Bitcoin Forum

My last bitcoin finally sold! It's a relief. Bitcoin is doomed to fail. It has a price, but it has no value. It has made a few people rich, but most people shall loose. A currency? It is only speculation and nothing more. Bitcoin has not and will not become a real medium for exchange. What remains for bitcoin now is the large holders to sell out their coins, but in a tempo that does not crash the 'market'. It will be interesting to see how bitcoin's decline plays out. Good luck, either buying or selling, but if you do the former, you need it most.

I disagree.  Most people will tight. 

If it has no value, you sold it at 0, right?
Don't let the door hit ya!

Good bye to you, and good riddance.

+1, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out!

See ya, and thanks for the cheap coins.

yes bitcoin is doomed, Litecoin is comming! ....just kidding (i like both) ;-)



you are a free man, bye  ;)

Well, you could be right. Myself, I hold about 1% of my net worth in bitcoin. If I lose 100% of that value, it's not going to ruin my life. It bitcoin does actually take off and become widely useful, I'll be set for life by the rise in price.

So from my perspective, while bitcoin is extremely risky as a speculative vehicle, the potential upside in the case of bitcoin going beyond the ultra-niche currency it is today to something widely used is massive, and potentially a couple magnitudes larger than the loss I could incur.

Hope you made money when you sold!

Good luck and good bye!

It is doomed to fail? Then surely i will find tons of people willing to sell bitcoins for 1 cent each!

To get some more discussion into the thread:
Why did you have Bitcoins then? What changed your mind?

Personally I feel more like dollar and euro in their current form are doomed to fail.
Bitcoin is still very risky though, but I wouldn't sell all of them ^^

Maybe he expected a get rich quick scheme

i doubt he had any coins to begin with with that kind of attitutde

The best thing that happened here is that the OP is feeling better.  ;D

Neither the dollar nor the euro are going anywhere. They may/will fluctuate in value, but they're certainly not going anywhere. Notably unlike Bitcoin, they actually have something backing their value: Giant armies that will ensure that any land within their jurisdiction has its property taxes paid in fiat, and the ability to insist on paying all their government's expenses (which are huge, obviously) in fiat currency.

he did look at his other posts... (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=86118;sa=showPosts)

So were a lot of the older fiat currencies that were killed due to hyperinflation in the past.
Granted there will be something issued by the state to replace them then.

you obviously dont understand bitcoin. Bitcoin is not only a currency/commodity, but really a new technology.. look at all these different ideas springing up. Mastercoin is one..

We haven't even begun to see what bitcoin can or will do.. Bitcoin is a better place without people like you in it...adios..

Also, why would you sell every last one? If I was going to call bitcoin quits, I would probably hold on to a couple, just in case it skyrockets... I don't hold every extra dime that I have in bitcoin, that would be stupid, its called diversity, lol... Buy some gold with your coin, buy some stock, even a little fiat, but to get rid of every bitcent is a little extreme...

So, all these people putting heaps, time and money, into start-ups have no confidence in BTC?

Everyone has a right to their views. I wish you all the best.

Paintings have a value only because users want to own them, no other reason.

I personally feel  bitcoin will continue to grow and do well, especially with the current world financial issues ATM.

Thanks for nice replies! A few facts:
Good some of you're happy to have bought my coins cheap. They were cheaper when i got them :)
And yes, I did have a lot of coins. Not like Gavin or Satoshi - no no. But still.
And yes, I did make a profit, maybe some 20%. I certainly lost some money due to MtGox withdrawal fuzz and arbitrage.
I do feel happy.


Good question! My main issue with bitcoin is the immorality of it. Explained simply: When my government issues new money, those money are used to run schools, build roads, provide health care , etc. So fiat money has some moral basis. When you buy bitcoins, some people get rich from that, nothing else.

A lot of countries want to leave the Euro. So it is definitely going to fall. Even 49% of German want Germany to leave Euro.

Dollar, we know where that is heading. The currency is doom.

I do think Bitcoin is risky. But I enjoy taking part in Extreme Sports. So I love the risk about Bitcoin.  ;D

Hm, I don't see why you couldn't buy schools and so on with a currency like Bitcoins.
E.g. a state could decide to back up their money with Bitcoins.
It's just that Bitcoin is too small for things like that yet, unlike state currencies it wasn't born with millions of users.

sorry to hear that it did not work out for you. I just bought some coins; maybe yours? I expect to make thousands of dollars from each one. But there is no guarantee until you sell your coins, so you may have made a better decision. How much did you make per coin?

P.S. remember that if you are in the U.S. you will need to set aside 20% of your profits for tax time.

Important to note that 20% is only if it's long-term capital gains, and only if you're in the highest tax bracket for LTCG.

If you experienced long-term capital gains, you'd be taxed at either 0%, 15%, or 20% depending on your income (assuming the IRS would categorize bitcoin appreciation as capital gains once you cash out). If you had held for less than a year and a day, you'd be paying at whatever your normal income tax rate is (up to 39.6% plus if you earn enough, an extra 3.8% in unearned income Medicare contribution).

It's important to keep track of your cost basis in bitcoin as well as carefully tracking when you buy and sell bitcoin so you know which ones you owe long-term capital gains on and which ones you owe short-term on.

This is the stupidest argument ever against bitcoin!

Let it be known as Wingding's Moral Argument against Bitcoin.


Here: https://www.smore.com/feux-sean-s-outpost

Anyway, Internet protocols have nothing to do with morality...

Yes, most of the money is spent trying to help children, run schools and build roads.

http://walrusmagazine.com/images/2006.10/l/cambodia01.jpg
http://a.abcnews.go.com/images/International/ap_nick_ut_pulitzer_prize_image_1972_vietnam_thg_120606_wblog.jpg

The U.S. debt has ballooned from about 8 to over 16 trillion dollars (http://www.usdebtclock.org/) in only 6 years. You might want to view what just 1 trillion dollars looks like (http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html).

Giant armies are made up of ordinary people who may not always follow top down orders as we saw with Mubarak/Morsi in Egypt. If a giant army mandates Easter confetti have value will that confetti always have value? Also, there is no European army backing the euro, which instead is made up of several member states.

You remind me of someone...
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27348.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=27348.0)

Which would cause the US dollar to fluctuate in value, not disappear in my lifetime.



Yeah, you're right about the Euro. That actually may fall apart, but will make no difference in the fiat vs. crypto currency debate - it will simply be replaced by fiat national currencies if it fell apart.

Comparing the US to Egypt kind of misses the vast differences between the two. I spent some time in Cairo right before the revolution started. There's no comparison there, beyond the facile.

@OP

http://assets.diylol.com/hfs/085/cc0/af0/resized/fu-meme-generator-fuck-you-64d06c.jpg?1311826945.jpg

Armies? Sooo 1940's.

Bitcoin user not affected.

I didn't compare the US to Egypt. I compared armies which are made up of people.

Yes. this is a much better answer than mine.

Hey guys I just came up with this poem, and I think here is as good a place as any to post it.

First they troll you,
then they laugh at you,
then they send in the FEDs..
and then you go bankrupt.

have fun! ;D

I disagree, they are going down.

The dollar has lost a huge percentage of value over the last 42 years (let alone the last 100), and without better monetary policy that will continue for as long as the policies that cause it are in place.  Perhaps no sharp drop will occur, but both the dollar and euro will continue their slow erosion of value day-by-day, week-by-week, year-by-year.

When the government "issues new money" they are taking money from you and everyone else who has assets in that country (or worldwide depending on the currency).  Inflation is a stealth tax on everyone and it hits the most needy the most because they may not have the education or ability to protect themselves from it.

Charity by its nature is voluntary.  There is nothing moral about me holding a gun to your head and saying "go feed the homeless".  That is immoral and it doesn't matter if I vote for someone to hold a gun to your head telling you to "go feed the homeless" or to a Dr, "go treat the poor." 

What country is that?  Here in the US, the government does not issue money, the Federal Reserve does.  This money does not go to the government as spendable revenue, it goes to artificially prop up markets that can't stand on their own without subsidy.  This is done to ensure that the privatly held banks remain solvent in spite of their repeated bad bets.  Markets have become casinos and bankers have to do immoral things to keep up with everyone else.

I sure hope your country really is different, but maybe you can understand my doubt about your morality argument.

Oh that would be funny if it wasn't so naive.

Your govt doesn't issue money.  Your central bank does which is a private cartel of banks who has been given a monopoly on issuing currency.  When they issue currency they and only they benefit.  They benefit because more issuance means more inflation but inflation is a lagging effect and so the money they issue today won't have its purchasing power degraded until after they spend it.  You on the other hand well you get your money slowly after it has filtered through many layers from the banks on downward so the prices have already adjusted.  Ever notice that you get a 3% raise (not a promotion but an annual raise) but by the time you get the raise prices have already increase 3% (or more).   You never catch up.


Governments build schools and roads and healthcare (and bombs, and engage in terrorism, and build police states, and incarecerate people) using TAX REVENUE which has absolutely nothing to do with the issuance of currency.  There are many countries which don't issue their own currency.  Belize for example defacto uses the US dollar as their national currency.  How does belize build roads?  Simple people pay taxes (often in US dollars) and the government spends those to build roads.

Governments have no money.  Governments don't build roads.  Governments collect wealth (through the us of force) from citizens in the form of taxes and pay for goods and services just like you or I do ... by spending money.

Citizen (wealth) ----> Government ----->  Road Builder

The only difference between you hiring someone to pave your driveway and the government hiring someone to pave a highway is the first involves voluntary free exchange (you give some money and the paver gives you some driveway) and the later involves the use of force (monopoly on violence).


As for no longer owning Bitcoins, well it sounds like it is a source of stress for you and life is too short for all that.  You may have made the right decision for you.   However even if you never use anything other than "national" currency you might want to do some research on what money is and how it doesn't work they way you think it does.

I guess you mean chinese government? In US, all those money went into banks (They were not used, they were loaned out, notice the difference here). They were loaned out to run schools, build roads, provide health care, but government must payback much more than they borrowed until they hit the debt ceiling

And bitcoin could also be used to build shools, roads, and provide health care, if the construction company and hospital accept bitcoin payment and 1 bitcoin worth millions of dollars

All fiat monies eventually fail. All of them. It's human nature... eventually TPTB succumb to the temptation to endlessly produce more money, and that's a situation that is unsustainable in the long-term. Nations can force people to use their currency... they can't force people to actually value it. Now, whether they'll fail tomorrow, or fail in 100 years is another issue.

But just like gold, Bitcoin's backing is both its monetary usefulness and its inherent utility. It allows me to send the world's first ever decentralized, pseudonymous virtual asset to anyone, anywhere, in seconds; that alone has enough power to make national governments quake and (dumbly) attack it. Yet even if it's monetary usefulness somehow disappeared, the technology itself still has numerous other uses (demonstrated in part by the proposals based on it, including Namecoin, which actually exists and works.)

In the beginning, the US successfully resisted central banks, and even abolished some of the first attempts that were started.  Hopefully, we can once again rid ourselves of them and go back to a sound money standard.  However, the Federal Reserve system has stood for quite some time. Very few people alive were born before the FED, and most don't know it is a private bank.  The name was key in associating it with government.  Even fewer understand the axioms of sound money, and savings has been eroded by debt and inflation.

We can be thankful for inflation also helping those with debt repay it.... So long as wages rise with inflation and interest rates are manageable.  Wages hasn't been a pretty picture, and rates have been rising, even with $85 billion a month being created to prop up mortgage and bond markets.  Tapering needs to happen, but will they be able to let up on the gas pedal without rates rocketing?

If rates rise, the US government's budget problems get worse quickly as interest payments swollow more of the pie.  As taxes are levied, or federal spending cut, dollars will be less plentiful and the USD will gain in value.  If rates get too high and a serious deflationary wave occurs, cash will be king and defaults will be the order of the day as interest on public and private debt sucks up all the "excess liquidity" they have flooded into the system.

Of course, they could always push the pedal harder, and sentiment could be ripe for such a move.  Many are expecting tapering.  It would continue to keep rates low, but would keep the bad bets from being cleared from the system.

The drag of the debt is too much, and only defaulting or inflating away much of the debt can get the economy moving forward.  We'll likely cycle through both as the economy inhales and exhales.

As Trace Mayer once said in an interview:
"You don't have to adapt, you can always go extinct"

Buy buy wingding :)

Boy will you be kicking yourself if it goes up to thousands of dollars a coin in your lifetime.  You really should have kept at least one for the "just in case" factor.

I don't know where to start tearing that last bit apart.   Since both currencies have zero intrinsic value, your argument seems to base itself the way people use one currency as opposed to the other.  This is like saying a kitchen knife is more immoral than a sword because it is used in more stabbings. Your notions are obviously misdirected.  Bitcoins are a medium of exchange, and as a decentralized medium of exchange it provides a much more fair system than any system controlled by one particular entity.  Currencies controlled by any one entity are subject to corruption and regulations that may favor one group over the next.  It should be clear that a decentralized currency is intrinsically more "fair" than a centralized one.  It goes hand in hand that a system that is more fair would also be considered more moral.  On top of this, when you say "goverment issues new money" to pay for things...  I hope you understand this money comes from somewhere.  It is either created as debt (to be paid by the taxpayer) or it is simply printed in which case the relative value of all current money is slightly less and we all lose a small amount of purchasing power.  So is it your argument that forcefully taking money from one party and giving it to another is more moral than not doing so if it is for something like schools?  Why don't we just create a law mandating that 20% of all income should go to charity, that would be even more "moral" according to your argument.   I'd be happy to continue ripping this argument apart but I've already wasted enough time.

Good bye and don't come back crying when it hit $1000.

If governments did all those things only with tax revenue, they wouldn't have debts, would they?
When the government needs more money, it issues more bonds (debt). At the moment, there isn't a large enough existing open market to buy all the debt that needs to be issued, so it is sold directly to the central bank, which issues more currency to match the value of the bonds it has bought.
And my central bank, the Bank of England, is not a cartel of private banks.

All it takes is to stash away 1 bitcoin to be a millionaire just in case of the "btc becomes $1,000,000" scenario. Meanwhile you can keep the other 99% or whatever of your purchasing power. I really don't get why people have to "sell every coin".

i have few accounts that i don't look into and they all have around 0.5btc. too  low to bother now but it will be fun to see them in few years from now :)

Bye bye :D More bitcoins to the people that see the value :) We'll welcome you back in 5 years.

Well, there are two sides. People now bet on 17 October 2013 will be in another side. If dollars fails, then gold, silver, crude oil, bitcoin will raise real quick.

I have seen the raising. If fails on 17 October 2013, then more people may like to buy gold, crude oil to save themselves.

Additionally, bitcoin never be able for money laundering as it can be unveiled when there is something broken.

This is good old Darwinian evolution at work. Move along.

Every time someone makes a dramatic thread about this feeling the urge to make it public that bitcoin has no value and they're leaving the scene we get a nice rally. Gotta love bitcoin karma at work. :D

bye.
Your attitude is still better than the 10kBTC Pizza buyer.

Gee, all i can say is this:
 - Banks were created because we needed to trust somebody to manage our Value. Now, they're not necessary, about to be replaced with peer to peer money.

They - the banks - are going, like cassettes, books and copyright.

We will still have banks to lend us money and give us mortgages and credit, process payments, pay interest, but for sure, they won't get their snouts into our day to day funds like they do today.

nuh uh! another one bites the dust. Goodbye to the threadstarter.
Can you tell why exactly you are so frustrated?
I felt bad years ago when some traders scammed me because of irreversible transactions but since i just adjusted my behaviour to what happened to me I'm still fine with bitcoin. You can't spend bitcoins you don't have unless you borrow them which is imo one of its biggest features. have faith in mother coin its > fiat already now!

Say a loaf of bread cost $1 USD today (you might find it on sale); suppose further that you could find a baker or grocer willing to accept Bitcoin as payment for a loaf of bread and even agreed to an exchange rate of $100 USD/1 BTC; the loaf would cost 0.01 BTC (or 10 mBTC if you prefer).

*If* someday in the future, the USD/BTC exchange rate reaches $1,000,000/1 BTC then how much will a loaf of bread cost?

0.01 btc since you and the baker agreed on the 100$/btc exchange....

and you seriously believe the baker will not be forced to update the agreement all the way to 1 million? goods are priced in fiat, and always will.btc price will always be converted to the "official price".

Unless you think the governments will switch to bitcoin as the official currency, and then the exchange rate would be pointless.

What exchange rate is the baker likely to accept in the future?

Or rather, how much is the baker likely to charge for the loaf?

Nominally the exchange rate has gone up by a factor of 10,000.  So one way simplistic way to look at is the loaf will cost $10,000 USD at that time and if the agreeable exchange rate at that time between our buyer and our baker is indeed $1,000,000 USD/1 BTC then the loaf will still be 0.01 mBTC.

If one had put $1 USD away for a future loaf purchase then they wouldn't even be able to afford hardly a crumb let alone a single slice.  If one had instead put 0.01 BTC away then they would still be able to afford a whole loaf.

But, will the exchange rate and the price of a loaf scale together?  In a world of hyper-inflation of a fiat, are financial systems so disrupted that product pricing becomes unstable?

Buying a loaf of bread with gold is difficult; it's hard to measure such a small amount of gold.  I know, I know, it is trivial to divide Bitcoin into small portions.  But, will our baker be content to accept Bitcoin when his world is in turmoil?  Will his suppliers, the farmer, the miller, etc., be accepting Bitcoin?  If not then by the time our baker can exchange to fiat to purchase the next round of flour, eggs and milk, etc., he might not be able to afford them.

It is the rate of change that cripples us.  Relatively smooth and steady change over long enough periods of time are tolerable.

Everyone with Bitcoin boners watching hour-by-hour for an explosion to huge exchange rates; slow down, relax, enjoy the ride.  Divert a little of the energy/intensity into promoting instead.

What is it exactly that frustrate me? Well, I would more than most people like to see the appearance of a decentralized cryptocoin becoming a real competitor to fiat money. But bitcoins hyperdeflationary nature do not allow it to happen. The problem is that bitcoin has a centralized ownership. You can pick 10-20 persons out there that is holding abt 50% of all the bitcoins that exist. And even if you count the 1000 persons that holds 80%, the problem is the same. What if Satoshi had premined every 21 million coin, and asked people to buy the coins from him? On the economic scale, that would not have been very different, except the flaw would be more evident.
(and know that I do not hate speculators or lottery winners - I just believe a true cryptocoin must be founded in a different domain)


Distribution of bitcoins:
http://cdn.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/cookie-crumbs.jpg

This is very true, but its hard to say if this will be what ultimately causes bitcoin's demise.

I still think it has a good short and medium term future, but is doomed to fail at some point.

The system Satoshi came up with to distribute bitcoins is brilliant. It offers incentive for their creation, a way to equitably distribute them around the world, and a model that offers a  disincentive for anyone trying to buy up the market. If Satoshi had pre-mined the coins and was selling them, they would have no value at all.  
No one knows what is comming, but there is no reason to think that bitcoin can't be $10,000/BTC.

This is also not a very valid argument, as the situation is the same with USD. 1% of Americans hold 40% of the wealth.

http://www.upworthy.com/9-out-of-10-americans-are-completely-wrong-about-this-mind-blowing-fact-2?g=3

^While I don't necessarily sympathize with the message in the video, it does a good job presenting these facts.


It sounds to me like Bitcoin motivated you to learn more about bitcoin (which is good), but you should take the time to learn more about money in general. So far, all of your qualms apply equally to the money you exchanged your bitcoins for, if not more. The people giving you a hard time in this thread are trying to say that, but the words come out all funny when you're anonymous on the internet.

By what mechanism would failing to raise the debt ceiling cause the dollar to tank?  I could see a default being deflationary, but which orifice are you pulling your inflationary theory from?

Sound money always attracts wealth.

There is nothing wrong with other people being more rich than myself.

Most of the bitcoin rich are early adopters. Without them believing in bitcoin in the first place bitcoin would not have been born or would have ceased to exist shortly after birth. The beneficial potential of bitcoin for humanity as a whole far outweighs the abstract moral hazard of a few bitcoin superrich.


ya.ya.yo!

I too fail to understand this thought. If the US defaults, the whole world will go into turmoil and deflationary collapse as people SELL EVERYTHING.

Yeah, Ive seen that video earlier. I also seen Bill Stills video on the money masters and Money as Debt. I am not completly blank when it comes to monetary systems. However, itvseems to me that many people on this forum are, knowledge limited to belive that limited supply is thevsalvation. It is not. I am trying to explain people that it is bitcoins kill switch. Those who understand that is also the same people who have personal interest in extending bitcoins life, before its unavoidable demise.

Bronn, in Game of Thrones:

"Bronn: Aye, we talked about it. Have you ever been in a city under siege? Maybe this part's not in your books. See, it's not the fighting that kills most people; it's the starving. Food's worth more than gold. Noble ladies sell their diamonds for a sack of potatoes."

In apocalyptic scenarios, food and other basic necessities are far more valuable than anything else that you might consider as a currency.

I'm (hopefully quite clearly) a huge advocate of bitcoin, so keep that into account. I believe one is extremely foolish to have a zero balance in any currency which has the potential at being the most valuable one in existence. I personally, while most of my wealth in in BTC, try to deversify as much as it makes sense to (this is different for everyone) into other currencies, such as Swiss, Japanese, Canadian, Norwegian, and even the Euro (which like the dollar is "too big to fail").

You could be right, after all a year ago BTC were only worth $12, so you obviously are not selling out at the bottom.  However, I have to think that BTC might be a good store of value even if it fails as a medium of exchange, and lots of things, gold, diamonds, slabbed rare coins, are good stores of value even if they are rubbish as mediums of exchange.

Good Luck!

Thanks. Yes, I agree with everything you say. However, I would like to see a crypto challenging the fiats, but I doubt btc ever will.

Digital currency's will (do) challenge fiat but not bitcoin alone.

Its funny how people have this cathartic need to confess.  wingding do you know anything about perfect money and how bitcoin was engineered to be such or was it just like day trading ABC stock vs. CBA to you?

Bitcoin or a similar crypto-currency will become a de-facto international exchange currency in the next 5-10 years due to its low to no transaction fee, distance is irrelevant behavior.

China is coming... and when that happens it will drive another run of adoption in western countries with intl B2B trade.

how long did you even hold coins?
registered March 15 2013  ???...
you really need much more patience, buy some coins (only as much as you can afford to loose) , forget about your wallet and look at it again in a year.

rome wasn't build in a day!

This, except the time frame which might be longer.

A lot of people make the mistake of thinking an even distribution is a fair distribution. They often even use the terms as if they are synonyms.

who would sell their last bitcoin when there is the possability that a single bitcoin could be worth tens of thousands of dollars some day. you could atleast hold onto one on the off chance, just so you arnt kicking yourself in the ass someday.

But is it the job of currency to be pre-distributed unevenly? Should that not be the job of capitalism?

There are those that are good at generating wealth and those that only know how to accumulate debt. That will be the same regardless of the money that is used.

With fiat currency it is easy to control to the benefit of the elite at the top of the banking pyramid, which they do by issuing endless new debt under the guise of money. Sound money like gold, silver or bitcoins is not easy to control in those ways, and so is much more fair.

Have you considered that the vast majority of the world don't only any bitcoins at all. If you only have 1 bitcoin, you are also an early adopter and may also be considered bitcoin rich one day.

Are you sure about that? I've just been researching the banks own web site and the wikipedia page and found no mention at all of who own it? Who is the owner then?

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/about/Pages/default.aspx

Edit: The legislation nationalising the BoE is available here: http://legislation.data.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/9-10/27/enacted/data.htm?wrap=true

This makes no sense. This year the quantity of bitcoins will actually increase by > 10%. That is actually quite a high rate of inflation. In time the rate of inflation will reduce to something close to zero and it is true that as coins are lost, there will then be a very slow fall in the quantity of spendable bitcoins. But that is hardly "hyper" deflationary.  Presumably what you really mean is that the price of goods when measured in bitcoins is falling. But this has nothing to do with deflation (which is a reduction in the money supply). It is simply a reflection of a rapid growth in the demand for bitcoin as its revolutionary possibilities become apparent to more and more people. Eventually however that process will stop at which point the price of goods measured in bitcoins will level off.  

The job of capitalism (or at least the job of free markets - I don't like the word "capitalism") is to direct resources to where they can be most efficiently used to satisfy the needs of consumers (aka "people"). This works best with a fixed money supply. The distribution of that money supply is irrelevant.

These thread types always make me laugh when then OP gets proven wrong in a matter of days...not weeks.

 :D

Bitstamp @ $135.81

Nice!

OP dumped just in time for Baidu's announcement. Up 8%.

Talk to you in a year, sir. $1000/XBT

Just checked the chart, and Bitcoin is headed up again.  I'm not sure you had the best of timing.  Let's see where price goes now.

you are probably right it is doomed to fail but not for the reason you mentioned.

imho here is why

1. reliance on internet. if some global cataclysm happens it might dissolve. for example what if governments start to tax any traffic that goes across the border? or something similar happens.

2. no solution for growth. there is no even talk about getting rid of having to store all the transaction on each node's medium. how can it grow when there is no space to grow into?

3. big players will never adopt bitcoin because they will never rely on a handful of individuals who control the source code. even though adepts claim bitcoin to be decentralized, most (all?) crysises were solved by centralized authority that de-facto controls the source code emission.

Interesting, though:
1. If internet reliance fail, I think bitcoin would only be a footnote in the list of problems.
2. You do not need to store the blockchain locally. There already existvservices that stores blockchain that is accessed by locallystored wallets.
3. Who are the fewindividual that contol thevsource? Bitcoin foundation? Not sure I get what you mean.

1. Yep. If the internet goes, so does bitcoin. I don't see how a "border" tax could work however. Your google search for a local barber could cross into many countries.

2. There are many solutions to this "problem". Wallet software does not have to DL the entire blockchain. Mainstream wallets of the future may be cloud based or use pruned trees instead of the whole chain.

3. Huh? There is no center. Do you mean the qt wallet? You could write your own software and not answer to anyone. The protocol is open source and anyone can use it however they wish. Gavin and his team are looked to because they have been at it for years, but anyone can trump them if they have something better.

+1 to this, since OP ignored it.

The current block chain is about 12.5GB and it zips down to 8.74GB (a 30% savings).

There are 7B people (1-5 transactions/day buying cigarettes, dinner .. ) ... 1 transaction is about 0.5 kB ...
= looks like when bitcoin will worth $200k/BTC then we will need 20 TB/day

When/if that happens, 20TB will cost a few cents.

I'm quite certain a distributed blockchain network protocol will be built on top of Bitcoin some time in the next two years. Then no one will need to download the whole thing; they'll just share the parts of the blockchain that are needed a la Bittorrent.

Toddlers buy cigarettes with their dinner.  ::)

'We' will not all have the blockchain stored locally.

20TB hard drives will cost $199 in 5 years.

There is no reason we can't have secondary systems on top of bitcoin, kind of like credit cards. Doing away with 99% of those 7B transaction. It doesn't make any sense to buy cigarettes with bitcoins when we could have a bitcoin credit system process small transactions with little to no risk and much faster throughput.

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For good or for worse we are all invested in bitcoin.

Because we have taken the time to understand it, follow the news about it, post on these forums about it, be involved with it and for many people actually buy the coins.

Obviously nobody knows the future of bitcoin. The VC's say it's 80% likely to fail, I have no idea how they come up with 80% but I'll take their word for it mostly  - because probably they (with their large resources of time, money and research) know a lot more than me about it.

However for good or for worse there's no way I am going to sell my coins unless something cataclysmicly bad happens to bitcoin. At which point, it would probably be a terrible time to sell because nobody would be buying.

So I guess you could say that - for good or for bad - I'm in it for the long haul, and probably speaking for many others here too.

My 2¢!

(sorry this post is probably not good for the price)