We can only hope. As a first generation product, Bitcoin is one of the worst cryptocurrencies from a technological standpoint, is an environmental disaster, and had no rational reason to be valued...
We can only hope. As a first generation product, Bitcoin is one of the worst cryptocurrencies from a technological standpoint, is an environmental disaster, and had no rational reason to be valued as high as it was, or even is.
I so badly want to be free from centralized credit card processing systems that sell my data to Google but bitcoin is so offputting its probably going to stain peoples opinion on cryptocurrencies...
I so badly want to be free from centralized credit card processing systems that sell my data to Google but bitcoin is so offputting its probably going to stain peoples opinion on cryptocurrencies for a very long time. They will be known as that weird scam that wasn't ever useful for anything.
That's why I hope this article is right and bitcoin really is finished. The sooner it's dead, the sooner we can get breathing room for cryptocurrencies that actually work as currencies instead of...
That's why I hope this article is right and bitcoin really is finished. The sooner it's dead, the sooner we can get breathing room for cryptocurrencies that actually work as currencies instead of as pyramid schemes. There's a lot of potential out there with cryptos like ripple, but at present, they're all shackled to a corpse.
Basically it stems from the way people use it, not as a currency, but overwhelmingly as a sort of investment. Since nobody is realistically using it for the service it's ostensibly designed to...
Basically it stems from the way people use it, not as a currency, but overwhelmingly as a sort of investment. Since nobody is realistically using it for the service it's ostensibly designed to provide, Bitcoin derives all of its value from people buying it in order to hoard it, in the hopes that more people do the same, driving the price up. In this way, later investors pay earlier investors, and hope themselves to get paid by even later investors. I don't think it's necessarily something that was intended by the original users and developers, but rather arose organically as the inevitable result of a deflationary "currency" that can only process half a dozen transactions a second going mainstream.
So I agree that at this point Bitcoin is being treated just like a stored value commodity investment. However that doesn't inherently make it a "pyramid scheme" since your line of logic follows...
So I agree that at this point Bitcoin is being treated just like a stored value commodity investment. However that doesn't inherently make it a "pyramid scheme" since your line of logic follows for all such investments. Investors hope to buy low and sell high, which requires new buyers who are willing to pay higher prices. Money doesn't "flow up" to earlier investors unless they sell their investment.
In any case, we don't need to get into a terminology debate. I was only interested in why people have a strong enough sentiment that they use such terms that carry heavy amounts of negative connotation.
Difference being that traditional investments have intrinsic value, like stocks convey partial ownership of a company, land has natural resources, hell even gold has industrial uses. Whereas...
However that doesn't inherently make it a "pyramid scheme" since your line of logic follows for all such investments. Investors hope to buy low and sell high, which requires new buyers who are willing to pay higher prices. Money doesn't "flow up" to earlier investors unless they sell their investment.
Difference being that traditional investments have intrinsic value, like stocks convey partial ownership of a company, land has natural resources, hell even gold has industrial uses. Whereas bitcoin has no such value beyond the possibility of selling it to later investors. Because earlier investors do need to sell to reap their benefits, perhaps pyramid scheme isn't the precise term, but it's very similar and gets the point across.
That Bloomberg link is returning a 500 error so I'm unable to read the full article for context, but from what you quoted: There's an investigation into spoofing in order to pump the price. That's...
That Bloomberg link is returning a 500 error so I'm unable to read the full article for context, but from what you quoted:
There's an investigation into spoofing in order to pump the price. That's totally fair and worthwhile to determine if a small circle of large players is trying to artificially raise the price in order to offload later for profit. However this is an issue with all tradable commodities, right? I wouldn't say that it indicates that Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme, just that people are trying to do scammy things with it, same as they would with something like penny stocks.
The other quotes are about Tether, which is a separate platform than Bitcoin. It should be treated separately since changes to it, even technical ones, have no bearing on how Bitcoin functions (only investor behaviour which might incorrectly assume that all crypto trading is interrelated).
The reason I asked is because a "pyramid scheme" is a pretty well-defined concept, which Bitcoin does not overlap with at all.
Not sure that anything does for bitcoin, but there are alternatives like Monero that are completely private and anonymous. The sooner Bitcoin stops sucking all the air out of the room, the sooner...
Not sure that anything does for bitcoin, but there are alternatives like Monero that are completely private and anonymous. The sooner Bitcoin stops sucking all the air out of the room, the sooner superior, later generation cryptocurrencies can take its place.
There are some that use (or plan to transition to) Proof of Stake rather than Proof of Work. These cryptos don't consume the energy equivalent to a small nation like Bitcoin does.
There are some that use (or plan to transition to) Proof of Stake rather than Proof of Work. These cryptos don't consume the energy equivalent to a small nation like Bitcoin does.
Oh don't even get me started on that. If the mining boom had kept going any longer, when paired with the RAM cartel, it would've given PC gaming in general a pretty staggering one-two punch. As...
Oh don't even get me started on that. If the mining boom had kept going any longer, when paired with the RAM cartel, it would've given PC gaming in general a pretty staggering one-two punch. As is, it probably set VR gaming back at least six months, due to GPUs being unavailable for all intents and purposes.
They are back down to regular levels now, but it took forever.
I don't own any bitcoin, but I've casually paid attention to its valuation's ups and downs. I do think cryptocurrency-type entities will eventually be relevant in some way, but I'm not sure...
As I argued, once Bitcoin’s price falls below its cost of mining, the incentive to mine will deteriorate, thrusting bitcoin into a death spiral. That is, without the mining activities supporting the ledger that maintains the records of who owns what — bitcoin is, after all, a set of encrypted numbers that cannot establish the ownership of anything — bitcoin will become worthless.
I don't own any bitcoin, but I've casually paid attention to its valuation's ups and downs. I do think cryptocurrency-type entities will eventually be relevant in some way, but I'm not sure Bitcoin will be one of them.
There's a site the keeps track of all the articles declaring Bitcoin dead: Bitcoin Obituaries. There are over three hundred so far going back to 2010. Bitcoin has crashed 80% or more from a peak...
There's a site the keeps track of all the articles declaring Bitcoin dead: Bitcoin Obituaries. There are over three hundred so far going back to 2010. Bitcoin has crashed 80% or more from a peak several times. Each time the bottom of the crash has been substantially above the where it was before the rally that lead to the peak started.
Bitcoin is getting close to that point. As I argued, once Bitcoin’s price falls below its cost of mining, the incentive to mine will deteriorate, thrusting bitcoin into a death spiral.
The cost of mining isn't fixed. It fluctuates based on how much mining is happening. If blocks are found too quickly then mining difficulty adjusts and it gets harder. If blocks take too long then the difficulty goes down. If the cost of mining is too high then the least profitable miners drop out and the cost of mining goes down for the rest of the miners that keep going.
That's exactly what is happening right now. A portion of the miners have shutdown, the difficulty dropped and the cost of mining has come down.
...its value is driven... mostly by its cost of mining.
It goes the other way around. The value of Bitcoin drives the cost of mining because of the difficulty adjustment mentioned above. The more valuable Bitcoin is the more miners jump in and the more the difficulty goes up. The less valuable it is the less mining power there is and lower the difficulty goes.
We can only hope. As a first generation product, Bitcoin is one of the worst cryptocurrencies from a technological standpoint, is an environmental disaster, and had no rational reason to be valued as high as it was, or even is.
I so badly want to be free from centralized credit card processing systems that sell my data to Google but bitcoin is so offputting its probably going to stain peoples opinion on cryptocurrencies for a very long time. They will be known as that weird scam that wasn't ever useful for anything.
That's why I hope this article is right and bitcoin really is finished. The sooner it's dead, the sooner we can get breathing room for cryptocurrencies that actually work as currencies instead of as pyramid schemes. There's a lot of potential out there with cryptos like ripple, but at present, they're all shackled to a corpse.
Curious as to why you think Bitcoin is a "pyramid scheme"?
Basically it stems from the way people use it, not as a currency, but overwhelmingly as a sort of investment. Since nobody is realistically using it for the service it's ostensibly designed to provide, Bitcoin derives all of its value from people buying it in order to hoard it, in the hopes that more people do the same, driving the price up. In this way, later investors pay earlier investors, and hope themselves to get paid by even later investors. I don't think it's necessarily something that was intended by the original users and developers, but rather arose organically as the inevitable result of a deflationary "currency" that can only process half a dozen transactions a second going mainstream.
So I agree that at this point Bitcoin is being treated just like a stored value commodity investment. However that doesn't inherently make it a "pyramid scheme" since your line of logic follows for all such investments. Investors hope to buy low and sell high, which requires new buyers who are willing to pay higher prices. Money doesn't "flow up" to earlier investors unless they sell their investment.
In any case, we don't need to get into a terminology debate. I was only interested in why people have a strong enough sentiment that they use such terms that carry heavy amounts of negative connotation.
Difference being that traditional investments have intrinsic value, like stocks convey partial ownership of a company, land has natural resources, hell even gold has industrial uses. Whereas bitcoin has no such value beyond the possibility of selling it to later investors. Because earlier investors do need to sell to reap their benefits, perhaps pyramid scheme isn't the precise term, but it's very similar and gets the point across.
That Bloomberg link is returning a 500 error so I'm unable to read the full article for context, but from what you quoted:
The reason I asked is because a "pyramid scheme" is a pretty well-defined concept, which Bitcoin does not overlap with at all.
W.r.t. privacy, what prevents a retailer from associating your Bitcoin public key with other things it knows about you?
Not sure that anything does for bitcoin, but there are alternatives like Monero that are completely private and anonymous. The sooner Bitcoin stops sucking all the air out of the room, the sooner superior, later generation cryptocurrencies can take its place.
Nothing. That's why you use a newly created public/private key pair for every transaction in your Bitcoin wallet.
Do you have any recommendations for crypto systems that remain secure without being so energy intensive?
There are some that use (or plan to transition to) Proof of Stake rather than Proof of Work. These cryptos don't consume the energy equivalent to a small nation like Bitcoin does.
Not to mention that the price of graphics cards has skyrocketed.
Oh don't even get me started on that. If the mining boom had kept going any longer, when paired with the RAM cartel, it would've given PC gaming in general a pretty staggering one-two punch. As is, it probably set VR gaming back at least six months, due to GPUs being unavailable for all intents and purposes.
They are back down to regular levels now, but it took forever.
I don't own any bitcoin, but I've casually paid attention to its valuation's ups and downs. I do think cryptocurrency-type entities will eventually be relevant in some way, but I'm not sure Bitcoin will be one of them.
There's a site the keeps track of all the articles declaring Bitcoin dead: Bitcoin Obituaries. There are over three hundred so far going back to 2010. Bitcoin has crashed 80% or more from a peak several times. Each time the bottom of the crash has been substantially above the where it was before the rally that lead to the peak started.
The cost of mining isn't fixed. It fluctuates based on how much mining is happening. If blocks are found too quickly then mining difficulty adjusts and it gets harder. If blocks take too long then the difficulty goes down. If the cost of mining is too high then the least profitable miners drop out and the cost of mining goes down for the rest of the miners that keep going.
That's exactly what is happening right now. A portion of the miners have shutdown, the difficulty dropped and the cost of mining has come down.
It goes the other way around. The value of Bitcoin drives the cost of mining because of the difficulty adjustment mentioned above. The more valuable Bitcoin is the more miners jump in and the more the difficulty goes up. The less valuable it is the less mining power there is and lower the difficulty goes.