Bitcoins

DiggerUK

'Shock horror, money is safer in banks.'

Seems your money is safer in a bank with FSCS protection and government bailouts.
..._

JohnRo

Yeah and your bitcoins are even safer in a properly secured personal wallet...

It's a MSM scare story, must be really p.issing the monopoly money barons off that bitcoin just won't go away.

sabretoothtigger

Bitcoin is a software program and gold is designed by god 0-1 However I think BTC is more about trading and transmission ease of exchange; only if you want to hide it I guess the 'virtual' wins there

Software is updated and bug fixed, they were always doing that. The main theme seems intact still which is remarkable, I expected it to destroy itself but its showing up how flawed many global transactions are so far, more evident in places like Argentina but soon I think it could be of use everywhere - still maturing

merlingrey wrote: »

indicating to me that with moores law and the compounding rate of people doing it it will hyper inflate.

In simple terms there will eventually be more people trying to "earn" bitcoins for free than the number of people willing to buy them.

That relates to mass production which is not a negative. What happens and is happening from what Ive seen is margins are reducing on this activity lending the advantage to larger more efficient operations rather then just anyone who stumbles across the idea .

The beneficiary as in life is the users of the production who generally receive a cheaper product

The negative could be OPEC type control or robber baron type practise where size is leveraged unfairly against a user. However that seems unlikely in this case because of so many alternate options

DiggerUK wrote: »

That is the fraud hiding in amongst the hysteria, it is not finite.

Crypto QE is what I call it. They can already go up to 8 decimal places, and by changing the computing protocols they can move the decimal point to 42 places if they want.
..._

We can bring back half penny pieces. I still have a few.
Apart from litle kids swallowing them I was always a fan of paying 17&1/2p for my Mars Bar and not a penny more

We can do that now and yet its not inflation, if anything it might promote accuracy which could be deflation slightly
Its not new money, its sharper pricing.

dryhat

DiggerUK wrote: »

'Shock horror, money is safer in banks.'

Seems your money is safer in a bank with FSCS protection and government bailouts.
..._

The way the Bitcoin community highlighted this and rallied around to fix it in a matter of days was incredible.

Compare that to breaches in bank security, where the bank just brushes it under the carpet and denies any problems for fear of losing face.

Another plus point for Bitcoin.

sabretoothtigger

Just found an account that pays me 8% interest on the balance in BTC. I like the idea it would both gain value and earn interest but we'll have to see as there is already world currency which has 8% interest but unfortunately similar inflation. Allegedly BTC is not inflationary but who knows

JohnRo

The rate at which the bitcoin monetary base is being inflated is a known quantity and the eventual amount finite, the test is always going to be whether and how long it takes to gain widespread acceptance in the mainstream. In some countries it's getting there much faster than others. The problem is people pricing btc in fiat when it's real value lies in itself and the way it can be used and that's still very much developing. Treating it like a commodity rather than a currency.

Once it gets to the point where people don't want paying in increasingly worthless fiat and would rather have an incorruptible electronic credit then the battle is all but won. Can't see the money barons rolling over without a fight though.

It's still a huge gamble whether it'll ever get really mainstream and whether the money powers will move to try and snuff it out but it is starting to look more appealing to more and more companies as it continues to gain traction.

Germany just declared it private money, they can see it's not going away and are making moves to ensure they can put the rules in place early that allow them to snaffle their cut as governments do.

It'll be interesting to see where it all goes over the next few years

DiggerUK

JohnRo wrote: »

The rate at which the bitcoin monetary base is being inflated is a known quantity and the eventual amount finite, .......

..........

DiggerUK wrote: »

.....They may only issue 21 million bitcons, but due to them being able to deal in them by moving the decimal point, then they can increase the number of available coins. Just because they are called fractions of a whole bitcon is nothing more than a play on words.
Crypto QE is what I call it. They can already go up to 8 decimal places, and by changing the computing protocols they can move the decimal point to 42 places if they want.
..._

JohnRo

does not compute, any more than saying denominations of one - anything - is a play on words because it can be cut into smaller pieces.

Bitcoin needs to find it's market value and once that's reasonably established, which it clearly isn't at present, the divisions and multiples, in themselves, are an irrelevance.

grey_gym_sock

it bears no resemblance at all to QE, or to inflation in fiat currencies. (presumably the theory is that QE causes inflation, which is possible.)

if you hold £10, and there's inflation, you still have £10, but you can buy less stuff with it, because there are more £ in circulation, so you hold a smaller proportion of them.

if you hold 10 bitcoins, and we've reached the point where no new bitcoins are created, but they subdivide them into smaller fractions, then you not only still have 10 bitcoins, you also still hold the same proportion of the total bitcoins in circulation as before. other things, being equal, they'd buy as much stuff as before.

however, very likely, the reason for dividing bitcoins further would be that they were being used for more things, so using smaller amounts for each transaction would make sense. which would tend to imply deflation in bitcoins, i.e. bitcoins becoming more valuable. this might be an undesirable property of bitcoins, for the same reasons that deflation is usually undesirable.

sabretoothtigger

Digger that isnt a valid point, they can bring back half pennys to sterling but it wont make us any poorer. Its just another way of counting, as it is we can already deal fractions of a penny if we want and if you deal shares on the markets you will find this already happens.
Its not altering the total worth.

I get what you mean roughly but thats not going to be its failure.

the theory is that QE causes inflation

If theres more money after QE then before hopefully we dont have to argue the fine print.
The main thing is money supply reduced so apparently inflation is not a problem but not all that is true is apparent immediately.
So we shall see if QE can correlate to Sterling GDP or whatever determines its worth

for the same reasons that deflation is usually undesirable.

deflation and depression is mixed about like debt and deficit I think. Steady deflation is no worse then steady inflation, extreme bouts of either mean instability and price volatility.
Growth + deflation is totally possible and normal for hundreds of years history shows, sounds an oxymoron