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A decade latter and it's still a hobby currency. Price is not a sole indicator of faith in a currency.
by three_seagrass 6y ago
A decade latter and it's still a hobby currency. Price is not a sole indicator of faith in a currency.
- JxLS-cpgbe0 6y agoETFs are a hobby?
- three_seagrass 6y ago>ETFs are a hobby? Bitcoin is not a bundle of securities, nor is an ETF a currency. Why would you confuse the two?
- JxLS-cpgbe0 6y agoI didn't. There are Bitcoin ETFs now and CME Bitcoin Futures now, as examples of institutional money invested that wasn't in 2017. Whales are holding, not trading, net inflow to NA is nothing like 2017. Just based on a hobby currency?
- three_seagrass 6y agoAsset != Currency Being in an ETF does not make something a real currency. BTC is still hobby money.
- JxLS-cpgbe0 6y agoWhich is why I never made either statement. GBTC has a $14B market cap. Do any Dogecoin ETFs? No? Then maybe BTC is more than a hobby. It's a serious long-term store of value people are increasingly using as a hedge. A serious currency with commercial and institutional investors. When you understand why Dogecoin doesn't have these things, you'll understand what a "hobby" actually is. > BTC is still hobby money. Can you post a single reason to believe that?
- three_seagrass 6y agoAgain, being an asset does not mean something is a useful currency. You keep listing characteristics of assets, like existing in an ETF or having a market cap or having commercial investors. Those are not characteristics of currencies, which are widely accepted, engaged with, and in use by people and organizations in commerce.
- JxLS-cpgbe0 6y agoWhy is why I never said that > currencies, which are widely accepted, engaged with, and in use by people and organizations in commerce So billions of dollars of institutional trading means BTC is widely accepted, engaged with, and in use by people and organizations in commerce. So, you said it's a currency. That makes no mention of the consumer space, where I bought my widescreen monitor with BTC and pay my friends in BTC with PayPal. Have you heard of PayPal? > BTC is still hobby money. Can you post a single reason to believe that?
- three_seagrass 6y ago>So billions of dollars of institutional trading means BTC is widely accepted, engaged with, and in use by people and organizations in commerce. So, you said it's a currency. This is a straw man. USD is a good currency because it is widely accepted, engaged with, and in use by people and organizations in commerce. BTC is not a good currency because it is not widely accepted, engaged with, and in use by people and organizations in commerce. Even in your paypal example, they first convert your hobby money to USD (a real currency) before commencing the transaction. Having billions traded or invested in it is a characteristic of an asset, which you keep repeating, and not a currency. You're failing to understand this distinction.
- JxLS-cpgbe0 6y agoBTC is widely accepted globally, engaged with, and in use, as currency, by people and organizations in commerce. I've given examples of major institutions that prove all of the above is true. Do you have a single reason to believe it's a hobby currency?
- ryanlol 6y agoThere are vast amounts of professional drug dealers making their living from transactions using this “hobby currency”.
- three_seagrass 6y agoAre you up to speed on the dark net markets? Most have closed. The last one in use, Empire, had an exit scam this summer. Before that, Wall Street Market was taken over by feds and used as a honey pot - where they used traced bitcoin transactions to arrest dealers/people involved. Any drug dealers still doing online trading prefer Monero, and even then, I would still say that using a currency solely to buy drugs online is the definition of hobby money.
- 93po 6y agoI buy stuff constantly using regular old bitcoin off of coinbase. Not drugs, but other things that don't lend themselves to tradtional payment providers. Market is alive and well for a lot of stuff outside drugs.
- three_seagrass 6y agoWhich is fine, but anecdotal. You're describing a hobby money because most people do not do what you are doing.
- ryanlol 6y ago> Are you up to speed on the dark net markets? Yeah actually. If you think Empire was “the last one in use” you obviously have no idea what you’re talking about. There are more DNM transactions happening now than ever before. There are closer to 20 markets in operation, XMR makes up less than 10% of the transactions. I’m sure many dealers would prefer Monero, but few customers do.
- three_seagrass 6y agoEmpire was the last one that was relatively trusted. Most of the new ones that aren't invite only are suspected honey pots until they go a period of time without busts or exit scams.
- hiq 6y agoHow do you distinguish a proper currency from a hobby currency? I can think of these criteria on the top of my head: * trading volume * number of shops where it's accepted * whether you can pay taxes with it Did you have something like that in mind? Or something else? What would lead you to say "this is not just a hobby currency anymore"?
- three_seagrass 6y agoIf you want to get into semantics, a currency something that is generally accepted or in use, meaning used by many people and organizations. For Bitcoin, transaction volume is not a good indicator of this because many of the trades (estimated >80%) these days are HFTs. Bitcoin is an asset for sure, but not a real currency.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y agoI'd say non-financial usage is the appropriate measure. My dollars are a good currency because I pay my mortgage in them, I buy groceries in them, I get my paycheck in them, I pay my friends for my share of dinner in it. The usage towards "stuff" that the economy is made of (activities, goods, etc) should be the measure. I have yet to see bitcoin make a dent there. It seems like bitcoin has actually gotten harder to use there than when I first encountered it. Until then a bitcoin is like a call option or financial derivatives or really exotic instruments. Financially very relevant, heavily used, but so niche that it's of no relevance to basically everybody.
- mywittyname 6y agoProper currencies are used to pay your bills: anything else is speculative. You might think this is a silly definition, because it means that the determination of how "proper" a currency is depends on where that person lives. And that's absolutely correct. I have no functional use for Turkish Lira. The only reason I would possess any is because I'm speculating that the value of Lira will increase relative to the currency I use to pay for my needs. Using that definition, one could create a Proper Currency Score by taking the number of people or businesses that use each currency and multiply it by the gross value of transactions performed in the currency (excluding currency exchange). This definition is at least reasonable on the surface, as the top currencies would be USD, EUR, and RMB.
- keymone 6y agoIs decade a lot? How long did it take gold to settle as universal currency?
- three_seagrass 6y agoA decade is a lot for a new technology to miss the mass market boat. It's less like the iPhone/PDA tech and more like the Segway.
- xtracto 6y agoI don´t agree with you. I see it more like SABRE, SAGE in the 1960´s and ARPANET in the 1970s, Compuserve in the 80s and the Internet in the 90s. Hashcash, eGold and other similar pioneered the "dark ages" of digital money/value-transfer. Now we are in the ARPANET/Compuserve stage. Cryptocats and crypto-games is akin to "90s" internet. Next 10 years will bring really interesting thinks.
- three_seagrass 6y agoTechnology adoption has changed since those analogies were developed. Bitcoin has been consistently "around the corner" from mass market for a decade now, while other technologies have been released and adopted.
- keymone 6y ago> Bitcoin has been consistently "around the corner" from mass market for a decade now do you even know how old bitcoin is?
- three_seagrass 6y agoYes, I do. I was using it in 2011, pre bubble, when forums were rife with self-proclaimed futurists even then, predicting Bitcoin's success as a currency.
- koonsolo 6y agoGo compare the market cap of bitcoin with the money supply of some countries. Is it still a hobby currency then?
- three_seagrass 6y agoAssets != Currencies APPL's market cap is $2 trillion and so by that logic it should be an excellent currency.
- koonsolo 6y agoAPPL is probably a hobby company ;)
- three_seagrass 6y agoNobody is saying that it is, but by your logic APPL is a great currency.
- koonsolo 6y agoFirst of all, comparing 2 things doesn't insinuate that they are the same. Second of all, just because US classifies bitcoin as an asset, doesn't mean the rest of the world has to agree with that. My country doesn't. And from the wikipedia page of bitcoin: "It is a decentralized digital currency"
- three_seagrass 6y agoRight. It's a hobby currency like I originally stated. Having characteristics of assets, like you said, doesn't make an asset a good currency.