Bitcoin and Other Cryptocurrencies Are Useless, The Economist Says (economist.com) 276
With few uses to anchor their value, and little in the way of regulation, cryptocurrencies have instead become a focus for speculation, The Economist magazine said this week. From the story, which may be paywalled: Some people have made fortunes as cryptocurrency prices have zoomed and dived; many early punters have cashed out. Others have lost money. It seems unlikely that this latest boom-bust cycle will be the last. Economists define a currency as something that can be at once a medium of exchange, a store of value and a unit of account. Lack of adoption and loads of volatility mean that cryptocurrencies satisfy none of those criteria. That does not mean they are going to go away (though scrutiny from regulators concerned about the fraud and sharp practice that is rife in the industry may dampen excitement in future). But as things stand there is little reason to think that cryptocurrencies will remain more than an overcomplicated, untrustworthy casino.
Can blockchains -- the underlying technology that powers cryptocurrencies -- do better? These are best thought of as an idiosyncratic form of database, in which records are copied among all the system's users rather than maintained by a central authority, and where entries cannot be altered once written. Proponents believe these features can help solve all sorts of problems, from streamlining bank payments and guaranteeing the provenance of medicines to securing property rights and providing unforgeable identity documents for refugees. Those are big claims. Many are made by cryptocurrency speculators, who hope that stoking excitement around blockchains will boost the value of their related cryptocurrency holdings.
Can blockchains -- the underlying technology that powers cryptocurrencies -- do better? These are best thought of as an idiosyncratic form of database, in which records are copied among all the system's users rather than maintained by a central authority, and where entries cannot be altered once written. Proponents believe these features can help solve all sorts of problems, from streamlining bank payments and guaranteeing the provenance of medicines to securing property rights and providing unforgeable identity documents for refugees. Those are big claims. Many are made by cryptocurrency speculators, who hope that stoking excitement around blockchains will boost the value of their related cryptocurrency holdings.
What next? (Score:5, Funny)
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I have a YuGiOh deck I will sell you for $2000.00. I got it years ago. By now it should be worth $10,000 or more.
Re: What next? (Score:2, Funny)
if only there were an online exchange for magic the gathering cards. they could call it oemtg or something like that
Re:What next? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Bitcoin is literally useless.
It is better than real money for anonymous transactions, such as buying drugs, or funding an off shore gambling account.
It is also better than real money for many international transactions. My company employs a graphic artist in Karachi. She emails us her work, and we pay her salary in bitcoins. This is much cheaper and faster than using a bank. We have also made a nice profit from the stash of bitcoins we bought for this purpose several years ago.
Re:What next? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you actually use it as the negotiated salary? As in 'X' number of bitcoins a year? Presumably you do a last minute calculation based on a more stable currency and by the same token she presumably cashes it out pretty quickly. That's a problem for what is ostensibly a 'currency'.
It sounds like you may have had a positive experience, purchased X bitcoins, but by the time payday came to pass, you probably needed a lot fewer due to boom, so you had spare. Conversely, if you paid what *should* be enough for her salary, using X USD to acquire them, say a week in advance, but on payday your account is suddenly short, that's a big problem. As it stands, the only way to have predictable income/spend relative to real goods is to minimize the time from when it's a stable currency, to cryptocurrency, and back to stable currency again.
There's some interesting (albeit too wasteful of energy) technology things going on, but the non-technical context does not bode well for the current cryptocurrencies.
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Do you actually use it as the negotiated salary? As in 'X' number of bitcoins a year?
No. Her salary is set in PR (Pakistani Rupees).
Presumably you do a last minute calculation based on a more stable currency
Yes. We calculate the BC->PR exchange rate, and send that many BC.
and by the same token she presumably cashes it out pretty quickly.
No idea. I never asked her. But I presume that she did, because if she had held onto them she will be a USD millionaire many times over and would would have quit working for us long ago.
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>because if she had held onto them she will be a USD millionaire many times over
It is telling that you say it in terms of fiat.
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Your company held bitcoins ? (Score:2)
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You company held bitcoins to pay salaries?
Yes. Salaries are low in Karachi, we pay her about $5000 USD per year. So we bought enough bitcoin to cover that for a few years so we wouldn't have to do a lot of small transactions. We weren't really expecting the surge in value, but now we have enough to cover her salary for a few centuries.
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anonymous transactions
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." --Inigo Montoya
(It might feel anonymous today, but eventually they'll map out all the wallets to real identities and it'll be more traceable than if you had paid with a credit card.)
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This is said a lot but I'm really not sure how accurate it works out in practice. Sure it's anonymous enough if you're buying the odd ounce of weed, but then so is cash and any number of physical items that could be bartered. The difference with Bitcoin is that if any single transaction gives away (or can be used to narrow down enough) who you are then all your other transactions are compr
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You do realize that slight inflation is pretty good for everyone right?
Sure it was pretty had for a minute in the 70s, but the trend in USD is not particularly bad, and it's more stable that pretty much any other good.
Re: What next? (Score:2)
You do realize that slight inflation is pretty good for everyone right?
Yeah, especially those who save. Get the fuck out of here with your Keynesian horseshit.
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You do realize that slight inflation is pretty good for everyone right?
That's generally true (a strong economy is based on transactions that move money, so you want to discourage people from keeping stacks of cash in their mattresses), what's more important is to have steady, predictable inflation. Most investors want predictable outcomes, not complete chaos. A guaranteed 20% inflation rate would certainly be less than ideal, but it would be better for most people than a rate that could be anywhere between -10% and 10% in any given year.
"Useless" as money, useful as a transfer system (Score:2)
Bitcoin is literally useless.
Nearly useless as money but it is useful as a money transfer system. Convert a real currency to bitcoins, transfer to whoever, they convert to a real currency. For the very short time the bitcoins are held the volatility isn't a problem.
Now if you want to argue that proof of work algorithms are useless given the power consumption, there is that, but Bitcoin does not have to use proof of work, there are other way to maintain a blockchain.
And speaking of blockchain, Bitcoin is use as a field test of tha
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Actually playing with the collector grade MTG cards destroys their value.
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enjoy looking at Beanie Babies on your shelf while holding them as a speculative investment. Bitcoin is literally useless.
No, really, once you start looking at the hashes, the hashes......I don't even see the hashes anymore. All I see now is blonde, brunette, redhead.
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Bitcoin is literally useless.
I happen to like looking at a seemingly random hex string of my speculative investment you insensitive clod.
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Yet some art remains pretty damn valuable.
Use: Evading capital controls. (Score:5, Insightful)
'The Economist' might not see evading capital controls as useful, but they are wrong.
Not an investment vehicle, but for 'in and out' in a day, good enough.
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Potato PotAto. The point is, it is personally and socially useful.
It's only anon, if you only use the wallet for two transactions. Otherwise, one mistake.
Nations that impose capital controls at their borders are never up to any good. This is a technical check and balance on that particular government overreach.
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A stable, and widely agreed upon, value is required.
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In and out in a day. Did you read the tread?
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Well, less anonymous than cash in practice. The transactions are out there for all to see, and with cash you can to some extent stuff it in mattresses without too much risk versus BTC where you really have to get the value out of BTC quickly if you really want to know how much worth you have.
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Except cash doesn't automatically record every transaction in a public ledger.
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'The Economist' might not see evading capital controls as useful, but they are wrong. Not an investment vehicle, but for 'in and out' in a day, good enough.
And that adds some drag in the system, if a lot of people are looking to buy/sell BTC at any given time not to speculate but because they're doing a transaction "via" Bitcoin then speculators will have a market to sell to/buy from. Those passing through doesn't care if the current price is $100 or $1000 or $10000, they're buying and selling in the same market. Volatility is also not a big deal if you do it regularly, you win some you lose some but the net loss due to price fluctuation is probably not that f
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The Economist is what Nassim Taleb calls IYI -- intelectuals yet idiots. They write what everyone in the IYI circles already think, right or wrong, but they make it sound more intelectual without adding any real depth to it. Proof of that is their poor track record in forecasting.
Re: Use: Evading capital controls. (Score:2)
You, some guy with a psuedonymn on a blog, can say that with no risk. Yet a yearly subscription to The Economist (a newspaper that has been published continuously since the 1830s) is about $130 and many successful business people gladly pay that for the information they get from it.
Here's two cents. Can I subscribe to your newsletter?
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I believe those successful business people don't pay for information as much as they pay for the feeling they get from it, that they are on top of things and are in the company of great intellectuals. They can also for example feature The Economist on their desks or in their waiting rooms and thus elevate their appearance.
But I'm not at all saying The Economist is a bad product, on the contrary I think $130/yr for that kind of satisfaction is actually money well spent. I'm just saying the predictive value o
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Come on, the Economist track record isn't half as bad as Wall Street Journal, and WSJ earns way more money than the Economist.
Wall Street Journal makes money by telling those in power that it is reasonable and proper that they are in power. Arguing that the information in there is useful just because it's expensive is bogus.
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Still, at the current rates that's around 3.7 Dogecoins. Not too shabby.
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'The Economist' might not see evading capital controls as useful, but they are wrong.
So, they're also useful for crime. Got it.
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'The Economist' might not see evading capital controls as useful, but they are wrong.
The economist sees it just fine. As do the tax departments of various governments of the world when people use a "currency" that has an completely open and public ledger published for all to see.
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Exactly. (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact it's existence depends on other actual currency means it is worthless on its own. Everyone who owns bitcoin is hoping to cash out for real money.
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The problem is so long as it realistically must be exchanged for something more stable to mitigate risk for it to work as an exchange when it is too rough to be an investment vehicle, it becomes easier and easier to trace. Bitcoin transactions are transparent, though anonymous (everyone can see X BTC moved from wallets A,B,C to X,Y,Z, but those stable value alternatives are tracked and correlations are easy).
Further the act of moving BTC from some wallets to another requires relatively huge amounts of ener
No (Score:2)
These are best thought of as an idiosyncratic form of database, in which records are copied among all the system's users rather than maintained by a central authority, and where entries cannot be altered once written. Proponents believe these features can help solve all sorts of problems, from streamlining bank payments and guaranteeing the provenance of medicines to securing property rights and providing unforgeable identity documents for refugees.
I don't see how blockchain is better than a centralized database in any of these use cases. The refugee example especially has many humorous angles: are refugees going to start mining identity-coin on their phones to keep the database up?
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I think the use case must revolve around trust. When there is no trust that a central entity can keep information, then it might do better to have a distributed ledger which cannot (I suppose...that's the lore anyhow) be manipulated. If your problem doesn't map to a trusted central entity easily, then a distributed version might be better.
Re: No (Score:2)
No value unless exchangable for something else (Score:5, Informative)
On top of that value, you have speculation based on other factors; in this case, scarcity and demand. The more the perceived mania continues, the more volatility there will be.
What is different here is that a number of early adopters held onto the currency, and others bought in late. That distorted people's perception of the cryptocurrency where they thought they could all make money fast. Well, lo and behold, the currency crashed since its peak, and seems to be teetering currently.
That there are systemic problems with exchanges and blockchain goes without saying. This is unlike traditional currency because the transaction costs are increasing exponentially and putting additional pressure that a normal paper currency managed by a sovereign central bank doesn't have. That reduces monetary velocity through the system and impedes cryptocurrency use for fine-grained transactions. I won't get into the back door idea or breaking the cryptography, although those might become factors in the future. These translate to additional volatility and uncertainty that hurt the value.
The other big difference between an independent cryptocurrency and a regular currency is who and what backs it. That's probably the greatest concern for The Economist and for those who favor classic economics. This is uncharted territory, and uncertainty will always be punished by the market by participatory withdrawal and diminished value. Only time will tell, but something tells me that Bitcoin and the like may be a game of musical chairs.
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All cryptocurrencies are underpinned by the belief that people will trade something of value for them.
And that's quite believable, since people do every day. Sure, a lot of the people involved are just trying to get rich quick, but that doesn't undermine the value in cryptocurrencies. You've got to be able to pay the camgirls without the wife finding out somehow....
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All cryptocurrencies are underpinned by the belief that people will trade something of value for them.
Same for fiat currencies.
Or don't you remember the time, before the EURO, when the most important news was, which currency the central bank is buying to hedge against speculation? Or when the dollar dropped, european central banks did "supporting buys" and when the dollar rose, they sold their surplus?
There were years where the "Deutsche Bundesbank" made substantial gains by trading foreign currencies.
So di
Re:Economist is controlled via bankers same drivel (Score:5, Insightful)
"vote back to you" - no it doesn't. it gives the vote to the existing whales, which for the hoi poloi entering the field, means "not you". it's like people trumpeting how the right to bear arms keeps them safe from "tyranny", when they have no chance to fight against an entity that can field APCs and drones.
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That would be the same military with APCs and drones that can't beat a bunch of savages armed with assault rifles? Even after 17 years and trillions of dollars spent?
That's because those savages with assault rifles aren't facing tyranny.
They're facing a military that is (by and large) operating under rules and trying to (whether the plan would work or not, that's the ultimate goal, yes?) establish order such that a democracy can form.
(also, the main threat isn't the assault rifles, but IEDs and other booby traps that a military trying to maintain order is vulnerable to)
If you're facing true tyranny, having assault rifles won't help. If you're not facing true tyranny, y
More investment than currency still, but .... (Score:5, Insightful)
I honestly believe the single biggest impediment to the public accepting crypto as an alternative currency were all the hacks and corrupt coin exchanges that took people's funds and vanished.
Crypto-coins had the promise of being extremely secure and anonymous, but we quickly saw that unravel as folks learned how to trace transactions back through blockchains and as all of the web site compromises and coin-stealing malware arrived.
It's still too complicated for the average person to take a payment or spend crypto-currency. The unique wallet ID, alone, is a big, long, messy string of characters that nobody can remember. So they have to pretty much launch their wallet app and copy/paste the thing any time they want to instruct someone else to pay them. So that's another big problem. But really, a lot of this stuff can be coded into a more user-friendly UI, if someone is motivated to do it. (I think that's one of the promises of the new project out there to let independent musicians get paid directly for use of their music, without needing a middle man.)
But we're far from seeing the whole thing get stable enough so folks have a good handle on just what a given crypto-coin is worth. Everyone I know hanging onto any of them does so with a hope of reselling them at a profit at some later point in time. They're not keeping them like folks collect spare change in jars at home.
Re: More investment than currency still, but .... (Score:3)
Those messy strings of characters are primarily to be used as a fallback. QR codes do almost all the real work, usually. It's even fine to print one out and use it over and over again, but you lose the benefit of embedding the price, which is a nice feature.
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I think it's more to do with trans time (Score:2)
re: wallets (Score:2)
I've used several wallets but they've been on computers. I have an iPhone and traditionally, Apple placed a lot of limitations on crypto-related apps they'd allow on the App Store, so I never really bothered to try to use one on there.
Well no fucking shit (Score:2)
Color me surprised.
Ugh...
Economist Subscriber (Score:2)
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Slashdot. Spreading moronic views on Bitcoin... (Score:2, Informative)
... from when 1 BTC value was a fraction of a dollar.
Re: Slashdot. Spreading moronic views on Bitcoin.. (Score:2)
I originally heard about BTC on /. when people had "faucets" which would just give you BTC now worth hundreds of dollars. At first they didn't even try to stop you from using it multiple times. These things were relatively common for a time.
Still just for the 1% (Score:2)
Thought this was news for nerds... (Score:2)
Not stuff that's blindingly obvious and has been from the start.
Re: Thought this was news for nerds... (Score:2)
Some of the nerds are pretty naive about real world matters. They know a lot about 6V6 Audio power output tubes, tantalum capacitors, and the comparative differences between a 74LS04 and a 74HC04 hex inverter chip, but are easily taken advantage of when amateur libertarian hucksters show up to ramble about 'fiat currency.'
These discussions are a social service to the nerd community.
An overcomplicated, untrustworthy casino. (Score:2)
Energy use... (Score:2)
Let's not forget that the power consumption is crazy high for what is really a minuscule fraction of the global economy.
If it *were* to scale to significant portion of the economy, we'd have to magically find more energy than the rest of our uses combined.
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We could use a non-mining cryptocurrency like Credits [credits.com]. I agree that mining seems stupid. All the science that this processing power could help with and instead we waste it.
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So if hypothetically you needed more transactions than you have mining interest and adjust mining difficulty to compensate, you have another problem,smaller mining pool controlling more of the economy would make an interested party willing to invest to get to majority to control the whole thing. Mabye they can't prevail because of the resultant 'arms race', but be sure the arms race will ensure that *way* more energy than is appropriate will be expended, and that arms race would go further the bigger the p
Queue all the negative articles (Score:2)
Wait (Score:4, Funny)
Are you saying imaginary internet money was a poor investment on my part?
Easily manipulated (Score:2)
Amara's law (Score:2)
"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Thus disproving their own premise, it exists st (Score:5, Insightful)
"All art is quite useless." - Oscar Wilde
It's not their best headline writing, but TFA makes the point clear: cryptocurrencies are not currencies, let alone useful currencies. Their only "use" is speculation, and to an economist, that doesn't count as "useful".
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You forgot their greatest two benefits: money laundering and international transfers of an interloping currency state.
Yes, it's currency, bizarre as that might seem. Consider the state of the Turkish Lira. Or the fates of Iran, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and a dozen more nations where there are either controls in place for international transfers, or worse, hyper-inflation.
The world's alternate currency used to be the US Dollar, Swiss Francs, the Euro, and pounds sterling. Even the yuan has caved to the whims of
Re:Thus disproving their own premise, it exists st (Score:5, Funny)
And then you pay something in Dogecoins and your cover is blown.
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Your understanding of how Coinbase and others work is lacking. You can trade dollars for cryptocurrency readily. Yes, they take a fee if you change it back to another currency, say BTC to USD.
The US hasn't used gold as a currency backer for decades. The price of gold mirrors paranoia more than any other perceived trait. You can buy crypto coins easily, and you used no energy, someone else did. Maybe their energy was cheap Probably not.
You can mint your own coins. Takes hardware and brains and electricity. S
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You people hate everything that makes our society what it is.. Life wasn't better before technology. It was WAY FUCKING WORSE.
You do know it's not either/or, right?
Technology is almost always three steps forward, one step back. We are heading in the right direction but we're kidding ourselves if we think anything is risk-free and drawback-free. And we're stupid if we think we can't do anything about that.
The ABS and seatbelts and airbags and other safety gear in my car are not anti-technology. They are technology.
I want technological progress and less pollution that we have now. I don't think that's unreasonable.
Re: Thus disproving their own premise, it exists (Score:2)
You've probaly burned more fossil fuel on airplane flights than are used for many crypto mining operations. Crypto-mining is concentrated around hydro and geothermal energy sources. Economics does more to help the environment than your indignation ever will.
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Some people love to gamble. To them it's a chance to win money. Losing or the thought of losing doesn't really register. They're hooked on the game and the possibilities.
With a bitcoin or a non-voting, non-dividend-paying stock, or art, they're all inherently useless. But once that pool of gamblers becomes "large enough", I think the system becomes self sustaining. An emergent property of such a game perhaps, kind of like
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"All art is quite useless." - Oscar Wilde
Not a great comparison, I suspect Wilde was making a point about judging art, art has no intrinsic value, it's true value is entirely subjective.
But I don't think people want Bitcoin so they can admire the blockchain, they expect an eventual payoff.
It's not their best headline writing, but TFA makes the point clear: cryptocurrencies are not currencies, let alone useful currencies. Their only "use" is speculation, and to an economist, that doesn't count as "useful".
Because it's not useful, aside from gambling (which is a losing proposition for everyone but the bookie) speculation relies on an eventual practical payoff. Tomorrow if everyone realized that the value of cryptocurrencies was purely for speculation their value wo
Re: Thus disproving their own premise, it exists s (Score:2)
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(Or, for the layman: Go into the direction of the visible lights.)
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Re:They aren't worthless because they have utility (Score:4, Informative)
What the Powers That Be don't like is gold. Keynes called it a "barbarous relic" and Warren Buffett derided [businessinsider.com] it. But, central banks have bought a lot of it [forbes.com]. Some countries have tried to limit its private ownership, now and in the past.
Currencies started out as mutually valued, divisible objects. Wampum [google.com], cowry shells [google.com], etc. For whatever reasons, everyone valued gold. It was divisible, didn't tarnish, didn't burn - essentially indestructible. It had all the qualities of an excellent means of exchange and a store of value, over the millennia.
Then people started putting gold into storage and using slips of paper which represented that gold. They could get gold for their slips of paper at any time. The system grew. Fractional-reserve banking was discovered (you can lend out more than you have in your vault because everyone is not going to try and withdraw at once). Emergent properties appeared. People stopped using gold to transact altogether. In 1971, the US "gold window" was closed [google.com] - cash could not be redeemed for gold. The system continued to function (though the price of gold skyrocketed, and around that time is the mark is the stagnation of the wages of the lower wealth percentiles of society. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. Side note: it seems to me to be much easier to skim paper you're printing, and to distribute it to your favored partners than it is to skim gold. But that's another topic).
Fast forward to today, and people are moving away from even using the slips of paper, going to cashless systems where only the balances of an account are tracked. "Purchasing power" is now totally virtual. Some countries [google.com] and economists [google.com] are pushing "cashless societies" (Note: most economists missed the oncoming 2008 Financial Crisis [google.com]).
The digital accounts represent cash. Cash used to represent gold. Now it just represents "purchasing power". What does bitcoin represent that is mutually valued?
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What does bitcoin represent that is mutually valued?
Hype. If I can get you really excited about it, then maybe you'll buy in too. And that means I can exit the game of musical money and let you become the next hype-master.
It's a bloomin' widespread, non-changeable ledger. PERIOD. And it takes a lot of CPU power, Watts, and connectivity to make it work. There's the 51% problem as well as throughput issues: VisaNet: 56K transaction messages/sec. And then there's just so MANY to choose from, kinda like religion. Hell, JUST like religion.
*-COIN is th
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Insults offered
Poorly communicated
Without evidence
Proper formatting...
Insults are offered
Poorly communicated
Without Evidence
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fiat currencies have been around for a thousand years.
all cryptocurrency is a failure as money, it's a game token
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really dollars are just game tokens too. a properly liquid and scalable cryptocurrency would also be a fiat currency; it's laughable that cryptocur fanbois say "the end of fiat is near" when their thing also has fiat value
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3. There is no switch though. To seriously harm the network, you'd need to mount a 51% attack.
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And even then you could patch and fork the chain.
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However it may be the case that there's a fundamental limit to the number of qubits that can be entangled at once. Also traditional online banking and wire transfers would be screwed as well.
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Traditional online banking can be made quantum-resistant with reasonable effort. It will start happening soon.
Bitcoin requires an incompatible upgrade to do the same. Those have been fun so far.
Re: Conflict of Interest (Score:3, Interesting)
It's been in continuous publication since the 1830s. Businessmen gladly pay a $130 annual subscription for it because it has journalistic integrity greater than just about any other journal in print.
But dinks on Slashdot know better. I bet Alex Jones has an entire rap he can rattle off about how uncreditble The Economist is.
Re: Hft is even more uselesd (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh for Fs sake don't make the tin foil fool +insightful. Just because people don't understand HFT doesn't mean it is useless or bad.
If the "big boys" had it their way they would go back to the good old days when your physical proximity to the trading floor determined the extra percentage you got on your trades. When a "chair" was mostly a high value ROI than a prestige. When people had to select which exchange they were going to trade in. Back when all the fat cats could cash out and be home counting thei
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You are wrong though. DivX the discs did not use DivX the pirate file format. DivX the pirate file format came significantly after DivX the discs.
There are no technical links between the two. DivX the pirate file format was named DivX to joke about DivX the discs. The only thing linking them is the name and the joke.
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