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This seems quite an advertisement for bitcoin. When? and Growing Utility? Bitcoin has decreasing utility since the initial hype. 1. The few companies that ac

This seems quite an advertisement for bitcoin. When? and Growing Utility? Bitcoin has decreasing utility since the initial hype. 1. The few companies that accepted it are gradually stoping to support it (Microsoft for instance). 2. We have reached a standstill that shows every bit why highly unregulated systems are difficult to maintain (the miners care only about short term profit and are making bitcoin as a payment system unusable in order to secure short term profit). 3. Even great contributors for the project have come out against it lately explaining the total dystopian mess that is the bitcoin core team and exiting the project.[http://uk.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-has-failed-says-developer-mike-hearn-xt-censorship-2016-1?op=1 http://uk.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-has-failed-says-develo...] 4. Bitcoins are in the hand of a very few people that own massive amounts of them (see blockchain.info top wallets) that seem to be going around trying their best to get a few remaining uninformed people to believe in the system long enough so that they can offload their bitcoins. [http://www.bitcoinrichlist.com/top100 http://www.bitcoinrichlist.com/top100] I see very few people trying to get into bitcoin and a see a great deal of somewhat high profile people trying to keep the hype going just a bit more so that they can recover at least part of their investment in a failed experiment. Still, 2 good things came out of this in the end: the blockchain which is a great tool for a lot of projects; and an eye opener of what can happen for people that want the financial system to have even less regulation.

brighton36 11y ago
Bitcoin's use in retail transactions has been steadily growing, and now accounts for around half of the coins mined each day. Need a link?
- jbmorgado 11y ago
  Yes please because even the CEOs of payment systems using bitcoin have come out stating that no one is using bitcoin as a payment system: Taavet Hinrikus, CEO of international-payments app TransferWise, “Bitcoin, I think we can say, is dead. There is no traction, no one is using bitcoin. The bitcoin experiment, I think we can say, is over.” [http://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-is-dead-says-prominent-fintech-executive-taavet-hinrikus-transferwise-bitcoin-experiment-failed-191800988.html http://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-is-dead-says-prominent...]
  - brighton36 11y ago
    Yeah I don't know where Taavet's numbers are coming from. There's a lot of these studies, here's one of many: http://www.coindesk.com/dark-web-markets-processed-more-bitcoin-than-bitpay-in-2014/ http://www.coindesk.com/dark-web-markets-processed-more-bitc... For as long as the federal government wants to subsidize mining, bitcoin is probably here to stay. I don't see any of the competitors capturing these subsidies.
    - emodendroket 11y ago
      Probably from his payment service? If the sole use of Bitcoin is buying illegal goods on the "dark Web" I think we can say that the various currencies of the world are not facing a serious threat.
      - brighton36 11y ago
        Bitcoin is for the underserved. Further, it's subsidized by the premium on fungible value. So it's necessarily not posing a threat to incumbent currencies. Taavet Hinrikus certainly drew from his own failed endeavor. But I don't know how he didn't extrapolate the state of the wider market.
      - pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
        tell that to the traces of cocaine on every $100 bill in circulation. you're an idiot.
  - btcprint 11y ago
    Yep..I didn't buy anything from newegg with bitcoin today..oh wait. Bitcoin dead for the 130th time. No conflict of interest with Hinrikus making that statement..his motives are purely altruistic - he's looking out for the people. Very intelligent post sir. You seem to be an expert on the fraud that is bitcoin.
  - codehalo 11y ago
    Transferwise competes directly with bitcoin. Were you really expecting him to say otherwise?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Rmilb 11y ago
>1. The few companies that accepted it are gradually stoping to support it (Microsoft for instance). Microsoft still accepts it. http://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/14/microsoft-stops-accepting-bitcoin-on-windows-10.html http://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/14/microsoft-stops-accepting-bit... Bitcoin's utility is still valuable for empowering those people stuck with a currency they don't want to hold like Argentina. http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2014/06/bitcoin-argentina http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2014/06/bitcoin-ar... Edit: Forgot to point out the lack of utility for us in the developed world is very true.
- roywiggins 11y ago
  Question: how does Bitcoin help you get around currency controls? Who is selling Bitcoin for Venezuelan money?
  - brighton36 11y ago
    Most of the people in venezuela with bitcoin trade it for dollars. Typically by routing it to the states, though there is a small local network of exchangers that route paper dollars over the border. However, most of the underserved users are in the states.
  - elorant 11y ago
    I don't know about currency controls but in Greece with capital controls imposed there were a lot of people who turned to Bitcoin to withdraw as much money out of their bank as they could. You can't withdraw more than 420 euros weekly per bank in cash but no one's stopping you from buying as much bitcoin as you like using credit/debit cards.
emodendroket 11y ago
I agree. I was pretty surprised when I saw this in the LRB.
jhallenworld 11y ago
Yeah, no mention of inflation... no explanation of bearer bonds... I think a big problem of bitcoin is lack of inflation. Terry Pratchett makes the point in Making Money that lack of inflation is stagnating. You tie the entire society to the willingness of people with old money to spend it. Why would we want that?
- clarkmoody 11y ago
  Of course people with old money are willing to lend it for a fee.
  - msellout 11y ago
    Lending does not necessarily encourage spending. During the housing price collapse crisis, the US government lent money to banks at a cheap rate, expecting to spur more consumer lending. Instead the banks just kept the money under the mattress, so to speak.
    - clarkmoody 11y ago
      > Lending does not necessarily encourage spending. And we're back to the old spending vs saving & investment view of economic growth. I'm squarely in the Austrian camp on this, so I don't really care about spending, especially if it's fueled by government intervention to "spur aggregate demand". I disagree that you have to have inflation, especially when we talking about gold & bitcoin. The past 100 years of economics has been tuned to a fiat money + fractional reserve banking + debt + inflation paradigm. Considering bitcoin within this framework doesn't even make sense, as it will (probably) not be the currency of a whole economy. Also, there is more to the story concerning the Fed's balance sheet [1] and the link to inflation. [1] file:///C:/Users/Clark/Downloads/market-outlook-2014-03-why-the-feds-4-trillion-balance-sheet-isnt-creating-inflation.pdf
      - x1798DE 11y ago
        FYI that is a local link that will only work on your computer...
homero 11y ago
Wrong, steam just went live with Bitcoin today https://imgur.com/N2oFy5Y https://imgur.com/N2oFy5Y
- boodm 11y ago
  Stop. He made multiple points that "Steam just went live with Bitcoin today" does not dispute. There is no reason for individuals to buy/sell Bitcoins other than speculation. Drugs were a crutch to the temporary currency. I love the idea, but without a reason to convert my stable dollars to a speculation currency, I will not - nor will others. What would be the point in buying Bitcoin with cash/card only to use it on a service that also accepts cash/card? Steam is a drop in the bucket. The only market that will use Bitcoins is hackers that do not want their main acct banned.
  - brighton36 11y ago
    Drugs are more than just a cruch, it's responsible for more than half of the bitcoin mined every day. It is bitcoin's killer app. People use bitcoin because it's as close as they can get to the dollar.
  - pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
    Stop. he made a point saying that the companies that took bitcoin have since stopped (microsoft was only given example)... it was then pointed out that microsoft actually didn't stop... and then the above poster further pointed out new companies are still getting on board (steam) you're an idiot.
  - homero 11y ago
    Stable dollars? Dude they lost half their value over 10 years.
    - lkbm 11y ago
      USD is down 15.3% from ten years ago. That's a far cry from 50%.
ZenoArrow 11y ago
> "We have reached a standstill that shows every bit why highly unregulated systems are difficult to maintain (the miners care only about short term profit and are making bitcoin as a payment system unusable in order to secure short term profit)." Bitcoin isn't completely unregulated. For example, I believe there's due to be a halving of the new block value soon, to slow down the rate of growth. This may have some negative consequences (such as reducing the number of people who mine for Bitcoin), but on the whole may help to stabilise the value of Bitcoin. http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-prices-steady-as-subsidy-halving-inches-closer/ http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-prices-steady-as-subsidy-hal...
digi_owl 11y ago
Bitcoin was set up from day one to act as cryptographic gold mining. As such, it attracted a overlapping crowd of goldbugs and cypherpunks. Hilariously while both are highly anti-establishment prone, what seems to have adopted the tech with gutso is Wall Street. And you can't really get more "establishment" than that...
IsaacL 11y ago
I don't think bitcoin has much utility as a means to transfer value, over the existing solutions. It might be a superior means to store value. The theory is that is as the amount of dollars (or any fiat currency) constantly increases, anyone holding large quantities of dollars will want to exchange them for something with a more fixed supply. Usually this is stocks. Oil futures, property, and gold are also used as stores of value. (In countries with weak currencies, people also hoard dollars as a comparatively stronger source of value). So the purely monetarist argument says if there are only 21m bitcoins, and an ever-growing amount of dollars, one would expect that the dollar price of bitcoin will only be stable at 0 or infinity. E.g., either the network crashes and bitcoin becomes worthless, or the dollar collapses and bitcoin reigns supreme. http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/im-hoarding-bitcoins-and-no-you-cant-have-any/ http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/im-hoarding-bitcoins-an... - see here for more on this theory as regards bitcoin. The counter to this argument is that a. despite seeming logical, money supply inflation doesn't always seem to occur in reality. E.g., quantitive easing hasn't noticeably increased consumer prices. b. Bitcoin is volatile, which means it isn't actually a safe store of value. One persuasive argument I heard (from goldbugs) is that bitcoin, having a fixed supply, has no mechanism to stabilise the price, and so booms and busts become self-reinforcing. With gold, on the other hand, the amount mined varies depending on the market price, which smoothes out booms and busts. I'm expecting both gold and bitcoin to increase in value over the next ten years as the EU and US both lurch from crisis to crisis. This will bring a debate over the future of fiat currency into the mainstream, after which things will get very messy and political. (You can't run a welfare state on gold or bitcoin, for one).
- IsaacL 11y ago
  http://coindesk.com/price/ http://coindesk.com/price/ It also seems like bitcoin is enjoying a rally, possibly in anticipation of the reward halving in 10 weeks (in theory the reward halving should already be priced in, but the bitcoin market is not the most rational).
- jbmorgado 11y ago
  Something as volatile on price as bitcoin is not a superior means to store value. High capital hates risk, so forget about it ever putting their money into bitcoin to store value. Second, you are coming from the assumption that bitcoin is actually a secure and desirable asset to the world at large. Well, it's not, people just don't want into it and they are not getting into it, even the bitcoin exchanges are living with ever decreasing volume since the beginning of 2014. I can also tell you from a purely personal view, that there are very few people left using Localbitcoins anymore. I used to sell quite a few bitcoins there in 2014, now, nobody is interested anymore, there is no one buying.

brighton36 11y ago

Bitcoin's use in retail transactions has been steadily growing, and now accounts for around half of the coins mined each day. Need a link?

jbmorgado 11y ago
Yes please because even the CEOs of payment systems using bitcoin have come out stating that no one is using bitcoin as a payment system: Taavet Hinrikus, CEO of international-payments app TransferWise, “Bitcoin, I think we can say, is dead. There is no traction, no one is using bitcoin. The bitcoin experiment, I think we can say, is over.” [http://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-is-dead-says-prominent-fintech-executive-taavet-hinrikus-transferwise-bitcoin-experiment-failed-191800988.html http://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-is-dead-says-prominent...]
- brighton36 11y ago
  Yeah I don't know where Taavet's numbers are coming from. There's a lot of these studies, here's one of many: http://www.coindesk.com/dark-web-markets-processed-more-bitcoin-than-bitpay-in-2014/ http://www.coindesk.com/dark-web-markets-processed-more-bitc... For as long as the federal government wants to subsidize mining, bitcoin is probably here to stay. I don't see any of the competitors capturing these subsidies.
  - emodendroket 11y ago
    Probably from his payment service? If the sole use of Bitcoin is buying illegal goods on the "dark Web" I think we can say that the various currencies of the world are not facing a serious threat.
    - brighton36 11y ago
      Bitcoin is for the underserved. Further, it's subsidized by the premium on fungible value. So it's necessarily not posing a threat to incumbent currencies. Taavet Hinrikus certainly drew from his own failed endeavor. But I don't know how he didn't extrapolate the state of the wider market.
    - pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
      tell that to the traces of cocaine on every $100 bill in circulation. you're an idiot.
- btcprint 11y ago
  Yep..I didn't buy anything from newegg with bitcoin today..oh wait. Bitcoin dead for the 130th time. No conflict of interest with Hinrikus making that statement..his motives are purely altruistic - he's looking out for the people. Very intelligent post sir. You seem to be an expert on the fraud that is bitcoin.
- codehalo 11y ago
  Transferwise competes directly with bitcoin. Were you really expecting him to say otherwise?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Rmilb 11y ago

>1. The few companies that accepted it are gradually stoping to support it (Microsoft for instance). Microsoft still accepts it. http://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/14/microsoft-stops-accepting-bitcoin-on-windows-10.html http://www.cnbc.com/2016/03/14/microsoft-stops-accepting-bit... Bitcoin's utility is still valuable for empowering those people stuck with a currency they don't want to hold like Argentina. http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2014/06/bitcoin-argentina http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2014/06/bitcoin-ar... Edit: Forgot to point out the lack of utility for us in the developed world is very true.

roywiggins 11y ago
Question: how does Bitcoin help you get around currency controls? Who is selling Bitcoin for Venezuelan money?
- brighton36 11y ago
  Most of the people in venezuela with bitcoin trade it for dollars. Typically by routing it to the states, though there is a small local network of exchangers that route paper dollars over the border. However, most of the underserved users are in the states.
- elorant 11y ago
  I don't know about currency controls but in Greece with capital controls imposed there were a lot of people who turned to Bitcoin to withdraw as much money out of their bank as they could. You can't withdraw more than 420 euros weekly per bank in cash but no one's stopping you from buying as much bitcoin as you like using credit/debit cards.

emodendroket 11y ago

I agree. I was pretty surprised when I saw this in the LRB.

jhallenworld 11y ago

Yeah, no mention of inflation... no explanation of bearer bonds... I think a big problem of bitcoin is lack of inflation. Terry Pratchett makes the point in Making Money that lack of inflation is stagnating. You tie the entire society to the willingness of people with old money to spend it. Why would we want that?

clarkmoody 11y ago
Of course people with old money are willing to lend it for a fee.
- msellout 11y ago
  Lending does not necessarily encourage spending. During the housing price collapse crisis, the US government lent money to banks at a cheap rate, expecting to spur more consumer lending. Instead the banks just kept the money under the mattress, so to speak.
  - clarkmoody 11y ago
    > Lending does not necessarily encourage spending. And we're back to the old spending vs saving & investment view of economic growth. I'm squarely in the Austrian camp on this, so I don't really care about spending, especially if it's fueled by government intervention to "spur aggregate demand". I disagree that you have to have inflation, especially when we talking about gold & bitcoin. The past 100 years of economics has been tuned to a fiat money + fractional reserve banking + debt + inflation paradigm. Considering bitcoin within this framework doesn't even make sense, as it will (probably) not be the currency of a whole economy. Also, there is more to the story concerning the Fed's balance sheet [1] and the link to inflation. [1] file:///C:/Users/Clark/Downloads/market-outlook-2014-03-why-the-feds-4-trillion-balance-sheet-isnt-creating-inflation.pdf
    - x1798DE 11y ago
      FYI that is a local link that will only work on your computer...

homero 11y ago

Wrong, steam just went live with Bitcoin today https://imgur.com/N2oFy5Y https://imgur.com/N2oFy5Y

boodm 11y ago
Stop. He made multiple points that "Steam just went live with Bitcoin today" does not dispute. There is no reason for individuals to buy/sell Bitcoins other than speculation. Drugs were a crutch to the temporary currency. I love the idea, but without a reason to convert my stable dollars to a speculation currency, I will not - nor will others. What would be the point in buying Bitcoin with cash/card only to use it on a service that also accepts cash/card? Steam is a drop in the bucket. The only market that will use Bitcoins is hackers that do not want their main acct banned.
- brighton36 11y ago
  Drugs are more than just a cruch, it's responsible for more than half of the bitcoin mined every day. It is bitcoin's killer app. People use bitcoin because it's as close as they can get to the dollar.
- pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
  Stop. he made a point saying that the companies that took bitcoin have since stopped (microsoft was only given example)... it was then pointed out that microsoft actually didn't stop... and then the above poster further pointed out new companies are still getting on board (steam) you're an idiot.
- homero 11y ago
  Stable dollars? Dude they lost half their value over 10 years.
  - lkbm 11y ago
    USD is down 15.3% from ten years ago. That's a far cry from 50%.

ZenoArrow 11y ago

> "We have reached a standstill that shows every bit why highly unregulated systems are difficult to maintain (the miners care only about short term profit and are making bitcoin as a payment system unusable in order to secure short term profit)." Bitcoin isn't completely unregulated. For example, I believe there's due to be a halving of the new block value soon, to slow down the rate of growth. This may have some negative consequences (such as reducing the number of people who mine for Bitcoin), but on the whole may help to stabilise the value of Bitcoin. http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-prices-steady-as-subsidy-halving-inches-closer/ http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-prices-steady-as-subsidy-hal...

digi_owl 11y ago

Bitcoin was set up from day one to act as cryptographic gold mining. As such, it attracted a overlapping crowd of goldbugs and cypherpunks. Hilariously while both are highly anti-establishment prone, what seems to have adopted the tech with gutso is Wall Street. And you can't really get more "establishment" than that...

IsaacL 11y ago

I don't think bitcoin has much utility as a means to transfer value, over the existing solutions. It might be a superior means to store value. The theory is that is as the amount of dollars (or any fiat currency) constantly increases, anyone holding large quantities of dollars will want to exchange them for something with a more fixed supply. Usually this is stocks. Oil futures, property, and gold are also used as stores of value. (In countries with weak currencies, people also hoard dollars as a comparatively stronger source of value). So the purely monetarist argument says if there are only 21m bitcoins, and an ever-growing amount of dollars, one would expect that the dollar price of bitcoin will only be stable at 0 or infinity. E.g., either the network crashes and bitcoin becomes worthless, or the dollar collapses and bitcoin reigns supreme. http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/im-hoarding-bitcoins-and-no-you-cant-have-any/ http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/im-hoarding-bitcoins-an... - see here for more on this theory as regards bitcoin. The counter to this argument is that a. despite seeming logical, money supply inflation doesn't always seem to occur in reality. E.g., quantitive easing hasn't noticeably increased consumer prices. b. Bitcoin is volatile, which means it isn't actually a safe store of value. One persuasive argument I heard (from goldbugs) is that bitcoin, having a fixed supply, has no mechanism to stabilise the price, and so booms and busts become self-reinforcing. With gold, on the other hand, the amount mined varies depending on the market price, which smoothes out booms and busts. I'm expecting both gold and bitcoin to increase in value over the next ten years as the EU and US both lurch from crisis to crisis. This will bring a debate over the future of fiat currency into the mainstream, after which things will get very messy and political. (You can't run a welfare state on gold or bitcoin, for one).

IsaacL 11y ago
http://coindesk.com/price/ http://coindesk.com/price/ It also seems like bitcoin is enjoying a rally, possibly in anticipation of the reward halving in 10 weeks (in theory the reward halving should already be priced in, but the bitcoin market is not the most rational).
jbmorgado 11y ago
Something as volatile on price as bitcoin is not a superior means to store value. High capital hates risk, so forget about it ever putting their money into bitcoin to store value. Second, you are coming from the assumption that bitcoin is actually a secure and desirable asset to the world at large. Well, it's not, people just don't want into it and they are not getting into it, even the bitcoin exchanges are living with ever decreasing volume since the beginning of 2014. I can also tell you from a purely personal view, that there are very few people left using Localbitcoins anymore. I used to sell quite a few bitcoins there in 2014, now, nobody is interested anymore, there is no one buying.