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1. Or – third possibility — many people have recently raised their expectation of the future value of the Bitcoin economy. If you're familiar with stock trading

by bdr 14y ago

1. Or – third possibility — many people have recently raised their expectation of the future value of the Bitcoin economy. If you're familiar with stock trading, this is analogous to having a high P/E ratio. There is a lot of uncertainty here. Intelligent, rational people disagree wildly on the future of Bitcoin. There are all kinds of risks: legal, technical, and competitive. If the exchange rate crashes, and takes a long time to recover, you'll feel justified in calling all buyers "speculators feeding the hype machine", when in actuality many of them were simply wrong, or early. 2. False dichotomy. Some people are speculating. Others are using it to exchange value. Inventions don't need teleologies. Your concern, if I'm understanding you, is that speculators are harming Bitcoin's potential as an alternative to the current economy. I wouldn't worry about that. The exchange rate is either going to $0 or $1000+, and the behavior of the community short-term isn't going to affect that. Obviously, I'm long Bitcoin. See this blog post from 2011: http://andrewbadr.com/log/10/bitcoins-and-why-im-buying/ http://andrewbadr.com/log/10/bitcoins-and-why-im-buying/

Retric 14y ago
I just read though your link and I hate to break it to you but bit-coins are the opposite of antonymous every account and every transaction is public. Also, from a technical standpoint it's horrible for fast transactions like a store or vending machine, so either it needs to be fixed, another layer built over it which makes it no more useful than cash, or some other digital currency is going to take over.
- zanny 14y ago
  It is designed to be attack resistant. Having to validate transactions across many nodes in the network, and having to maintain a valid transaction history amongst the network, makes it really hard to be fraudulent. You can register as many sources as you want in wallets, and you can give away your wallet.dat, so in practice wallets are tied even less to people than IPs are.

by bdr 14y ago

Retric 14y ago

I just read though your link and I hate to break it to you but bit-coins are the opposite of antonymous every account and every transaction is public. Also, from a technical standpoint it's horrible for fast transactions like a store or vending machine, so either it needs to be fixed, another layer built over it which makes it no more useful than cash, or some other digital currency is going to take over.

zanny 14y ago
It is designed to be attack resistant. Having to validate transactions across many nodes in the network, and having to maintain a valid transaction history amongst the network, makes it really hard to be fraudulent. You can register as many sources as you want in wallets, and you can give away your wallet.dat, so in practice wallets are tied even less to people than IPs are.