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It's this kind of thing that makes me see just how ignorant people actually are about this subject. You have this neat little label you've put on the box and yo

It's this kind of thing that makes me see just how ignorant people actually are about this subject. You have this neat little label you've put on the box and you've never actually done the necessary research to see if your label fits, you heard a headline somewhere, laughed about it and threw it in a mental sock drawer. Even at a casual glance, your statement is flatly wrong; the peak of the last BTC bubble was 2013-11-30, 1163 USD, a couple months later that bubble had deflated to 826.40 USD, a loss of just over 29%. In the last 20 years, the USD has lost 31.38% of its value, so no, a 29% is not "much worse" than a 31.38% It has rough parity, if we want to get pedantic about it, over the two periods you nominated, the USD actually technically did worse. But throwing aside that shallow criticism that you happen to be flatly wrong because the statement you made is technically incorrect, and instead focusing on how one would assuage the sense that one had made a bad investment purchasing at that particular point in time, I would say the same thing to them that I would have said to those that had bought at the peak of the bubble prior to that at 220 and then saw a price collapse to half before stabilisation, and then onwards to the only bubble price you're dimly aware of from your shallow knowledge. Or the same thing that I would have said to the people that bought at the peak of the bubble prior to that at 30, which then collapsed down below half before proceeding on to 220 and etc, and that is "That's how markets work, and if the trend follows and the next time it quadruples the previous high you will be the one talking about how you got in for a steal at 1163 to people who bought in near a peak of 5000 assuming the trend continues, and so on, and so forth". What I'll say to the person who is all in on fiat currencies over the next twenty years though, is that if everything goes according to plan, they will be subject to the exact same devaluation that the person in their situation was twenty years ago, and that's the optimistic projection. The pessimistic projection is a lot less rosy, and involves a massive sovereign debt bust and the collapse of fiat currencies and the corrupt world central banking apparatus, all expenses paid courtesy of your shallow, misplaced faith in the benighted institutions of the modern status quo.

hueving 10y ago
>Even at a casual glance, your statement is flatly wrong; the peak of the last BTC bubble was 2013-11-30, 1163 USD, a couple months later that bubble had deflated to 826.40 USD, a loss of just over 29%. In the last 20 years, the USD has lost 31.38% of its value, so no, a 29% is not "much worse" than a 31.38% It has rough parity, if we want to get pedantic about it, over the two periods you nominated, the USD actually technically did worse. Are you listening to yourself? You just compared 20 years to 2 months, and they were approximately equal. That's terrible. Follow it out until the fall of 2014 if you like and it has declined another 50%. Add another few months an in a year from december to december, your wonderful currency has lost nearly 70% of its value. But wait, there's more, let's say you loaded up then because you have so much faith that this is the future (TM). Ride it for just another month and it will lose 30% of the value between December and Jan (~$330->$220). Methinks you also forgot that money in a bank earns interest and you forgot to deduct that from your devaluation of the USD. $1000 USD in a savings bank in 1996 with a withdrawal now would be about $1500, which essentially nullifies your entire devaluation when talking about holding value over long term. >would assuage the sense that one had made a bad investment purchasing Currency is not supposed to behave like an investment. For it to be useful to real humans that depend on it for living day to day, it cannot behave like that. >price you're dimly aware of from your shallow knowledge You can just pull prices from here: http://www.coindesk.com/price/ http://www.coindesk.com/price/ You don't need to pretend that it takes a very complex understanding to recognize an unstable financial instrument. Also, trying to insult people into accepting your views very rarely works. >The pessimistic projection is a lot less rosy, and involves a massive sovereign debt bust and the collapse of fiat currencies and the corrupt world central banking apparatus, all expenses paid courtesy of your shallow, misplaced faith in the benighted institutions of the modern status quo. If all currencies collapse, there is little evidence anyone would accept bitcoin instead. Also, a massive debt bust across the global financial system would imply a shortage of cash, not a surplus (a.k.a. deflation and not inflation).
- etherael 10y ago
  > Are you listening to yourself? You just compared 20 years to 2 months, and they were approximately equal. That's terrible. You compared them, and your comparison was technically incorrect, so I pointed it out. Price discovery in new class of asset vs the premeditated inflation of a centrally managed fiat currency are different, but it was not I who nominated the two things to compare nor the two periods over which to compare them, nor made a technically incorrect statement about the result of such a comparison. > Currency is not supposed to behave like an investment. For it to be useful to real humans that depend on it for living day to day, it cannot behave like that A cursory glance at the historical ubiquity and utility of non fiat currencies would suggest that this is not correct. A simple observation that the inevitable fate of every flat currency that has ever existed has been demise would do so more strongly. > You don't need to pretend that it takes a very complex understanding to recognize an unstable financial instrument. Also, trying to insult people into accepting your views very rarely works. Giving me a source for a narrow singular slice of data on the bitcoin price does not negate or address the core point I made about the long term trend being dramatically upward, not allowing for cherry picked time window periods in which things did not align with that trend. I do not care that you don't accept my views, I care that you make flatly wrong statements based on shallow knowledge and smugly pretend towards understanding and in so doing contribute to the ridiculous smokescreen regarding this particular topic in this particular forum. Frankly I don't care if people like or dislike bitcoin, I'm simply sick of the lies, falsehoods, and other generally misleading junk that passes for information on it here. Perhaps I should attempt a technically correct assassination of the project simply so people who object on other grounds can at least avoid parroting flat abject falsehoods. > If all currencies collapse, there is little evidence anyone would accept bitcoin instead In all the aforementioned cases of the inevitable death of fiat currency, trade and commerce did not simply cease, non fiat currencies took over. There is no reason to assume a change to this pattern.
  - hueving 10y ago
    >A cursory glance at the historical ubiquity and utility of non fiat currencies would suggest that this is not correct. Such as the tulip bulb? Or spices? There are very few things that have stored value in a long term fashion and that's because they are rare in nature (e.g. gold, silver). Bitcoin's value relies entirely on faith in the system that places arbitrary computational constraints on generating new units of currency. It is still a currency controlled by people. >I do not care that you don't accept my views, I care that you make flatly wrong statements based on shallow knowledge and smugly pretend towards understanding and in so doing contribute to the ridiculous smokescreen regarding this particular topic in this particular forum. It was not flatly wrong. You did not account for the fact that currency in a bank would have appreciated due to interest. It seems you lack a very basic understanding of how the current banking system works and have dedicated yourself to pump bitcoin rather than objectively compare it to the existing system. >In all the aforementioned cases of the inevitable death of fiat currency, trade and commerce did not simply cease, non fiat currencies took over. There is no reason to assume a change to this pattern. There has never been a case that wiped out all government currencies at once, which is what a 'massive sovereign debt bust' implies. Perhaps you meant something else and failed to convey it. If you are referring to one currency collapsing, then usually what happens at this point is people just use currencies from other countries. Trading in commodities is a nightmare and would only be the result of massive global instability, in which case the bitcoin network would likely be taken down (or would fork several times) due to countries severing Internet connections.

hueving 10y ago

>Even at a casual glance, your statement is flatly wrong; the peak of the last BTC bubble was 2013-11-30, 1163 USD, a couple months later that bubble had deflated to 826.40 USD, a loss of just over 29%. In the last 20 years, the USD has lost 31.38% of its value, so no, a 29% is not "much worse" than a 31.38% It has rough parity, if we want to get pedantic about it, over the two periods you nominated, the USD actually technically did worse. Are you listening to yourself? You just compared 20 years to 2 months, and they were approximately equal. That's terrible. Follow it out until the fall of 2014 if you like and it has declined another 50%. Add another few months an in a year from december to december, your wonderful currency has lost nearly 70% of its value. But wait, there's more, let's say you loaded up then because you have so much faith that this is the future (TM). Ride it for just another month and it will lose 30% of the value between December and Jan (~$330->$220). Methinks you also forgot that money in a bank earns interest and you forgot to deduct that from your devaluation of the USD. $1000 USD in a savings bank in 1996 with a withdrawal now would be about $1500, which essentially nullifies your entire devaluation when talking about holding value over long term. >would assuage the sense that one had made a bad investment purchasing Currency is not supposed to behave like an investment. For it to be useful to real humans that depend on it for living day to day, it cannot behave like that. >price you're dimly aware of from your shallow knowledge You can just pull prices from here: http://www.coindesk.com/price/ http://www.coindesk.com/price/ You don't need to pretend that it takes a very complex understanding to recognize an unstable financial instrument. Also, trying to insult people into accepting your views very rarely works. >The pessimistic projection is a lot less rosy, and involves a massive sovereign debt bust and the collapse of fiat currencies and the corrupt world central banking apparatus, all expenses paid courtesy of your shallow, misplaced faith in the benighted institutions of the modern status quo. If all currencies collapse, there is little evidence anyone would accept bitcoin instead. Also, a massive debt bust across the global financial system would imply a shortage of cash, not a surplus (a.k.a. deflation and not inflation).

etherael 10y ago
> Are you listening to yourself? You just compared 20 years to 2 months, and they were approximately equal. That's terrible. You compared them, and your comparison was technically incorrect, so I pointed it out. Price discovery in new class of asset vs the premeditated inflation of a centrally managed fiat currency are different, but it was not I who nominated the two things to compare nor the two periods over which to compare them, nor made a technically incorrect statement about the result of such a comparison. > Currency is not supposed to behave like an investment. For it to be useful to real humans that depend on it for living day to day, it cannot behave like that A cursory glance at the historical ubiquity and utility of non fiat currencies would suggest that this is not correct. A simple observation that the inevitable fate of every flat currency that has ever existed has been demise would do so more strongly. > You don't need to pretend that it takes a very complex understanding to recognize an unstable financial instrument. Also, trying to insult people into accepting your views very rarely works. Giving me a source for a narrow singular slice of data on the bitcoin price does not negate or address the core point I made about the long term trend being dramatically upward, not allowing for cherry picked time window periods in which things did not align with that trend. I do not care that you don't accept my views, I care that you make flatly wrong statements based on shallow knowledge and smugly pretend towards understanding and in so doing contribute to the ridiculous smokescreen regarding this particular topic in this particular forum. Frankly I don't care if people like or dislike bitcoin, I'm simply sick of the lies, falsehoods, and other generally misleading junk that passes for information on it here. Perhaps I should attempt a technically correct assassination of the project simply so people who object on other grounds can at least avoid parroting flat abject falsehoods. > If all currencies collapse, there is little evidence anyone would accept bitcoin instead In all the aforementioned cases of the inevitable death of fiat currency, trade and commerce did not simply cease, non fiat currencies took over. There is no reason to assume a change to this pattern.
- hueving 10y ago
  >A cursory glance at the historical ubiquity and utility of non fiat currencies would suggest that this is not correct. Such as the tulip bulb? Or spices? There are very few things that have stored value in a long term fashion and that's because they are rare in nature (e.g. gold, silver). Bitcoin's value relies entirely on faith in the system that places arbitrary computational constraints on generating new units of currency. It is still a currency controlled by people. >I do not care that you don't accept my views, I care that you make flatly wrong statements based on shallow knowledge and smugly pretend towards understanding and in so doing contribute to the ridiculous smokescreen regarding this particular topic in this particular forum. It was not flatly wrong. You did not account for the fact that currency in a bank would have appreciated due to interest. It seems you lack a very basic understanding of how the current banking system works and have dedicated yourself to pump bitcoin rather than objectively compare it to the existing system. >In all the aforementioned cases of the inevitable death of fiat currency, trade and commerce did not simply cease, non fiat currencies took over. There is no reason to assume a change to this pattern. There has never been a case that wiped out all government currencies at once, which is what a 'massive sovereign debt bust' implies. Perhaps you meant something else and failed to convey it. If you are referring to one currency collapsing, then usually what happens at this point is people just use currencies from other countries. Trading in commodities is a nightmare and would only be the result of massive global instability, in which case the bitcoin network would likely be taken down (or would fork several times) due to countries severing Internet connections.