Bitcoin Forum

Even for a huge fan of bitcoin like me, sometimes bitcoin seems so disruptive that it scares the shit out of me.

This is going to bring tears and sorrow, as many people's job will suddenly become pointless.  A whole economic sector, mainly related to banking industry, is about to collapse.  Educated people are going to need to start again from scratch.  They will have learnt tons of stupid regulations and intellectual structures for nothing.  Pure freaking waste.  They will definitely not be happy about that.

It is certainly going to be painful for a lot of people, and many people will claim that bitcoin is a bad thing because it brings chaos.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction

Bitcoin brings chaos or the system was going to collapse anyway?

I don't think that the system was about to collapse anyway.  It would have survived, after a big devaluation, a world wide depression, possibly a few wars.  But in the end banks would still profit from it all.

Cryptocurrencies are necessary to destroy the banking system for good.

things will be fine. society is not fragile. there won't be massive upheaval.

The fiat currencies have caused huge environmental destruction, consolidation of power, and now this recession has made cash very difficult to work with. It's only natural for other systems for trade to emerge during the failure of the existing ones. Not that bitcoin would solve those problems, but more options for trade would help.

Banks won't go away.  Bankers will start using bitcoins...

People will finally stop using banks as soon as they stop using AOL as an ISP "to access their email."  :D

"If you cannot win them, join them" - this often was applied by many people to banksters. Now it seems banksters will have to apply this to bitcoin. Ohhh irony...

I don't think it's going to be any more dramatic than the financial crisis of 2008 in terms of sudden job losses. It's a gradual process that will take a decade or two. People are not going to give up on traditional banking overnight.  The banking industry will adapt and continue to provide jobs.  People are still going to need loans.  Bitcoins need to be secured just like fial money.

I would say that certain types of current banking and financial institutions will do very very well and certain kinds very very poorly under a bitcoin based business model.

How to differentiate?  The difference is between businesses that create or destroy wealth.

Bitcoin isn't the cause of the coming Schumpeterian crisis.  Something else is.  But it will be well-positioned to pick up the pieces.

H'ok

This is the shit coming down the hall:

1) climate change

2) mass-extinction / ecosystemic destabilisation

3) peak-oil


This stuff is definitely going to happen - in fact it's already happening now. We will be lucky to societally survive any of these - and they're all happening at the same time.

4) In addition to that, we also have encroaching fascism/freedomism world-wide, which is happening as the web threatens every hierarchy. This is no small thing. We've been through this before, and it was incredibly messy.

5) In addition to that, we have uber-weirdness in the shape of a gen-tech revolution, which is also going to happen at the same time. It's hard to understate the potential impact of this. It'll change what it means to be human.


The creeping fascism/corporatism we're seeing today is going to crash the global economy. It's already in the process of this... NO lessons were learned from the last crash. The banks are bigger and more conglomerated, still gambling, still with the same toxic debt on the books, and still addicted to the ferocious, blind short-termism driven by fucking astronomical bonuses... which have gone up.

...

Now into this is thrown bitcoins - and I'm guessing the main impact of bitcoins is that it teaches people that they CAN use alternative currencies... and the main purpose of alternative currencies is for people to do business when there isn't a viable alternative (see:  http://bit.ly/13dJy )


So my guess is that bitcoins will not bring a crisis - because the crisis that are already starting will totally eclipse them (in fact bitcoins is contained in 4). What bitcoins might do though is teach us how to temper some of these crisis.



 

If the oil runs out why do we need to worry about the climate changing?

Sure that's a fair point.  Also think about government employees, and companies with fat government contracts.  With good money, we'll see businesses become more lean and competitive, which is good.  I highly doubt this will happen overnight though; I anticipate it will take years.  I'm not too concerned. 

First, Bitcoin eliminates the need for banks to provide safekeeping of money or to act as a transaction clearinghouse, but it doesn't eliminate the need for loans. So banks will become less important but not completely irrelevant.

Second, when people switch out of unnecessary jobs, they are hopefully finding more useful jobs, which is in general a good thing for all of society.

I think you have a good point there, but personally I am not worried about educated and willing to learn - they will adapt. The people I am worried are the masses of unskilled workers who were bred by this system to keep the growth increasing.

It's going to be bloody

You don't need banks to borrow money.  Just search "auction bond" in the marketplace forum.


True.  But I suspect some people will have difficulties to understand that once they get sacked.

Banks aren't required to borrow with current money systems and they won't be required in a Bitcoin-dominated world. But they will exist because they will be useful for people who want to lend money at interest without having to be directly involved with:

a)deciding who is worthy of a loan
b)collecting on bad loans

A lot of people would rather pay someone else to handle these aspects of loan-making. And the banks perform that job for a fee.

I think this is a very plausible scenario indeed.  Gold has really always been at the foundation of the international banking system even though currencies were allowed to float against gold long ago.  It's not hard to imagine bitcoin taking at least part of that role in the future.

Banks will not be needed anymore.  They will disappear.   Everything will be software-oriented.

There is no alternative in a world where money is digital.

banksters are gonna have to learn C++ and scrape for a living like the rest of us ... well except the "early adopters"  :D

You people are fools if you think the banks and the power behind the money are just going to let something like that happen.   That of course meaning bitcoin making them obsolete.   You think they got where they are today because they are stupid?  You think the great crash and bailouts was an *accident?*

Describe their options.

How/why would banks go away?

Banks are simply too big to fail.  They own countries and unless world war breaks out ( not all that unlikely in these times ) they'll be fine.

I'm talking about the big banks of course.  They get such huge amounts of interest money that it's hard to imagine that they could go broke unless people stopped paying them.  I'm not going to go empty my bank account and buy bitcoins (not all of it! ) I have a mortgage and I'm pretty sure wells fargo doesn't take BTC

Wrong.  People still need a secure place to store their money.

80-year-old Aunt Tillie is probably not going to know how to properly use TrueCrypt, nor will she want to type in long passwords each time she spends her money.

Finally they can start doing something useful.

Hopefully satoshi will have more brilliant ideas and we won't need tax accountants any more. And less politicians. Some more mostly reactive jobs jump to my mind...

Arrgh, everybody will become a nerd. =)

Banks will not go away as an institution, they will simply change and adapt (though this change may be pretty extreme).

Let's remember that banking today uses digital money systems already. Physical cash deposits are a small minority of business. There will always be a need for warehousing of wealth in a protected "vault" type system. We store digital dollars in bank vaults today. We'll hopefully store digital BTC in bank vaults tomorrow. The bigger change will be on the government side, for the inability to print and manage the money supply will be the true disruption.

Banking and finance industries will adapt as all business must. Governments may be in serious trouble, however.

Bitcoin is nowhere big enough or tested enough for me to even begin to think about worrying about these kinds of consequences.

We are enthusiasts of Bitcoin. I'm involved in the Free/Open Source Movement, till 1998. Thirteen years later and still we are vey far from changing all the software to Free/Open Source. The changes need time to happen. The same I believe is bitcoin. It will take decades, to be of some real importance to bankers. Their only fear is,l that they will loose total control as it is today, and they don't want to accept 99% of control. It's not about getting out of business for them.

more like everyone will need a nerd.

people on this forum complain routinely that they can't read six-line paragraphs because they're 'walls of text'. you haven't learned to code since using bitcoin. as someone who enjoys reading both code and long paragraphs, i don't hold out much hope that bitcoin will yield much intellectual advancement in broader sections of humanity.

If you believe all that stuff I'd think you'd be against bitcoin.  Since bitcoin is a "freedomism" (libertarian) sort of thing.  Although I agree the current system will collapse, but only after the world population maxes out and the current growth rate becomes impossible.  Bitcoin could bring an end to the system sooner than that.

Pandora's box is now open.

Whether it's good or bad, cryptocurrency is an idea that cannot be killed. I, for one, have plenty of popcorn to see what happens.