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Correct me if I'm wrong but there's many reasons: - It's an unregulated market, so there's nothing preventing wealthy actors from buying up tonnes and artifici

by gitgud 6y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong but there's many reasons: - It's an unregulated market, so there's nothing preventing wealthy actors from buying up tonnes and artificially increasing the price, e.g: "pump n dump". - It's inherently speculative and has no real use besides investing and unregulated money exchange. - It's a global market, people from all over the world have access to the market with little overhead, making it volatile.

mettamage 6y ago
> It's inherently speculative and has no real use besides investing and unregulated money exchange. How about sending cash? You can do that with a bank account. But what if you can't? 1.7 billion people are unbanked and some of them do have access to computers. There are situations where cryptocurrencies are currently the only solution. Sure, not for you, or for me. But definitely for a large group in the world that we don't know much about, because we don't live their lives. Edit: the more I reread my reply the more it fits "unregulated money exchange". But I'd like to argue that such a thing is a real use case. And by trivializing it you're not allowing yourself to understand it with minimal bias.
- notahacker 6y ago
  > But what if you can't? 1.7 billion people are unbanked and some of them do have access to computers. And absolutely none of them are or should be storing their limited assets into something they can't change into spendable cash in the local economy without access to a bank account [even without taking into account volatility etc]. Regulated money transfers already serve this population much better for sending money long distance because they get cash at the other end. No matter how hard newly-minted foreign millionaires try to enlist them in the dump phase of their money-printing scheme, people in the developing world don't have a need for computer based tokens with volatile notional value which are not only not accepted by people in their local economy but also completely unintelligible to them The real demand for unregulated money exchange is of course unlawful transactions, and serious crime like extortion undoubtedly represents several orders of magnitude more volume in the BTC economy than serving the unbanked.
  - mettamage 6y ago
    Disclaimer: not a crypto millionaire (my comment history shows some plausible evidence of that). Thanks for giving your opinion. Well, we clearly strongly disagree. The only issue I see in my argument is that I don't know well enough to what extent the unbanked can exchange bitcoin in their local economy for goods/services or their own currency. One can say they can't, but the real answer is: they probably can't, but I don't know and maybe they could. If they couldn't then my position is not holdable. If they can, then I'd say I strongly disagree. In any case, you said the following. > demand for unregulated money exchange is of course unlawful transactions, and serious crime like extortion undoubtedly represents several orders of magnitude more volume in the BTC economy The way I made this quote is slightly out of context, but with this I agree (i.e. I deleted "the real" and "than serving the unbanked"). But what about playfulness? This is a completely different inquiry than my comment above that (i.e. the western world). I wonder how big that demand is. I'd venture to guess the following: at least 21 million people are willing to play with bitcoin by now for at least $1. If this number is 210 million people, then this lowerbound goes to $10 per bitcoin. Yep, handwavy, I know. I'm assuming by the way that in such a secnario everyone would then play around with 0.1 bitcoin. The reason those values are sustainable is because $1 is within everyone's budget of being playful. I'm simply wondering what you think as your views are very different from mine.
    - notahacker 6y ago
      I think the switch from BTC's demand being supported by the needs of 1.7 billion people to a small minority to the 'playfulness' of a minority of the Western world pretty much underlines the difference between the fantasy and the reality. WRT crypto appealing to some people's playfulness, I entirely agree with you: it's well established fact that a non-trivial number of people in the Western world enjoy gambling with Bitcoin or cryptokitties, and some of them have deep reserves of cash and algorithms to pump more in when they see a trend they like. But the thing about 'playfulness' is it doesn't make a stable store of value or useful medium of exchange: for that you need the amount of new money flooding in to equal the amount of money flowing out. And people move on to playing with new things.
- ac29 6y ago
  > How about sending cash? You can do that with a bank account. But, you dont need a bank account to send cash as is. You can use a system like western union, or just put cash in the mail. Western union has high fees, sure, but the money it sends also doesnt lose 10% of its value in half an hour. Exchanging to and from crypto isnt free either, and is required, since approximately 0% of people get paid in crypto, and 0% of goods and services are bought in crypto. Sending cash in the mail might get lost, stolen or seized, but the same can be said of crypto. Or, you can send something safer like a postal money order which has minimal fees ($1.25 up to $500, $1.75 $500 to $1000).

by gitgud 6y ago

mettamage 6y ago

> It's inherently speculative and has no real use besides investing and unregulated money exchange. How about sending cash? You can do that with a bank account. But what if you can't? 1.7 billion people are unbanked and some of them do have access to computers. There are situations where cryptocurrencies are currently the only solution. Sure, not for you, or for me. But definitely for a large group in the world that we don't know much about, because we don't live their lives. Edit: the more I reread my reply the more it fits "unregulated money exchange". But I'd like to argue that such a thing is a real use case. And by trivializing it you're not allowing yourself to understand it with minimal bias.

notahacker 6y ago
> But what if you can't? 1.7 billion people are unbanked and some of them do have access to computers. And absolutely none of them are or should be storing their limited assets into something they can't change into spendable cash in the local economy without access to a bank account [even without taking into account volatility etc]. Regulated money transfers already serve this population much better for sending money long distance because they get cash at the other end. No matter how hard newly-minted foreign millionaires try to enlist them in the dump phase of their money-printing scheme, people in the developing world don't have a need for computer based tokens with volatile notional value which are not only not accepted by people in their local economy but also completely unintelligible to them The real demand for unregulated money exchange is of course unlawful transactions, and serious crime like extortion undoubtedly represents several orders of magnitude more volume in the BTC economy than serving the unbanked.
- mettamage 6y ago
  Disclaimer: not a crypto millionaire (my comment history shows some plausible evidence of that). Thanks for giving your opinion. Well, we clearly strongly disagree. The only issue I see in my argument is that I don't know well enough to what extent the unbanked can exchange bitcoin in their local economy for goods/services or their own currency. One can say they can't, but the real answer is: they probably can't, but I don't know and maybe they could. If they couldn't then my position is not holdable. If they can, then I'd say I strongly disagree. In any case, you said the following. > demand for unregulated money exchange is of course unlawful transactions, and serious crime like extortion undoubtedly represents several orders of magnitude more volume in the BTC economy The way I made this quote is slightly out of context, but with this I agree (i.e. I deleted "the real" and "than serving the unbanked"). But what about playfulness? This is a completely different inquiry than my comment above that (i.e. the western world). I wonder how big that demand is. I'd venture to guess the following: at least 21 million people are willing to play with bitcoin by now for at least $1. If this number is 210 million people, then this lowerbound goes to $10 per bitcoin. Yep, handwavy, I know. I'm assuming by the way that in such a secnario everyone would then play around with 0.1 bitcoin. The reason those values are sustainable is because $1 is within everyone's budget of being playful. I'm simply wondering what you think as your views are very different from mine.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    I think the switch from BTC's demand being supported by the needs of 1.7 billion people to a small minority to the 'playfulness' of a minority of the Western world pretty much underlines the difference between the fantasy and the reality. WRT crypto appealing to some people's playfulness, I entirely agree with you: it's well established fact that a non-trivial number of people in the Western world enjoy gambling with Bitcoin or cryptokitties, and some of them have deep reserves of cash and algorithms to pump more in when they see a trend they like. But the thing about 'playfulness' is it doesn't make a stable store of value or useful medium of exchange: for that you need the amount of new money flooding in to equal the amount of money flowing out. And people move on to playing with new things.
ac29 6y ago
> How about sending cash? You can do that with a bank account. But, you dont need a bank account to send cash as is. You can use a system like western union, or just put cash in the mail. Western union has high fees, sure, but the money it sends also doesnt lose 10% of its value in half an hour. Exchanging to and from crypto isnt free either, and is required, since approximately 0% of people get paid in crypto, and 0% of goods and services are bought in crypto. Sending cash in the mail might get lost, stolen or seized, but the same can be said of crypto. Or, you can send something safer like a postal money order which has minimal fees ($1.25 up to $500, $1.75 $500 to $1000).