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I have great respect for Kevin Roose, but this was a disappointing piece. Dogecoin was a meme. It gained popularity and is still worth something. Jackson Palmer

by aml183 9y ago

I have great respect for Kevin Roose, but this was a disappointing piece. Dogecoin was a meme. It gained popularity and is still worth something. Jackson Palmer might not believe it has value, but clearly, there are people who own Doge that think otherwise. There is definite frothiness in the market. Some token sales are scams, some are overpromising, and some that look promising will probably blow up. Take a look at SEC Fraud statistics for 2016. Crypto scams are a small fraction of these crimes: https://www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/2016-212.html https://www.sec.gov/news/pressrelease/2016-212.html Reporters need to separate Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin (and some of the other older cryptocurrencies) from token sales and other crypto assets. Bitcoin has existed for 9 years and has real users with real use cases (remittance & cross-border payments) I can keep going, but reporters really need to make an effort to do more research and separate fact from fiction (I guess this can be said for many areas of journalism though).

chrishacken 9y ago
What do you do with Dogecoin though? It's market cap is $91MM and yet its creation was a joke.
- sjg007 9y ago
  Whatever you want. Crypto currencies are the fiat currency end game. Get enough foreign currency cross pollinated via bitcoin (and assuming enough political clout) and the world will suddenly change.
- vit05 9y ago
  Some people say that moving Value from one exchange to another is cheaper when using DOGE than it would be using Bitcoin.
- aml183 9y ago
  I guess sell it. People think it's valuable. Cryptocurrencies are priced not valued. You can't just go Dogecoin is valued at X. Dogecoin is priced based on supply and demand which is saying it's worth $91MM.
  - runeks 9y ago
    All Dogecoins in circulation are not worth $91m. For that to be the case, there’d have to be people willing to buy all 111 million Dogecoins for $0.000796 each, which is not the case at all. People are only willing to pay this price for a tiny fraction of all Dogecoins in existence; as we go beyond that, the bid price starts approaching zero.
    - CamelCaseName 9y ago
      The opposite is also true, and not just in assets like stocks but cryptos as well. The price of any asset increases substantially if you try to buy a significant stake.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  As David Gerard notes, market cap of cryptocurrencies is a false and misleading metric. Look to total circulation volume/time, and realise it is exceedingly thin.
- tpallarino 9y ago
  It's not any fundamentally different than Bitcoin, in fact it's probably better for money laundering than Bitcoin because nobody cares. Furthermore, the market cap was $400MM a few months ago, so does that mean we're still in a "bubble"?
danmaz74 9y ago
> Jackson Palmer might not believe it has value, but clearly, there are people who own Doge that think otherwise If there is one way you really can't detect a bubble, it's relying on "people thinking X has value". Also people buying tulip bulbs for a house worth thought those bulbs had value, as in every other bubble in history.
- ianai 9y ago
  It's when the last hold out is convinced that the bubble bursts.
- koonsolo 9y ago
  > it's relying on "people thinking X has value" Where do dollars or euro's get their value from? Let me give you the wikipedia definition: "Fiat money is a currency without intrinsic value established as money by government regulation or law." What do you think happens to fiat money when people stop believing it has value? Look back to 19th century France, were fiat money collapsed. Bitcoins have no intrinsic value, which is bad. But the good part is that it only has to compete with fiat money, which also doesn't have intrinsic value. And if you ask me, I put more trust and faith into an algorithm distributed over lots of people, versus trust in banks and governments.
  - aplummer 9y ago
    I agree with what you are saying to an extent (it is just paper), however at a minimum the value of government backed money could possibly be expressed by the mobilisation of resources a government would rally to give it value. Lets say everyone declares USD is worthless, the government could 1) sell things of value demanding explicitly USD in return. 2) Impede movement or other activities, use of public goods using force and demand a toll explicitly in USD. I.e. this much $ is worth 100km of highway travel. Like calculating the value of a person's life to the government in free health coverage countries based on where they draw the line on spending to keep them alive, I think the value is the inverse of the cost the government would go to to prop it up. You could argue without money how would they be able to enforce, however enforcement of a government order has not always required money, and that's one hypothetical too deep for me.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
justifier 9y ago
But what I want to see is proponents of cryptocurrencies acknowledge that the value requires a specific outcome to a yet unproven problem in mathematics(o) How many people bullish for andor excited by cryptocurrencies know that? any answer to that would leave you wondering: what are the implications? If the majority answer: of course I know it could all be found to be worthless tomorrow Or even if the majority answers: wait, it could potentially be mathematically proven to be useless? Both leave me wondering what the motivations are for those who are promoting it (o) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_resistance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_resistance
- semi-extrinsic 9y ago
  I think this is a pretty dishonest way of framing it. It's not just bitcoin, our entire system for secure communications across the internet (SSL/TLS etc.) is built on the assumption that P≠NP. If someone were able to prove P=NP and come up with a practical exploit that made bitcoin valueless, it would also spell instant death for Ebay, Paypal, Amazon and a few hundred other small companies. Not to mention that all internet banking would have to be taken down very quickly. In summary, it would be such a huge shock to the economies in all industrialised countries that it would make the 2012 financial crisis look like a minor inconvenience. Nobody would be concerned with "ah shit, my BTC is valueless", they'd be concerned with "ah shit, there's a run on the banks to get physical money and I will probably starve."
- johncolanduoni 9y ago
  It's pretty much the same story for anything that depends on cryptography, including virtually all transactions involving normal currencies.
fapjacks 9y ago
> Reporters need to separate Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin (and some of the other older cryptocurrencies) from token sales and other crypto assets. Not even actual crypto speculators seem to be able to do this. The second anything drastic happens on one of the crypto markets, all prices immediately peg to Bitcoin, and they all rise and fall in unison.
- jacobush 9y ago
  I see that as a sign that the markets (BETWEEN cryptocurrencies) work and are highly liquid.

by aml183 9y ago

chrishacken 9y ago

What do you do with Dogecoin though? It's market cap is $91MM and yet its creation was a joke.

sjg007 9y ago
Whatever you want. Crypto currencies are the fiat currency end game. Get enough foreign currency cross pollinated via bitcoin (and assuming enough political clout) and the world will suddenly change.
vit05 9y ago
Some people say that moving Value from one exchange to another is cheaper when using DOGE than it would be using Bitcoin.
aml183 9y ago
I guess sell it. People think it's valuable. Cryptocurrencies are priced not valued. You can't just go Dogecoin is valued at X. Dogecoin is priced based on supply and demand which is saying it's worth $91MM.
- runeks 9y ago
  All Dogecoins in circulation are not worth $91m. For that to be the case, there’d have to be people willing to buy all 111 million Dogecoins for $0.000796 each, which is not the case at all. People are only willing to pay this price for a tiny fraction of all Dogecoins in existence; as we go beyond that, the bid price starts approaching zero.
  - CamelCaseName 9y ago
    The opposite is also true, and not just in assets like stocks but cryptos as well. The price of any asset increases substantially if you try to buy a significant stake.
dredmorbius 9y ago
As David Gerard notes, market cap of cryptocurrencies is a false and misleading metric. Look to total circulation volume/time, and realise it is exceedingly thin.
tpallarino 9y ago
It's not any fundamentally different than Bitcoin, in fact it's probably better for money laundering than Bitcoin because nobody cares. Furthermore, the market cap was $400MM a few months ago, so does that mean we're still in a "bubble"?

danmaz74 9y ago

> Jackson Palmer might not believe it has value, but clearly, there are people who own Doge that think otherwise If there is one way you really can't detect a bubble, it's relying on "people thinking X has value". Also people buying tulip bulbs for a house worth thought those bulbs had value, as in every other bubble in history.

ianai 9y ago
It's when the last hold out is convinced that the bubble bursts.
koonsolo 9y ago
> it's relying on "people thinking X has value" Where do dollars or euro's get their value from? Let me give you the wikipedia definition: "Fiat money is a currency without intrinsic value established as money by government regulation or law." What do you think happens to fiat money when people stop believing it has value? Look back to 19th century France, were fiat money collapsed. Bitcoins have no intrinsic value, which is bad. But the good part is that it only has to compete with fiat money, which also doesn't have intrinsic value. And if you ask me, I put more trust and faith into an algorithm distributed over lots of people, versus trust in banks and governments.
- aplummer 9y ago
  I agree with what you are saying to an extent (it is just paper), however at a minimum the value of government backed money could possibly be expressed by the mobilisation of resources a government would rally to give it value. Lets say everyone declares USD is worthless, the government could 1) sell things of value demanding explicitly USD in return. 2) Impede movement or other activities, use of public goods using force and demand a toll explicitly in USD. I.e. this much $ is worth 100km of highway travel. Like calculating the value of a person's life to the government in free health coverage countries based on where they draw the line on spending to keep them alive, I think the value is the inverse of the cost the government would go to to prop it up. You could argue without money how would they be able to enforce, however enforcement of a government order has not always required money, and that's one hypothetical too deep for me.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

justifier 9y ago

But what I want to see is proponents of cryptocurrencies acknowledge that the value requires a specific outcome to a yet unproven problem in mathematics(o) How many people bullish for andor excited by cryptocurrencies know that? any answer to that would leave you wondering: what are the implications? If the majority answer: of course I know it could all be found to be worthless tomorrow Or even if the majority answers: wait, it could potentially be mathematically proven to be useless? Both leave me wondering what the motivations are for those who are promoting it (o) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_resistance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_resistance

semi-extrinsic 9y ago
I think this is a pretty dishonest way of framing it. It's not just bitcoin, our entire system for secure communications across the internet (SSL/TLS etc.) is built on the assumption that P≠NP. If someone were able to prove P=NP and come up with a practical exploit that made bitcoin valueless, it would also spell instant death for Ebay, Paypal, Amazon and a few hundred other small companies. Not to mention that all internet banking would have to be taken down very quickly. In summary, it would be such a huge shock to the economies in all industrialised countries that it would make the 2012 financial crisis look like a minor inconvenience. Nobody would be concerned with "ah shit, my BTC is valueless", they'd be concerned with "ah shit, there's a run on the banks to get physical money and I will probably starve."
johncolanduoni 9y ago
It's pretty much the same story for anything that depends on cryptography, including virtually all transactions involving normal currencies.

fapjacks 9y ago

> Reporters need to separate Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin (and some of the other older cryptocurrencies) from token sales and other crypto assets. Not even actual crypto speculators seem to be able to do this. The second anything drastic happens on one of the crypto markets, all prices immediately peg to Bitcoin, and they all rise and fall in unison.

jacobush 9y ago
I see that as a sign that the markets (BETWEEN cryptocurrencies) work and are highly liquid.