Musings on bitcoin and other cryptos

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  • JohnRo
    JohnRo Posts: 2,887 Forumite
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    edited 30 November 2017 at 2:53PM
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    jimjames wrote: »
    Surely you are beholden to whoever holds your bitcoin or buys them for you and there is the same or more risk of fraud with an unregulated system.

    Absolutely right, there are all sorts of problems bitcoin has yet to overcome, that being one of them.

    What you can't do, though clearly it's an olympic sport to some, is claim that those problems have anything to do with the network itself or how it operates.

    ** You can quite easily hold your own bitcoins and interact with the crypto-network btw. there is no requirement for a third party or gatekeeper to allow access, regulated or otherwise.
    'We don't need to be smarter than the rest; we need to be more disciplined than the rest.' - WB
  • Malthusian
    Malthusian Posts: 10,941 Forumite
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    msallen wrote: »
    I agree with everything you say, but surely it would be a better investment than a Bitcoin because at least with a MLcoin there is an absolute floor below which its price shouldn't collapse (1/20,000,000th of the value of the ML).

    There is an absolute floor with Bitcoin as well - $0.

    Let's say the Mona Lisa can be sold on the art market for $500m so the "net asset value" of an MLCoin is $25. But MLCoins, to the same extent as BitCoins, are also bought in large numbers by speculators who think it will rise in value, and traded by criminals due to their untraceability, which means the price at which MLCoins are actually being traded is $10,025. How is that any safer than a BitCoin traded at $10,000?
    JohnRo wrote:
    In the same vein, do fiat tickets having anything backing them, other than the threat of government violence?

    Isn't Bitcoin backed by government violence as well? If fiat currency wasn't controlled by the J... umped-up bureaucrats in Washington, and we could be confident that we could hold fiat currency without the risk of sudden hyperinflation, then there would be no reason for anyone to buy Bitcoins.

    So the value of BitCoins relies on the continuance of the problem that it claims to solve.
  • JohnRo
    JohnRo Posts: 2,887 Forumite
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    Apparently there is a lucrative market in criminal theft of 'old masters' many of which disappear forever. They're a criminal currency, just like fiat is.

    As for government violence, that sounds like a crypto rage induced word salad to me.

    Bitcoin is controlled by the algorithm the network of users maintain.
    'We don't need to be smarter than the rest; we need to be more disciplined than the rest.' - WB
  • Cactus_Jack
    Cactus_Jack Posts: 592 Forumite
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    If someone could find a way to utilise mining power to research cancer cures, alien life, etc whilst obtaining coins with value from it, it'd change the world
  • Malthusian
    Malthusian Posts: 10,941 Forumite
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    Cactus_Jack wrote: »
    If someone could find a way to utilise mining power to research cancer cures, alien life, etc whilst obtaining coins with value from it, it'd change the world

    Like SETI@Home and Folding@home?

    I assume that they get enough processing power from volunteers or they would have found a way to pay them already. If they did want to pay people money for their spare processor cycles, it would be better to just pay them directly rather than get them working on a cryptocurrency algorithm, which would take up some of the processor cycles that the project wants to use to fold proteins / scan for alien life.

    If it would really change the world to get the Bitcoin mining rigs on these projects you would hope they would have already done it long ago. But there is a rapidly diminishing return on scanning the sky for extraterrestrial radio signals that don't exist. I have no idea how protein folding works but again, if it was profitable to put mining rigs to work on protein folding then surely Big Pharma would just buy some.
  • atilla
    atilla Posts: 862 Forumite
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    20% blip today. Oh dear.
  • markj113
    markj113 Posts: 256 Forumite
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    atilla wrote: »
    20% blip today. Oh dear.

    And back to nearly $10k already.

    Nov 2016 - $750
    Nov 2017 - $9883 right now
  • jimjames
    jimjames Posts: 17,619 Forumite
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    markj113 wrote: »
    And back to nearly $10k already.

    Nov 2016 - $750
    Nov 2017 - $9883 right now

    So absolutely useless as a currency then
    Remember the saying: if it looks too good to be true it almost certainly is.
  • markj113
    markj113 Posts: 256 Forumite
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    I view bitcoin as a commodity personally with the added benefit that it can be spent like a currency if you choose to do so.

    People love to point out the pull backs but the overall picture is onward and upwards.
  • Billco_2
    Billco_2 Posts: 61 Forumite
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    I am 100% sure conversations just like this took place some 8 years ago, when Bitcoin was what, .00001 USD or something?

    The people that threw 100 bucks at a throwaway gamble back then would be millionaires today.

    Personally with all the scandal of governments and politics and banking systems I quite like the idea of getting away from them so i've taken a gamble.

    Same way that (and shoot me if I open another can of worms here), but I voted to leave the EU. Yeah its a gamble. Yeah its probably gonna cost me in the short term. But I took the risk because I believe the ends justifies the means.
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