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Bitcoins have no value. Nothing is more an indication of quantitative easing and bubbles and so forth than Bitcoin. A $12 billion market cap, as worthless as

by Ologn 10y ago

Bitcoins have no value. Nothing is more an indication of quantitative easing and bubbles and so forth than Bitcoin. A $12 billion market cap, as worthless as the $12 billion valuation of some unicorns. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have both been around 85 years and know when something has value and when it doesn't. "Rat poison" is what Munger calls Bitcoin and Buffett also notes their worthlessness. Why does a Bitcoin have value? There is no answer to this question. They're as worthless as Ponzi's postal reply coupons. One day, like Flooz and Beenz and other worthless "electronic currencies" before it, Bitcoin will come crashing down into worthlessness. It's surrounded by scammers - Mt. Gox, Butterfly Labs was raided, on and on. That should tell you something.

AtheistOfFail 10y ago
A Bitcoin has no inherent value. The only value attributed to Bitcoin is that someone, somewhere had to spend electricity to create a Bitcoin. Sort of like when you eat in the morning, go to work and get a paycheck, your work has value. Now, is the Bitcoin price crazy? Maybe a little bit, but it's reacted very strongly to the Donald Trump election since it's considered to be alternative to existing remittances that cannot be taxed (IE, remittances to Mexico). Now in regards to your scammers, Mt Gox was the only exchange and you know 'power corrupts... I forget the saying' Butterfly Labs got raided because they took a lot of money from the community for mining gear and delivered nothing.
s_m_t 10y ago
The scammers do tell me something. In my view Bitcoin has some real utility and 'value' precisely for the same reason that it attracts so many scammers. As long as people want some form of digital, hard to track, irreversible way to exchange things that can't be duplicated then Bitcoin will have some value. Drugs, guns, donations to political organizations, scamming, etc etc. Those are big forces with a fair amount of market value; If Bitcoin is the best way to trade in them then of course it will have value.
tomsthumb 10y ago
> Bitcoins have no value It's money (a currency). Money has value because someone says it has value and someone else agrees. Congrats, bitcoin has value! The nature of that value may be volatile and doomed to drop severely or go away entirely in the future, but that doesn't make it non-existent now.
- Ologn 10y ago
  > It's money (a currency). Money has value because someone says it has value and someone else agrees. Congrats, bitcoin has value! Commodities have value. Until 1971 in the US, US currency had implied value because it could be exchanged for a commodity - gold, which the US has thousands of tons of in Fort Knox and other places. Then in 1971, Nixon stopped the exchange of currency for that gold. But the tons of gold are still in Fort Knox. Why? Why store thousands of tons of gold? Obviously it is still backing the currency. Any currency panic can be ended by starting the conversion back up. US currency went from an implied conversion to an implication of an implication. It is still backed by those thousands of tons of gold though, although not explicitly. Bitcoin is backed neither explicitly nor implicitly by an useful commodity.
  - tomsthumb 10y ago
    Your second paragraph seems to be heading in the direction that bitcoin doesn't have value because it lacks the robustness of being backed by a useful commodity. This is only vaguely less than orthogonal though. The robustness of a currencies value, while related, is not the same thing as the value of said currency. If the gold disappears tomorrow dollars would not become worthless. People would still use them as value stores which can be exchanged for goods and services (despite a lot of questions about where the gold went). Similarly, Bitcoin is (now) exchanged for goods and services which have value. Then comes the interesting question of "why is gold valuable?". If we assume the apocalypse and you have gold and I have guns, bullets, and canteens you could bet your boots I'm not interested in trading. If you're certain bitcoin is valueless AND you're right I urge you to continue convincing me. This could be one of the best short opportunities since the housing crisis of 2006.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dryajov 10y ago
Bitcoin and other blockchains are not currency, they are platforms and infrastructure. Currently, Bitcoin doesn't have a lot of intrinsic value, but as more and more core services (DNS, identity, etc...) migrate over to the blockchain/s it will eventually increase its value and come out of the _initial_ speculative phase. The blockchain is essentially a globally distributed transactional log, that allows you to build things that require synchronization and consistency, it just so happens that moving assets is the most obvious application. Currently it's pretty slow, but work is being done, specially in ethereum to speed it up. Things like proof of stake over proof of work as well as sharding should make it a lot faster, and capable of processing several thousands of transactions a second. Ethereum is also the next step in the evolution of the blockchain, with the addition of a Turing complete virtual machine it is now possible to execute arbitrary code and have a truly programmable block chain. This allows it to be used for virtually anything without having to roll your own blockchain, for example you can program a truly distributed naming system that would allow alyisyng anything out there to human readable names, from IPs to to arbitrary hashes in a distributed file system, or even fisical people, granted they have a virtual presence of some sort and and a unique hashed handle. The other important aspect of it is the possible symbioses with the distributed/decentralized web or web3 or next web. Decentralization seems to be the theme for the next several years, and I personally am extremely optimistic about some or all of it becoming real and currently actively trying to contribute to it in any way I can. However for decentralization to become economically vaiable an intrinsic way of incentivation is required and this is one more place where the blockchain will be what makes it possible. To sumarize: * Blockchain is a platform not a currency * It enables synchronization on a global distributed scale * "Next web" and blockchains go hand in hand. On the one hand providing the backbone infrastructure required to run some critical parts of web3, on the other providing a transparent digital aset management system which you can build incentivation on top of. On a side note, I wouldn't necessarily trust Buffet and company on this one, for one, it requires a pretty good understanding of the technologies involved to be able to make any sort of informed prediction, and I'm not sure if you can perform any sort of typical fundamental analysis on it at all, which is a common practice in his business line, and yes currently the bitcoin price might be somewhat speculative, but that will change as more and more core infrastructure relies on it. As for scammers, raids and etc... That's pretty common in a nascent complex and deregulated environment such as this, remember the WWW at the beginning ;)?

by Ologn 10y ago

AtheistOfFail 10y ago

A Bitcoin has no inherent value. The only value attributed to Bitcoin is that someone, somewhere had to spend electricity to create a Bitcoin. Sort of like when you eat in the morning, go to work and get a paycheck, your work has value. Now, is the Bitcoin price crazy? Maybe a little bit, but it's reacted very strongly to the Donald Trump election since it's considered to be alternative to existing remittances that cannot be taxed (IE, remittances to Mexico). Now in regards to your scammers, Mt Gox was the only exchange and you know 'power corrupts... I forget the saying' Butterfly Labs got raided because they took a lot of money from the community for mining gear and delivered nothing.

s_m_t 10y ago

The scammers do tell me something. In my view Bitcoin has some real utility and 'value' precisely for the same reason that it attracts so many scammers. As long as people want some form of digital, hard to track, irreversible way to exchange things that can't be duplicated then Bitcoin will have some value. Drugs, guns, donations to political organizations, scamming, etc etc. Those are big forces with a fair amount of market value; If Bitcoin is the best way to trade in them then of course it will have value.

tomsthumb 10y ago

> Bitcoins have no value It's money (a currency). Money has value because someone says it has value and someone else agrees. Congrats, bitcoin has value! The nature of that value may be volatile and doomed to drop severely or go away entirely in the future, but that doesn't make it non-existent now.

Ologn 10y ago
> It's money (a currency). Money has value because someone says it has value and someone else agrees. Congrats, bitcoin has value! Commodities have value. Until 1971 in the US, US currency had implied value because it could be exchanged for a commodity - gold, which the US has thousands of tons of in Fort Knox and other places. Then in 1971, Nixon stopped the exchange of currency for that gold. But the tons of gold are still in Fort Knox. Why? Why store thousands of tons of gold? Obviously it is still backing the currency. Any currency panic can be ended by starting the conversion back up. US currency went from an implied conversion to an implication of an implication. It is still backed by those thousands of tons of gold though, although not explicitly. Bitcoin is backed neither explicitly nor implicitly by an useful commodity.
- tomsthumb 10y ago
  Your second paragraph seems to be heading in the direction that bitcoin doesn't have value because it lacks the robustness of being backed by a useful commodity. This is only vaguely less than orthogonal though. The robustness of a currencies value, while related, is not the same thing as the value of said currency. If the gold disappears tomorrow dollars would not become worthless. People would still use them as value stores which can be exchanged for goods and services (despite a lot of questions about where the gold went). Similarly, Bitcoin is (now) exchanged for goods and services which have value. Then comes the interesting question of "why is gold valuable?". If we assume the apocalypse and you have gold and I have guns, bullets, and canteens you could bet your boots I'm not interested in trading. If you're certain bitcoin is valueless AND you're right I urge you to continue convincing me. This could be one of the best short opportunities since the housing crisis of 2006.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

dryajov 10y ago

Bitcoin and other blockchains are not currency, they are platforms and infrastructure. Currently, Bitcoin doesn't have a lot of intrinsic value, but as more and more core services (DNS, identity, etc...) migrate over to the blockchain/s it will eventually increase its value and come out of the _initial_ speculative phase. The blockchain is essentially a globally distributed transactional log, that allows you to build things that require synchronization and consistency, it just so happens that moving assets is the most obvious application. Currently it's pretty slow, but work is being done, specially in ethereum to speed it up. Things like proof of stake over proof of work as well as sharding should make it a lot faster, and capable of processing several thousands of transactions a second. Ethereum is also the next step in the evolution of the blockchain, with the addition of a Turing complete virtual machine it is now possible to execute arbitrary code and have a truly programmable block chain. This allows it to be used for virtually anything without having to roll your own blockchain, for example you can program a truly distributed naming system that would allow alyisyng anything out there to human readable names, from IPs to to arbitrary hashes in a distributed file system, or even fisical people, granted they have a virtual presence of some sort and and a unique hashed handle. The other important aspect of it is the possible symbioses with the distributed/decentralized web or web3 or next web. Decentralization seems to be the theme for the next several years, and I personally am extremely optimistic about some or all of it becoming real and currently actively trying to contribute to it in any way I can. However for decentralization to become economically vaiable an intrinsic way of incentivation is required and this is one more place where the blockchain will be what makes it possible. To sumarize: * Blockchain is a platform not a currency * It enables synchronization on a global distributed scale * "Next web" and blockchains go hand in hand. On the one hand providing the backbone infrastructure required to run some critical parts of web3, on the other providing a transparent digital aset management system which you can build incentivation on top of. On a side note, I wouldn't necessarily trust Buffet and company on this one, for one, it requires a pretty good understanding of the technologies involved to be able to make any sort of informed prediction, and I'm not sure if you can perform any sort of typical fundamental analysis on it at all, which is a common practice in his business line, and yes currently the bitcoin price might be somewhat speculative, but that will change as more and more core infrastructure relies on it. As for scammers, raids and etc... That's pretty common in a nascent complex and deregulated environment such as this, remember the WWW at the beginning ;)?