The economics of BitCoin

economic

I also don’t think people will buy crypto to hide away from government’s stealing /taxing their wealth until things get really desparate. The rise in crypto is all driven by speculation rather then for hiding money.

Since a futures market now trades, when will options in btc start trading? I imagine they would be very expensive options but a fun way to speculate on the price of btc.

SerialRenter

All this talk of anonymity is utter tosh.

If you want to buy or sell bitcoin with euro's or pounds, you're going to go through one of the exchanges based in Europe.
These exchanges are already covered by money laundering regulations, if you go and sign up, you will be asked to provide proof of ID.
They no doubt record all transactions associated with all bitcoin addresses/wallets ready to cooperate with European governments for taxation etc.
Seeming the blockchain is public, if you know who owns an address you can track the money, which doesn't make it great for illegal purposes if everyone has there name attached to the address.
This is all a positive things for bitcoin, as it encourages legitimate, legal uses.

Although i do agree the transaction fees are currently an issue, there are a few fixes in the works, such a segwig, lightning network and Schnorr signatures. I'm sure they will take quite a while to roll out though unfortunately, this is probably hold down the price for a while.

Whilst it remains a high risk investment, i can't see i crashing any time soon, a few people have said "people will sell once they see it has no use", i'm not quite sure what they're envisioning, the only scenario i could think of, is if perhaps numinous first world governments stamped down hard on crypto at the same time, but currently legislation seems to be working on embracing crypto.

I think 2018 is going to be very positive for bitcoin.

GreatApe

SerialRenter wrote: »

All this talk of anonymity is utter tosh.

If you want to buy or sell bitcoin with euro's or pounds, you're going to go through one of the exchanges based in Europe.
These exchanges are already covered by money laundering regulations, if you go and sign up, you will be asked to provide proof of ID.
They no doubt record all transactions associated with all bitcoin addresses/wallets ready to cooperate with European governments for taxation etc.
Seeming the blockchain is public, if you know who owns an address you can track the money, which doesn't make it great for illegal purposes if everyone has there name attached to the address.
This is all a positive things for bitcoin, as it encourages legitimate, legal uses.

Although i do agree the transaction fees are currently an issue, there are a few fixes in the works, such a segwig, lightning network and Schnorr signatures. I'm sure they will take quite a while to roll out though unfortunately, this is probably hold down the price for a while.

Whilst it remains a high risk investment, i can't see i crashing any time soon, a few people have said "people will sell once they see it has no use", i'm not quite sure what they're envisioning, the only scenario i could think of, is if perhaps numinous first world governments stamped down hard on crypto at the same time, but currently legislation seems to be working on embracing crypto.

I think 2018 is going to be very positive for bitcoin.

What if the government regulated the actual miners? So miners only process transfer on registered addressees? How hard would it be to regulate the miners? Or even for the governments to become the only doninant miner. If it can regulate the chip manufacturers to only manufactured ASIC for the government then it can control the whole space.

While it would be an end to the anonymity it could allow bitcoin to become the digital gold more easily if it was a government regulated 'digital asset'
Or maybe governments could use that power to kill off bitcoins and set up their own version

The talk about how secure bitcoins are is misguided.
Sure it would take a ridiculous amount of computer power to break the code
But it would only take a couple of laws to have the computer chip manufacturers only manufacture ASIC for the government and then the government would have control of the mining. It could even speed up the process by taking control of the existing centralised asic mining farms. Do you doubt China could do this?

If anything the future of bitcoin is central control.
If China doesn't take control of the asset one of the big foundries will.
Samsung Intel global foundries. Any of them can build a million ASIC over a few months and become the dominant miner. Probably only temporarily until a government orders the foundries to only produce ASIC for them.

Decentilised fixed quantity bitcoins become centralised coins whose supply and use is government controlled

economic

I wonder what the next asset class to go into a bubble is after cryptos. I would take a guess for that to be equities. No one is talking about stocks despite the bull market we are in. Growth has been picking up globally. I think we are now entering the optimistic stage and i think the mainstream press and the average person on the street over the course of the next 1 or 2 years will start to talk more and more about stocks. And less and less about cryptos.

Just a wild educated guess.

hildosaver

SerialRenter wrote: »

All this talk of anonymity is utter tosh.

If you want to buy or sell bitcoin with euro's or pounds, you're going to go through one of the exchanges based in Europe.
These exchanges are already covered by money laundering regulations, if you go and sign up, you will be asked to provide proof of ID.
They no doubt record all transactions associated with all bitcoin addresses/wallets ready to cooperate with European governments for taxation etc.
Seeming the blockchain is public, if you know who owns an address you can track the money, which doesn't make it great for illegal purposes if everyone has there name attached to the address.
This is all a positive things for bitcoin, as it encourages legitimate, legal uses.

Although i do agree the transaction fees are currently an issue, there are a few fixes in the works, such a segwig, lightning network and Schnorr signatures. I'm sure they will take quite a while to roll out though unfortunately, this is probably hold down the price for a while.

Whilst it remains a high risk investment, i can't see i crashing any time soon, a few people have said "people will sell once they see it has no use", i'm not quite sure what they're envisioning, the only scenario i could think of, is if perhaps numinous first world governments stamped down hard on crypto at the same time, but currently legislation seems to be working on embracing crypto.

I think 2018 is going to be very positive for bitcoin.

It really isn't though. All you gotta do is put your bitcoin (or anything else) through Monero and it's 100% untraceable. This is why Monero (and other coins like it) have their value. If you do not want anybody to know what you have it is totally do-able if you have the knowledge.

Rotor

Good article in the Guardian about Cryptos (or bad if you're a fan)
Interesting either way.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/15/should-i-invest-bitcoin-dont-mr-money-moustache

Arklight

Bitcoin's early success can be attributed to it's use in organised crime, weapons dealing, and illegal pornography. It will continue to be used for these things even if the sentiment falls out of Main Street.


Whether it's going to keep going upwards though is anyone's guess.

The-Joker

Why did all the cryptos just fall off a cliff ?

Good time to buy?

Herzlos

Depends how confident you are in it bouncing back.

The-Joker

Herzlos wrote: »

Depends how confident you are in it bouncing back.

I’m more confident in crypto than fiat