the year-end balance, making it an almost certainty that you would be paying vastly more in tax than you would otherwise have done.
You are correct that Overstock will have to pay capital gains on assets such as Bitcoin if it appreciates in value. Are you inferring that the percentage in taxes paid would outstrip the value in gained appreciation once said asset was sold? We are laughing all the way to the bank paying all the taxes on our deflationary currencies rapid rise in value.
Every time the topic comes up, all the BTC proponents, with not a single accounting or economics degree between them (Patrick Byrne has the "do you want fries with that" Philosophy degree) start disagreeing with practicing accountants, book-keepers and economists.
This is an argument from authority fallacy.... lets just stick with data and facts please.
Why is this lie perpetually getting repeated? Hell, some moron even modded it up. Overstock (and Tigerdirect, etc) do not accept bitcoins as payment.
They certainly do, as they are supporting the Bitcoin ecosystem in 2 ways:
1) Using Bitcoin as a payment protocol gives the 0.5-1% in fees to Bitcoin exchange processors rather than 3-8% to Visa/Mastercard.
2) Even if a merchant instantly converts back to fiat there creates a demand for bitcoin because those bitcoins used in the transaction are tied up for up to 24 hours in the cycle back to the exchange and thus can drive up the price.
Once again for those of you too stupid to read carefully - No major retailer accepts bitcoins as tender!. Some of them allow you to pay via an exchange such as coinbase, but note that even though the customer is parting with bitcoins, the seller is only ever receiving dollars (AKA real currency).
While currently Overstock converts most of the bitcoins to USD to pay their suppliers and affiliates, Patrick Byrne indicates that they keep a small percentage of profits in Bitcoin and are looking to increase that percentage when they start getting more of their partners accepting Bitcoin.
They are heavily invested in Bitcoins future and expect large profits to be continued to made in doing so.Look at the email they just sent to 42 million of their clients in support of Bitcoin:
You are assuming many things and ascribing statements to me that I did not make rather than directly refuting any of my comments.
I suggest you short Bitcoin if you are so confident that we are all crazy. Backup your statements with something real and profit in return. If you don't trust any of the current exchanges to short Bitcoin there are many traditional "regulated" exchanges soon about to introduce bitcoin shorting. good luck sir.
This is false as there are many regulations exiting, government or coded in the protocol, to insure investments remain safe. There are even insured banks for bitcoin:
There are plenty of ways to hedge against inflation through a standard brokerage account. Literally thousands of ways to do it.
Bitcoin is not one of those ways.
A standard brokerage account may offset inflation or if you are lucky grow a little in value but thus far Bitcoin has much more impressive returns.Time will tell if bitcoin is a good investment and in the interim many can save money on using it as a more efficient payment protocol. This is a fascinating experiment and every economists wet dream as we are gathering solid data points with a public ledger rather than depending upon less desirable sources like opinion polls and other indirect means of gathering data.
A whole lot of people seem to think that Bitcoin has a magical deflationary property simply because there's a limited supply of it, and that it can simply be hoarded. That's grade-school thinking at best. It's nature gives it no such property.
-Matt
While Bitcoin is currently inflationary with 3600 bitcoins produced per day, it is deflationary in the long term as the amount of coins minted are halved every 4 years and many will lose their private keys thus causing deflation in the monetary supply when the demand outstrips the supply. Studying the blockchain and sales numbers from bitcoin have proven that economists intuitions have proven incorrect and more spending happens during rapid deflation or appreciation of value in Bitcoin.
Slashdot Mirror
yes, additionally, btc-e.com as well. That's the nature of this many headed hydra, it cannot be regulated by states so easily.
What are the facts to support these claims?
For brevity I will narrow the examples down to what many American's are unaware of, a few examples off the top of my head where intelligence agencies work on behave of private interests within the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stockwell
writings go into detail with corporate involvement and the military industrial complex.
"The CIA and the big corporations were, in my experience, in step with each other. Later I realized that they may argue about details of strategy - a small war here or there. However, both are vigorously committed to supporting the system."
Recent Snowden leaks shows this is still prevalent:
http://www.reuters.com/article...
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
.....but I strenuously disagree that more than a very small percentage of people who have studied public finance would say that more than half of an average federal dollar is wasted.
Nowhere did I refer to my disagreement being with wasteful spending. The fact that I was talking about ethics and mentioned agorism should have made my point abundantly clear. Suppose there was no waste, would that make such duplicitous, unethical, hypocritical behavior any better? I understand many human societies and individuals aren't perfect. I don't expect a utopia, but many Americans have been drinking the kool aid for so long that they either don't see the overt hypocrisy , they are apathetic, or they rationalize their support which you seem to be doing.
If you feel so strongly that 11-20% of what you pay supports human rights violations or policies that are bad for humanity why do you do it? There are ways you can directly and indirectly support aspects of the government you agree with.
Or if you really think the US is irredeemable, leave. There are plenty of places on this planet that are better by many measures. But staying here, and quietly trying to get out of paying your taxes, telling yourself that you are taking a principled stand because 51% of your tax dollar is wasted, is bullshit.
Why are you assuming I am an American citizen or haven't already left? To those living in the US I would suggest leaving but I can certainly understand those that decide to distance themselves as conscientious objectors within the US.
If the banks were truly too big to fail, they should have been nationalized, senior management at least fired, preferably arrested and charged and the banks broken into small pieces and sold.
Yes, completely. Whether it was fraud or incompetence it is sheer lunacy that we permitted such behavior.
Are you really insinuating that the wholesale murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians is eclipsed by the benefit of cheap oil?
No, I said the exact opposite. I said that in my opinion the cost is greater than the benefit. Your reading comprehension is terrible.
I understood the context just fine. You just are under the impression that it is morally justified to continue to support said behaviors with federal tax dollars because not doing so would have a much greater detrimental outcome for society. Some would suggest that their is a very good moral argument to be made by practicing agorism when more than half of federal tax dollars support activities many do not agree with.
.... and than you give examples to illustrate the above:
Are you really insinuating that the wholesale murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians is eclipsed by the benefit of cheap oil?
While I agree with you that certain Americans benefit off the corrupt policies of foreign interventionism and leveraging our power with exploited contracts and trade barriers, spying on foreign businesses to give US ones unfair advantages with the NSA, some of us recognize this isn't ethical. Rationalizing such behavior sounds cruel and insinuating that an emotional response isn't also backed up with good reasons and provable facts is unfair.
I don't care if its a government, corporation, religion, or individual committing these crimes against humanity, it doesn't ever justify cheap oil or a smooth highway. There is a line that is repeatedly being crossed where a person of good conscious should become intolerant to any entity despite some beneficial side effects. The ends do not justify the means and it is presumptuous to believe that their is even a net benefit for yourself.
You mean loaned out to banks. Banks either paid that back or they failed. Most of it was paid back.
You are repeating the banks' talking points. Some of it loaned out. Some of it was given out. Some of it was exchanged for worthless assets. In the end the bottom line is most people were screwed and the the banks profited.
Were you offered extremely low interest loans which you immediately were allowed to profit massively off of by selling higher interest loans and dissolving your bad investments?
Why didn't the Fed do the right think and allow the irresponsible banks to fail and instead invest those trillions on paying directly to the consumers the raised 250k FDIC insurance? Why weren't the bad actors weeded out? Instead the banks were told quite clearly they must stay large so they become too big to fail and in a couple years they can start aggressively find new games to play with peoples life savings.
Not if you are actually considering the rest of the costs including currency exchange cost, opportunity cost, volatility risk and the rest.
I do not need to pay any currency exchange fees. I can directly spend my bitcoins with thousands of merchants directly or by git cards for 0 fees with the remaining ones like amazon or walmart. There is 0 need for exchanging back to fiat. If I needed, 1% or lower is much less than the 3-5 % avg for merchant processing fees. Volatility risk doesn't effect me either as I simply buy when its higher than what I purchase the coins at. So the volatility makes items less expensive.
You are also focusing entirely on the risks with bitcoin and not mentioning the many risks with debit cards or usd cash.
Do you seriously think I'm going to ask someone to waste a considerable amount of their time setting up to use bitcoin so that I can save at best a few cents on a money transfer at considerably higher risk to both of us? I honestly don't know anyone in real life who has done a single transaction in bitcoin.
Bitcoin isn't just about you but about others who are underbanked or unbanked. It benefits those that regularly have to send money so the little extra effort in initially setting things up and buying some coin is worth it. It is about countries where there is hyper-inflation or bail-ins where 60% of your savings disappear overnight. It may indeed be too much of a hassle for you now because you don't know anyone that uses it but once you join you will start to interact with the 2.5+ million and growing of our community and than you may find it actually much easier than traditional online banking.
Bitcoin does not eliminate counterparty risk from a transaction. At most it might shift the type of risk to worry about. Furthermore, escrow is nothing new at all in financial transactions.
You must be unfamiliar with the many services out their like https://www.bitrated.com/ and even hot wallets like https://www.bitgo.com/ which make it impossible for the third party escrow, bank, or arbitrator to independently steal your funds. How can this be done without a crypto-currency ledger system like bitcoin?
What about them? You're confusing the specific technology used with the function it serves. Those all have existing analogs that have nothing to do with bitcoin.
Can you cite any examples that do so with the efficiency and security of bitcoin?
Being a first mover is not necessarily an advantage. Second movers often can simply watch the mistakes of the first mover and act accordingly. Ask MySpace how being a first mover worked for them. Bitcoin isn't going to succeed because of "first mover advantage".
has the benefit of the networking effect
Bitcoin is not a central company or website so your example is poor. Bitcoin is an open source evolving protocol. Bitcoin has in the past incorporated code changes other 2nd movers like litecoin and can simply adopt other altcoins feature sets if they prove advantages. The networking effect is critical in not only open source protocols but currencies thus the stranglehold USD has on the world reserve currency and why Visa/Mastercard remain dominant above paypal. It takes something with unique features like bitcoin to start to carve out some market share.
Which presumes that there is no flaw in the implementation, does not account for future advances in computing power, etc. Just because it is currently secure does not mean it is safe to assume it will remain so. Are you an expert in cryptography? I'm sure as hell not and yet I'm expected to trust the code written by no one I know and certainly no one who is accountable to anyone? Yeah, not going to happen... Hell, someone doesn't have to launch an attach on bitcoin itself to make it not
"they are not charging you a red cent if they have a theft."
No, they socialize that to the government insurance, which you pay for with your taxes. Banks take zero risk here.
Really? You think when a thief steals $1000 from an ATM that the bank gets paid back by the government? What country do you live in? The government insurance only kicks in when a bank actually fails - then the depositors get the money - not the bank.
I seem to remember trillions of dollars in bailout insurance being paid to banks, not the customers through FDIC, while they remained open and more profitable than ever. This is socialized government insurance, where moral hazard is removed and its business as usual.
Can somebody explain to me WHY it matters if there is a fixed amount of coins when you can split a coin to something like 8 decimal places, price and buy things in fractions of a coin.
The dollar practically speaking can only be split into pennies. I can understand why you would need more money made. Bitcoin will probably ALWAYS have enough atomic satori to go around.
The reason 21 million coins matter is this is the limit that ultimately makes bitcoin deflationary instead of inflationary in the longterm. The divisibility of a coin does not devalue the currency but is akin to a 2 to 1 stock split where the value of the stock is half with double the shares thus the total value remains the same. When a government inflates the monetary supply it devalues the price of the currency unlike if they added more decimal places to the dollar. Currently, USD reduces in value between 5-8% a year minimum and other fiat currencies with greater rates of inflation. Bitcoin is likely to grow in value because it is designed to be deflationary in the longterm with most coins mined by 2040 and all by 2140.
Bitcoin for all its technical sophistication is more of a threat to "stock exchanges" or "equity allocation" than it ever will be to "currencies"
It is not suitable to a "drive-thru" transactions due to the number of "confirms" required to have veracity in the exchange.
However, it is VERY WELL SUITED to the exchange of equity -- and is, given the current settlement times, much more of a threat to public ledgers like TORRENS (property exchange logs) -- or stock/ownership exchanges.
Debit and Credit cards take much longer to confirm. Bitcoin takes between 10 minutes to an hour to confirm. Cards take 60 days to confirm and before than the transaction can be reversed as fraudulent instantly. In store purchases can be done instantly with either using a customer shopping card, allowing unconfirmed transactions for small transactions backed up by security camera footage, or payment processors like bitpay/coinbase who conduct investigations and could offer insurance like credit card companies.
What's curious about bitcoin is that functionally it's pretty much a digital money order. It seems to have some geek appeal but there isn't anything functionally novel about what it does. I think it is an intellectual curiosity that will be studied closely by economic researchers but practically speaking I don't really see much point in it. It carries a huge amount of risk and externalized cost for something that I can already do with a lot less bother.
What an odd statement. Can you name any other way to wire funds to another person or business instantly and securely for costs of half a penny to free? Is there any other secure system that allows for multisig authentications to remove the need for counter-party trust? What about Oracles, DAO's, smart contracts? There is long list of novel features that only exist within bitcoin. Sure some of these features could be copied and created outside of bitcoin but such a system would ultimately be insecure attacks. Bitcoin will remain novel as it has first movers advantage, has the benefit of the networking effect and the hashing power that makes it near impossible for any group or government to launch a successful attack on it.
All this, unfortunately, is irrelevant. Bitcoin in itself has no inherent value. Its only value lies in what its users, and ultimately what the public perceives it to be worth.
Are you suggesting their is no inherent value for a system that allows me to send thousands of dollars instantly and securely to anyone in the world with costs ranging from half a penny to 0? Are you suggesting a technology that allows me to use escrow/arbitration services that are free and remove all risks with counter-party trust has no value?
I would love for you to provide me an alternative solution that can accomplish these things. Until such, bitcoin has tremendous inherent and intrinsic value outside of merely what speculators perceive.
Where did the money go in the Wall Street crash?
Money on stock exchanges is never lost. For every seller there is always a buyer. For every investment there is a payout. It's like the conservation of energy. Money changes hands, but it can not simply vanish, like BitCoins apparently can, unless you actively destroy cash currency.
Nonsense, money goes missing and unreported all the time through fraud and sloppy accounting with Bitcoin, stocks, or fiat. If Private keys to Bitcoin wallets are lost than that is simply a donation to the whole user base. In fact individuals will sometimes purposely destroy their bitcoins as a charitable act to the community as it is the easiest way to donate a little money to all Bitcoin users efficiently.
Actually, just like with dollars, the creator can choose to inject more BTC into thesystem at any time. That feature was designed into the currency.
Anyone can choose to fork the blockchain and inject more liquidity but that new blockchain will not be "bitcoin" but an alt and the new user will be hard pressed to convince anyone to devalue their savings by using that new coin.
There were a handful of accidental millionaires, but nobody predicted the heights of the bubbles and while many made some money, with the exception of the accidents, all others liquidated at 2-3x value, not 1000-10000x value.
The Bitcoin wealth distribution has been well studied and your statement is factually incorrect. There are a little under 1K new mufti-millionares and a couple billionaires because of Bitcoin at this moment. With the next bubble (~5k per bitcoin) one should expect this figure to shoot up to 5-10,000 new millionaires and even more billionaires.
lol...have you ever heard of FDIC? Consumer protections? None of these things apply to bicoin and never will. My bank can be vaporized out of existence and it wouldn't do shit to me.
Bitcoin Hot wallets can be insured if you want just like FDIC backed banks.Lloyds of London is one of the oldest and most trusted insurance companies in existence.
https://www.elliptic.co/vault
https://xapo.com/
Bitcoin is 100% legal in china as a commodity or asset.
Nice try - but it still isn't legal tender. Here in the USA there is a legal definition that US money is legal tender and must be accepted for payment of all debts, public and private. Says it right on the money. Any country on the Earth with a functioning government makes the same assertion about their money within their borders. It's one of the basic sovereign powers which any world government is able to exercise (if they're truly a national government).
So . . . no, Republic Credits are no good here. I can buy stuff at the corner grocery store with money. I can pay my rent with money. I can buy gasoline with money. How's that bitcoin workin' for ya?
Nice try sidestepping my comment. Read it again:
USD Fiat has no legal enforcement as currency outside of the US either.. Bitcoin is merely a competing currency like any other.
Additionally, USD fiat is legal tender to pay all debts. There is no enforceability for accepting USD as payment for a good or service. All businesses and individuals can choose how they wish to be paid and who their potential clients are. Businesses within the US can choose to turn away people paying in USD and do so all the time. This is why an individual can pay taxes and debts in thousands of pennies in protest and businesses turn away clients all the time for this type of nonsense when a protestor does so with a new transaction.
Bitcoin isn't legal tender, but it is a form of money with the same rights and privileges as foreign currency in the US. This is why thieves are prosecuted in the US for stealing bitcoin, because its recognized as a valuable form of money.
It is only deflationary if the demand grows, or at a minimum shrinks slower then supply shrinks.
Correct, or after 2140.
Selling that BTC later on (for dollars) results in even further revenue. This just artificially drives up the "earned revenue" in the year-end balance, making it an almost certainty that you would be paying vastly more in tax than you would otherwise have done.
You are correct that Overstock will have to pay capital gains on assets such as Bitcoin if it appreciates in value. Are you inferring that the percentage in taxes paid would outstrip the value in gained appreciation once said asset was sold? We are laughing all the way to the bank paying all the taxes on our deflationary currencies rapid rise in value.
Every time the topic comes up, all the BTC proponents, with not a single accounting or economics degree between them (Patrick Byrne has the "do you want fries with that" Philosophy degree) start disagreeing with practicing accountants, book-keepers and economists.
This is an argument from authority fallacy.... lets just stick with data and facts please.
Why is this lie perpetually getting repeated? Hell, some moron even modded it up. Overstock (and Tigerdirect, etc) do not accept bitcoins as payment.
They certainly do, as they are supporting the Bitcoin ecosystem in 2 ways:
1) Using Bitcoin as a payment protocol gives the 0.5-1% in fees to Bitcoin exchange processors rather than 3-8% to Visa/Mastercard.
2) Even if a merchant instantly converts back to fiat there creates a demand for bitcoin because those bitcoins used in the transaction are tied up for up to 24 hours in the cycle back to the exchange and thus can drive up the price.
Once again for those of you too stupid to read carefully - No major retailer accepts bitcoins as tender!. Some of them allow you to pay via an exchange such as coinbase, but note that even though the customer is parting with bitcoins, the seller is only ever receiving dollars (AKA real currency).
While currently Overstock converts most of the bitcoins to USD to pay their suppliers and affiliates, Patrick Byrne indicates that they keep a small percentage of profits in Bitcoin and are looking to increase that percentage when they start getting more of their partners accepting Bitcoin.
They are heavily invested in Bitcoins future and expect large profits to be continued to made in doing so.Look at the email they just sent to 42 million of their clients in support of Bitcoin:
http://www.overstock.com/80786/static.html?ehid=EF916438FE97B21EE040010A249C4B4A
You are assuming many things and ascribing statements to me that I did not make rather than directly refuting any of my comments.
I suggest you short Bitcoin if you are so confident that we are all crazy. Backup your statements with something real and profit in return. If you don't trust any of the current exchanges to short Bitcoin there are many traditional "regulated" exchanges soon about to introduce bitcoin shorting. good luck sir.
This is false as there are many regulations exiting, government or coded in the protocol, to insure investments remain safe. There are even insured banks for bitcoin:
https://xapo.com
https://www.elliptic.co/
There are plenty of ways to hedge against inflation through a standard brokerage account. Literally thousands of ways to do it.
Bitcoin is not one of those ways.
A standard brokerage account may offset inflation or if you are lucky grow a little in value but thus far Bitcoin has much more impressive returns.Time will tell if bitcoin is a good investment and in the interim many can save money on using it as a more efficient payment protocol. This is a fascinating experiment and every economists wet dream as we are gathering solid data points with a public ledger rather than depending upon less desirable sources like opinion polls and other indirect means of gathering data.
A whole lot of people seem to think that Bitcoin has a magical deflationary property simply because there's a limited supply of it, and that it can simply be hoarded. That's grade-school thinking at best. It's nature gives it no such property.
-Matt
While Bitcoin is currently inflationary with 3600 bitcoins produced per day, it is deflationary in the long term as the amount of coins minted are halved every 4 years and many will lose their private keys thus causing deflation in the monetary supply when the demand outstrips the supply. Studying the blockchain and sales numbers from bitcoin have proven that economists intuitions have proven incorrect and more spending happens during rapid deflation or appreciation of value in Bitcoin.
The CPI was juked in the 80's to remove variables like Fuel and Food which are somewhat essential to determining true inflation.
http://business.time.com/2013/03/12/if-theres-no-inflation-why-are-prices-up-so-much/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/perianneboring/2014/02/03/if-you-want-to-know-the-real-rate-of-inflation-dont-bother-with-the-cpi/
http://www.policymic.com/articles/4952/is-america-hiding-its-true-inflation-rate-and-could-the-u-s-be-as-insolvent-as-greece