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Disclaimer: not a crypto millionaire (my comment history shows some plausible evidence of that). Thanks for giving your opinion. Well, we clearly strongly disa

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 7y 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.

notahacker 7y 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.