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Doom Marine

2014 Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Discussion

What's in Your Wallet?  

99 members have voted

  1. 1. What's in Your Wallet?

    • Bitcoin
      9
    • Litecoin
      7
    • Dogecoin
      10
    • Peercoin
      3
    • Ripple
      3
    • Other Cryptocurrencies
      5
    • Pls Send Magic Intarweb Moola
      10
    • Cryptocurrency is a Scam / Ponzi
      17
    • Fiat Money / Bank Notes
      23
    • Empty
      15


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fraggle said:

Yes. It's not a matter of overlooking it - everyone is perfectly aware of it, there just isn't any easy way to fix it. But when the blockpocalypse comes, I'm sure everyone we'll all hear about it's Actually A Good Thing For Bitcoin.

Definitely not an easy way to fix it. One or a combination of things that may work, none that I've seen without drawbacks:

Raised block-size limit - Bandwidth intensive. Storage intensive. Most likely a short-term solution.

Off-chain transactions - Requires third-party trust. If implemented, almost guaranteed EmptyGox.

Sidechains - If outside the BTC network, lacks the secure hashrate. If merged-mine, further increases centralization.

fraggle said:

Thing is though - it's true. There are laws in place that force financial firms to use that phrase to remind their customers that it's always a gamble.

It should be obvious enough that just like everything else, the price of Bitcoin isn't going to just keep going up forever. But there are thousands of people just like you who seem to assume it is, and are buying in with the assumption that they're certainly going to make money. Who knows when it will peak, but when it does, a lot of people are going to lose money.

I assume that the price will be magnitudes higher than $450. The question is how much? Here's my prediction for the record: By the end of the year - $2,000 to $5,000 depending on the timing of bubble followed by correction. We'll revisit this in January and I will either be a crypto-Warren Buffet, or humor you in my jester suit.

Time to follow up on the response I had earlier about explaining the fundamentals...

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Doom Marine said:

We all have our opinions, but here is a chart that just about sums up why I invested: http://i.imgur.com/ejrTU8r.jpg

As I said in a previous Bitcoin thread - it's a bubble. You'd be better off putting your money into tulip bulbs, when the dust settles you will at least have something pretty flowering in the garden.

Bitcoin prices have been in decline since China's central bank banned financial institutions from trading in that virtual currency, it's apparently a popular means of smuggling money out of the country.

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Doom Marine said:

Time to follow up on the response I had earlier about explaining the fundamentals...

I already understand the fundamentals of Bitcoin. You don't need to explain them to me.

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Fraggle: Not so fast, I'm talking about economic fundamentals here.

GreyGhost said:

As I said in a previous Bitcoin thread - it's a bubble. You'd be better off putting your money into tulip bulbs, when the dust settles you will at least have something pretty flowering in the garden.

Bitcoin prices have been in decline since China's central bank banned financial institutions from trading in that virtual currency, it's apparently a popular means of smuggling money out of the country.

A response to this is a good way to transition into my explanation of bitcoin's fundamentals as a currency.

You're right about it being a bubble. A bubble by trading definition is a fast valuation of a commodity fueled by speculation, and often leads to correction. Most users of bitcoin at this stage are speculators like me. In order to have real value (beyond a speculative stock/commodity), bitcoin must have the widespread ability to be traded for usable goods, right? And it does, at an increasingly exponential pace.

What determines it's value? Math. Metacafe's law. In practice, BTC's value has almost perfect correlation with the square-root rate of transactions per time period:



The numbers suggests that bitcoin's value increases in accordance to the rate of transactions, like any currency. Bitcoin's transactions gives it money velocity, which in turn determines its speculative value.

As the market capitalization rises, it becomes visible to businesses which then in turn accepts bitcoins. This is where the bitcoin transaction stops being a speculative bubble, and becomes a currency of tradable value.

Why would any business choose bitcoins over dollars, or any fiat for that matter? No fear of chargeback, counterfeit, getting physically robbed, credit card fees / overhead, and ultimately, because of increasing BTC customer demand.

This is pretty straightforward, if not for BTC's legendary volatility, the public's distrust of things they don't understand, and flat out government bans (China).

In spite of uncertainty, not everyone is deterred from adopting bitcoins. Libertarians looking for a way to decouple their money from the gov, venture capitalists, tech geeks like myself, and a few other groups braves the darkness and decides to give it a go! Here are some of the more recent adoption news:

- Overstock accepts bitcoins
- Square marketplace accepts bitcoins
- Chicago Sun Times accepts BTC
- BTC now on Bloomberg
- Winklevoss twins to list BTC on NASDAQ

In the face of all these groundbreaking news, the public is still skeptical, and for good reasons.

There exists extreme information asymmetry between bitcoin owners and non-owners. Proportional to the population, very few people know about bitcoin, and even fewer about its properties as a payment system.

In the beginning, during the first boom of 2011, the number of people who heard about bitcoin including myself was in the millions. The witnesses during the 2011 events propelled the boom in 2013 because their average decision making time takes several years. In 2013, hundreds of millions of people heard about Bitcoin when its valuation past $1000.

On average, a small percentage of these people takes several years to enter, but there are so many of them! There are literally millions of people out there who will eventually adopt BTC, and by doing so, their action increases the price again in the subsequent years, letting the rest of the planet hear about it and putting hundreds of millions of people in the pipeline.

The bust-and-boom cycle of bitcoin follows this logic precisely, the numbers of adopters comes in waves. There will be technical as well as regulatory hurdles in the future, but if the fundamentals are as I observe, we are witnessing the formation of a new monetary system that will change the world.

If it is just a speculative bubble, it's final value will approach zero. If it has value in trading for goods, then it's market price will rise in reflection to its utility. That is my take on the fundamental of bitcoin economics.

Like Graf Zahl stated, it is a gamble at this point. Only history can verify if my investment decision is sound or not.

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Doom Marine said:

What determines it's value? Math. Metacafe's law. In practice, BTC's value has almost perfect correlation with the square-root rate of transactions per time period:

The numbers suggests that bitcoin's value increases in accordance to the rate of transactions, like any currency. Bitcoin's transactions gives it money velocity, which in turn determines its speculative value.

It's an interesting graph, but doesn't necessarily prove anything. A good theory has a predictive power: if this is correct then the same rule should also apply to other cryptocurrencies, right? Litecoin, Peercoin, etc. Does it work for them, or did someone just find a way to fit two curves together?

I'll also note that it's not up to date and stops in early 2014. A lot has happened since then, most notably the collapse and bankruptcy of the world's largest Bitcoin exchange. Does the graph still hold or has it diverged? (It certainly looks like it was starting to diverge at the end there).

There will be technical as well as regulatory hurdles in the future, but if the fundamentals are as I observe, we are witnessing the formation of a new monetary system that will change the world.

Oh please, spare us the rhetoric. This is exactly the kind of frothy-mouthed hysteria that I hate about the Bitcoin community.

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World is pretty hard to change, especially if the change requires acquiring a controversial ideal and ignoring its shortcomings while the status quo is much more comfortable.

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Call me paranoid, but I would MUCH rather have money invested into tangible items rather than some digital "Cryptocurrency." If shit hits the fan one day, nothing would beat demandable items that you can physically hold and make use of.

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fraggle said:

It's an interesting graph, but doesn't necessarily prove anything. A good theory has a predictive power: if this is correct then the same rule should also apply to other cryptocurrencies, right? Litecoin, Peercoin, etc. Does it work for them, or did someone just find a way to fit two curves together?

An interesting proposal. I may in the future gather the altcoin data and see how well Metcalfe fits.

fraggle said:

I'll also note that it's not up to date and stops in early 2014. A lot has happened since then, most notably the collapse and bankruptcy of the world's largest Bitcoin exchange. Does the graph still hold or has it diverged? (It certainly looks like it was starting to diverge at the end there).

Haven't checked the latest, if it exists at all. The graph I showed stopped on March 26th, a month after EmptyGox's collapse. Notice that the market cap was temporarily higher than the Metcalfe value for a few months and converged back down to it.

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For investors and those who are interested in jumping in:

I found a possible sign that the bear market of the last 5 months has consolidated, and the bull market has begun:

http://i.imgur.com/kzRkrBJ.jpg

Interpretation: For the first time since the December crash, the MACD indicator on the 3-day chart has turned up positive. This is a breakthrough.

No, it's not just some random magical cyclical event dictated by just trading psychology. It's supported by positive news:

- Winklevoss twins to list BTC on NASDAQ
- USA Today's Cover (you can now buy/bribe a politician with BTC in the US)
- 200,000 Hotels Now Accept Bitcoin Through Online Travel Agency CheapAir

With increasing adoption news coming out almost everyday, supported by positive buy signals, could this be the beginning of a rally? ... It's still not too late to hop aboard.

PS: I use Coinbase to purchase my BTC. It only works if you're American: https://coinbase.com/signin

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Gez said:

Bitcoin value keeps climbing and climbing forever with no end in sight. The sooner you buy some, the richer you'll be in the end. Early adopters have already been rewarded beyond their wildest dreams!

Yeah that's a classic Ponzi pyramid scheme. It never ends well. Once the system stops expanding -- and it will stop expending because we aren't living in an infinite world -- it'll burst.

I'm a little surprised to hear this from you, Gez, as I've normally found your posts quite sensible and well researched (unlike dew's). What you're saying here wouldn't be true even if cryptocurrency was purely a speculative asset (which it isn't). If you had bought 3 or 4 years ago, you had to potential to make either a profit or a loss. If you were to buy today, you also have the potential to make either a profit or a loss. It's an open market that can go up as well as down. Just because a vocal minority of idiots keep spouting "to the moon", that doesn't make it a ponzi scheme. If someone told you now would be a good time to invest in any other asset because they have vested interests, it doesn't suddenly mean that asset is a ponzi scheme. And cryptocurrency isn't just an asset because it has practical applications for sending money anywhere in the world at a fraction of the cost of traditional payment methods.

Gez said:

Let's be clear: when a currency is backed by the state, what it really means is that it's backed by society. Money is merely a token representing what society agrees is potential buying power. When you earn money, what you really get is an abstracted recognition by society that you have earned some buying potential. In the end, the system works because it has to. It's what we have come up with, it's what everybody is familiar enough with, it's what is meaningful to people, and we need it to work so we're willing to go with whatever is needed to keep it working. We need for it to work, because if it doesn't, the entire society collapses. There is none of that with bitcoin. If tomorrow nobody wants bitcoins anymore, there will not be any sort of movement to keep bitcoins working, because they already don't work.

Currencies and economies have failed throughout history and continue to do so today. They don't all get miraculously saved just because they "need" to work. And by the same rationale, cryptocurrencies are backed by a global society, which has the potential to be much larger than any arbitrary-lines-on-the-map society. It's already serving as a safe haven for people in countries where their domestic economies are crumbling and governments are placing restrictions on the availability and movement of fiat currency. It's already working for the people in third world countries that have no access to a banking system. Just because you're fortunate enough not to live in such a place, it doesn't mean you should be blind to the benefits of a decentralised currency. Nation states can easily become insolvent if they're not careful, so if you don't have a contingency plan, you should keep your fingers crossed that your unwavering faith isn't misplaced. I'm not saying Bitcoin can't fail, but by the same token, fiat can too.

Gez said:

It's not a currency, it's at best a toy.

MasterCard seem pretty eager for people to stop playing with this toy. Evidently they have more respect (and concern) for its potential, otherwise they wouldn't be funding lobbyists to fight against it. Perhaps you should be a little less dismissive.

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@DooMAD:

Now who's the fool here?

The one voicing some very justified concerns or the one who dismisses them out of hand?

Sorry to burst your bubble, but no matter how you twist it: Bitcoin is nothing more than a gamble. You may win, you may lose. But if there's one thing this is not, it's a serious threat to money. It's far too volatile for that so it's hardly usable as a reliable means of payment.

As a speculative investment it may be fine if you know the risks but that's really all it is right now.

Let's talk again when the bubble bursts - and it will burst. This entire thing needs some serious sorting out before it becomes a viable alternative.

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Graf Zahl said:

@DooMAD:

Now who's the fool here?

The one voicing some very justified concerns or the one who dismisses them out of hand?

Sorry to burst your bubble, but no matter how you twist it: Bitcoin is nothing more than a gamble. You may win, you may lose. But if there's one thing this is not, it's a serious threat to money. It's far too volatile for that so it's hardly usable as a reliable means of payment.

As a speculative investment it may be fine if you know the risks but that's really all it is right now.

Let's talk again when the bubble bursts - and it will burst. This entire thing needs some serious sorting out before it becomes a viable alternative.

The only thing I'm dismissing is the incorrect assertion that it's a ponzi scheme and the incorrect assertion that fiat is completely safe. Again, I never said Bitcoin can't fail. I know it's a gamble because I said so in my post. The words are right there: "you have the potential to make either a profit or a loss". Try to figure out what it is you're trying to take issue with before posting, please.


//EDIT:

In fact, just to prove I'm keeping an open mind, here's some potential risks that we haven't discussed:

    The Core Developers or other programmers could propose amendments to the Bitcoin Network’s protocols and software that, if accepted and authorized by the Bitcoin Network’s community, could adversely affect it

    If a malicious actor or botnet obtains control in excess of 50 percent of the processing power active on the Bitcoin Network, it is possible that such actor or botnet could manipulate the Blockchain in a manner that adversely affects it

    If the award of bitcoins for solving blocks and transaction fees for recording transactions are not sufficiently high to incentivize miners, miners may cease expending processing power to solve blocks and confirmations of transactions on the Blockchain could be slowed temporarily. A reduction in the processing power expended by miners on the Bitcoin Network could increase the likelihood of a malicious actor or botnet obtaining control in excess of 50 percent of the processing power active on the Bitcoin Network or the Blockchain, potentially permitting such actor or botnet to manipulate the Blockchain in a manner that adversely affects it


    As the number of bitcoins awarded for solving a block in the Blockchain decreases, the incentive for miners to continue to contribute processing power to the Bitcoin Network will transition from a set reward to transaction fees. Either the requirement from miners of higher transaction fees in exchange for recording transactions in the Blockchain or a software upgrade that automatically charges fees for all transactions may decrease demand for bitcoins and prevent the expansion of the Bitcoin Network to retail merchants and commercial businesses, resulting in a reduction in the price of bitcoins that could adversely impact it


    To the extent that any miners cease to record transactions in solved blocks, transactions that do not include the payment of a transaction fee will not be recorded on the Blockchain until a block is solved by a miner who does not require the payment of transaction fees. Any widespread delays in the recording of transactions could result in a loss of confidence in the Bitcoin Network


    The acceptance of Bitcoin Network software patches or upgrades by a significant, but not overwhelming, percentage of the users and miners in the Bitcoin Network could result in a “fork” in the Blockchain, resulting in the operation of two separate networks until such time as the forked Blockchains are merged. The temporary or permanent existence of forked Blockchains could adversely impact it


    Intellectual property rights claims may adversely affect the operation of the Bitcoin Network. Third parties may assert intellectual property claims relating to the holding and transfer of Digital Math-Based Assets and their source code. Regardless of the merit of any intellectual property or other legal action, any threatened action that reduces confidence in the Bitcoin Network’s long-term viability or the ability of end-users to hold and transfer bitcoins may adversely affect it
So please tell me again how I'm just some gullible fool who hasn't thought it through to conclusion. I'm fully aware of the potential shortcomings and points of failure.

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DooMAD said:

What you're saying here wouldn't be true even if cryptocurrency was purely a speculative asset (which it isn't).

DooMAD said:

I know it's a gamble because I said so in my post.

You, sir, have no right to call anyone's posts poorly researched.

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dew said:

You, sir, have no right to call anyone's posts poorly researched.

If you want to spend it like a currency you can do.

If you want to hold it on the belief it will appreciate over time you can do that too.

Therefore, it's not just an asset. I'm sorry if that's too challenging a concept for you to wrap your head around.

I can trade pounds sterling for renminbi if I wanted to speculate on that. Doesn't make it suddenly not a currency.

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Graf Zahl said:

Let's talk again when the bubble bursts - and it will burst.

I'm assuming you mean those gigantic price spikes followed by corrective crashes?



I predict the next bubble will be fueled by Wall St. related news, only to come crashing back down to a new support level because the marketcap is oversold, or China punishes bitcoin traders even more.

Judging from history and what we know about BTC's market, each bubble brings in a large number of speculators, a fraction of whom will stick around as adopters. This explains why after each bubble correction, the support level has always been an order of magnitude higher than that of the previous support. Example:

2011 Bubble -> $30
2011 Correction Baseline -> $2

2013 April Bubble -> $266
2013 July Correction Baseline -> $76

2013 November Bubble -> $1200
2014 April Correction Baseline -> $340

Before anyone starts spouting "Past performance does not indicate future results"... no competent analyst simply look at a chart and be like, "durr... we will have twice the profit today based on last year's growth", even though that prediction may come true. It takes insight of the product, timing, and market (with a bit of luck) for predictions to be consistently successful.

I wager that by knowing the fundamentals, keeping track of BTC's development, economic conditions, competition, and using past performance metrics, that I'm able to predict a new all-time high (breaking $1200) by the time period July-Sept. I'm willing to be wrong on this just to say, "I told you so."

... If on the next bubble, the prices go past $4000, I'm just going to sell my "gambling*" portion of BTC, because any higher than that, the marketcap would be overvalued with respect to the businesses and infrastructure at the time.

*There is a quota of cold storaged BTC that will not be touched until a critical market price is touched.

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DooMAD said:

If you want to spend it like a currency you can do.

We have spent a ridiculous amount of time within this thread to point out how utterly impractical such an application is on ANY scale. The volatility by itself makes it just a sympathetic gesture of a fellow bitcoin fan. You've never answered any of those issues and only focused on sweeping claims about our entire society.

Answer me this: Bitcoin seems to gain or lose, say, 10% between two days easily. When exactly should I buy my groceries, or my new bedroom, or my entire mortgage? How is it in any way sane to potentially enrich the salesman by throwing magically growing gold nuggets at him? Why should a smart salesman take any btc from me when it's entirely possible that there will be a "correction" next day and he'll lose a big portion of the value I paid him, unless he quickly spends it on another fool? Should literally everyone constantly think about the investment side of btc when making their daily shopping? That is utterly unthinkable and a society would "correct" itself very soon by throwing such a nonsense out of the window.

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dew said:

We have spent a ridiculous amount of time within this thread to point out how utterly impractical such an application is on ANY scale. The volatility by itself makes it just a sympathetic gesture of a fellow bitcoin fan. You've never answered any of those issues and only focused on sweeping claims about our entire society.

Answer me this: Bitcoin seems to gain or lose, say, 10% between two days easily. When exactly should I buy my groceries, or my new bedroom, or my entire mortgage? How is it in any way sane to potentially enrich the salesman by throwing magically growing gold nuggets at him? Why should a smart salesman take any btc from me when it's entirely possible that there will be a "correction" next day and he'll lose a big portion of the value I paid him, unless he quickly spends it on another fool? Should literally everyone constantly think about the investment side of btc when making their daily shopping? That is utterly unthinkable and a society would "correct" itself very soon by throwing such a nonsense out of the window.

I'm not denying that volatility is an issue at the moment. But maybe it's not too much to ask that something that's never been tried before has a little bit of time to develop before you decide to write it off as being completely unworkable.

Explain to me how you're supposed to launch a global currency that the majority of people have never heard of and keep the price stable while more and more people get involved each day. I'm guessing you can't explain how to achieve that, because if you could, the thread would be called DewCoin. If there were a way to do it, we'd be doing it by now. So I think it's reasonable to assume you can't control volatility when jump-starting something as ambitious as this.

If I were saying dump every penny of fiat you have into <insertcoinhere> today, then yeah, call me a raving fruitloop. But oddly enough I'm not saying that. I'm saying it has merits, I'm interested in seeing where it goes and I'm willing to put some money where my mouth is in the hope it succeeds.

But according to you guys, those are the words of a crazy person.

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Doom Marine said:

By bubble bursting, I'm assuming you mean those gigantic price spikes followed by a corrective crash?


No, what I mean is a deep plunge as it happens with each and every object that's being traded for speculative gain.

The graph you show is textbook advertisement for stock buying. But at some time there's not just a corrective dive but a total breakdown. Remember the stock market crash of 2001? It took years for the market to recover but many of the stocks that crashed went entirely out of business, so everybody having invested in one of those lost all their money. I don't see any difference with Bitcoin. There's simply not enough substance behind it to survive such a crash.

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Some people want the volatility (day traders). People who don't want volatility, like someone who wants to transport a million dollars from 1 country to another with almost no fees or hurdles, can immediately convert back to cash after the crypto transfer. And of course you'd say 'but you're using cash as a focal point making crypto useless' or something, but this might be an early stage. At this early stage, things like day trading and transferring money like that might be the main attractors, drawing people to it before it reaches critical mass. Only then will the network effect/stickiness/first mover advantage maybe take control where its easy to buy from anyone else because they are all nodes in the network by then too. I'm not very knowledgeable about speculative type stocks, but it would make sense that the waves of volatility would calm over time, like when you first throw a rock in a pond. Maybe its wavy because its young.

Tulips self-replicate/ reproduce so it seems they're a pretty bad analogy. They have counterfeiting biologically built in, whereas the main 'invention' of bitcoin seems to be to programmably emulate scarcity in a digital environment.

What about moore's law solving whatever blockchain size problem that was being discussed?

I think a bottom up organization would be better in general than a planned top down one. Of course we're talking about society, way too complex to predict or understand more than a tiny portion. A single brain is too complex to understand let alone a society of brains. Bottom up seems more organic and more 'antifragile', so I still lean toward 'libartarianism' or anarchy. The system itself can have coercion though, like if it becomes a norm/standard for people to drive on the right side of the street, it is sort of coercing you to do the same. I think things would just 'evolve' bottom up on a deeper technological/cultural/memetic level than biological evolution. There's going to be 'bad guys' no matter which political system is in place. There's probably more good guys and a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun. Might as well put everyone on even ground than to suppose that a small minority has legitimate authority, where the bad guys will get in control. We vote and they represent us? You just vote for the choices they give you, put in the only spotlight that matters by the mainstream media. Voting is begging your masters to treat you better rather than saying there is no legitimacy in having masters. Also I don't know what I'm talking about lol.

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Graf Zahl said:

No, what I mean is a deep plunge as it happens with each and every object that's being traded for speculative gain.

The graph you show is textbook advertisement for stock buying. But at some time there's not just a corrective dive but a total breakdown. Remember the stock market crash of 2001? It took years for the market to recover but many of the stocks that crashed went entirely out of business, so everybody having invested in one of those lost all their money. I don't see any difference with Bitcoin. There's simply not enough substance behind it to survive such a crash.

You must then be referring to black swan events, and that's a risk that every investor, every business venture, and every stock has to face.

In fact, I consider bitcoin a black swan event for centralized banking!

I think this thread has exhaustively discussed both sides of the issue as far as the fate of bitcoin is concerned, the question remains: is bitcoin's first mover advantage, network effect, developers, and supporters enough to win over the skeptical public, evolve past technical limitations, and defy governments?

Only time will tell.

...in the meanwhile, this is another thing you can do with the blockchain technology:

BitID demonstration: sign into a website using a Bitcoin address

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I'm glad bitcoin will never become a currency for everyday use.

Aside from many reasons listed previously, there's the inherent lack of trust people have towards technology they don't understand, that can only present itself more strongly when it comes to technology tied to financial matters.

It will stay a toy for tech geeks and speculators, and that's how it should be.

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Doom Marine said:

...in the meanwhile, this is another thing you can do with the blockchain technology:

Aside from the fact that this is just public key authentication and nothing to do with "blockchain technology": this is effectively the same thing as SSL client certificates which we've had on the web since 1996 and nobody uses (because they're annoying to use and basically a bad idea). The only apparent difference here is that this appears to use QR codes.

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CorSair said:

I'll eat my socks if their profit margin shows plus on those days.

I certainly wouldn't want to be one of the employees, having to awkwardly explain to hundreds of people why they won't accept normal money that day and how they should come back later in the week.

Probably the intention is that this will hope promote Bitcoin, but I suspect it will backfire in a public relations disaster. Forcing people to learn and use things that they don't want or need to use never wins them over.

At least it has the potential to be entertaining for the rest of us. Hopefully there will be some good videos of the irate customers complaining.

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CorSair said:

I'll eat my socks if their profit margin shows plus on those days.

I'm predicting they'll make a modest trading profit, which will quickly evaporate as the Bitcoin price continues to slide. ;)

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GreyGhost said:

I'm predicting they'll make a modest trading profit, which will quickly evaporate as the Bitcoin price continues to slide. ;)

I'm predicting that if they hold their BTC until third quarter this year, it will generate them enormous buying power.

Do you know how stupid a person looks buying domain names in 1993? Well they don't look so stupid anymore selling them for a quarter-million each now do they? My bet is bitcoin will behave like this as an investment.

Remember folks, July-September ATH. That's going on the books.

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Doom Marine said:

Do you know how stupid a person looks buying domain names in 1993?

Very stupid, if they fall foul of ICANN's UDRP and have to relinquish the domains.

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GreyGhost said:

Very stupid, if they fall foul of ICANN's UDRP and have to relinquish the domains.

Analogous to falling foul of ICANN in virtual currency, would be holding your VC in an unencrypted wallet.

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fraggle said:

It's an interesting graph, but doesn't necessarily prove anything. A good theory has a predictive power: if this is correct then the same rule should also apply to other cryptocurrencies, right? Litecoin, Peercoin, etc. Does it work for them, or did someone just find a way to fit two curves together?

I'll also note that it's not up to date and stops in early 2014. A lot has happened since then, most notably the collapse and bankruptcy of the world's largest Bitcoin exchange. Does the graph still hold or has it diverged? (It certainly looks like it was starting to diverge at the end there).

Looks like someone made a similar graph that has data up to today:



Metcalfe's value and market price still closely mapped to one another.

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