Bitcoin Forum

Every single chinese speculator who bought bitcoins at any price is sitting on profits, some of them massive profits.

100% of them!!!

literally every single one, and not a single one can be short, or hedged, or on the wrong side of options, so 100% of them are sitting on big to massive profits!!! all in less than 30 days.... the kind of returns you lucky to get in the stock market in 5 to 10 years.

In all my years I have never ever ever seen anything like this, such a one sided state of affairs, it's blowing my mind.

It's all a happy story until it crashes and people go kill themselves over it :(

AAAND THE CRASH WILL BE HARD!

nah I would say if you are a good trader, investor you could double your equity in 3 years ;) in stock markets
In forex it takes 1 year, if you are really good trader, mentally and intelligent.

I really can't even comprehend how fast things have gone up!

yeah i don't know what happens next but just seeing what I am seeing is nothing other than amazing. I am telling you my brain is totally amazed.
I have no clue what happens next because I have never seen this before.

and this is now with real money, not that BS april thing that happened before, I can see orders of $100 000s flowing through in single buys and sells.

no offence to any of you still long, but just so I can witness something equally as amazing, I would like to see a crash of the same magnitude, because I will never forget this run up, ever, so a crash to match would complete the amazement x 2. But I am hoping it runs higher first, stretch the elastic band to the moon ...... and back lol

Whereas in crypto you can make 10 times your investment in a year if you just buy and then do nothing. Seems that people have trouble with the doing nothing part though, a lot of them end up selling at a loss instead...

90% of Forex traders lose.

i an seeing orders on gox go through for 200+ coins...... buys

who in their wacky mind keeps close to $200 000 USD on gox?

that also blows my mind, you cannot withdraw anything but leave $200 000 usd on gox?

I think BTC people have cahones the size of watermelons

Wow, Jasonjm.  What a change of tone from 2 days ago.  

Bitcoin is here to stay. We were announced to the world in front of congress today. #1 trending topic in Google. Chinese government promoting it on national tv.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Prepare to be amazed. :)

i am seeing orders on gox go through for 200+ coins...... buys

who in their wacky mind keeps close to $200 000 USD on gox?

that also blows my mind, you cannot withdraw anything but leave $200 000 usd on gox?

I think BTC people have cahones the size of watermelons

It will crash eventually like it did in April, but probably not as hard - maybe it will drop to 1/3 of the peak before it gets bought back up. And there will be endless threads of, 'I told you it was a bubble' with the replies of, 'whatever, just hold and wait for it to recover and go even higher'

only ignorant people can't change their minds by the way (and admit they are wrong).

however I still am not saying I am wrong, that will come much later if I am wrong.

but right now I am amazed (not wrong or right)


LOL gox selling off but BTC-china is like - what? chickens........ lol

the thing is bitcoin doesn't have a lot of liquidity.  And as seen during other bubbles not everyone can sell at the top.  And it just matters how far the price slides.

Bitcoin is not like a fiat stock but its like when the stock market crashes.  Everyones like woah, all this wealth just got destroyed overnight but maybe it just wasn't ever there.

the wealth isn't there that is what I have been saying all along

A seller that sells and has no intention of buying back (such as myself) removes that money from the system and it is gone.... for good.

the only thing holding the value are the parked buy orders of new incoming money.....  now if people were using their coins like crazy to buy stuff and millions were travelling in circles every day, that would work. But that is not what is happening, there is masses of hoarding and speculation, I would wager 99% of coins are in this hoard and speculate camp.

There are a total of less 200 000 bids across all exchanges down to $100, and 12 million coins floating around - that is what made me very very nervous. What if 5% of people decide to hell with this, it's christmas and I am cashing in! who buys those 600 000 coins? yeah they will be bought..... but where? at $50? at $20?


same thing on way up - there were total of 10 000 coins across all exchanges for sale from $500 to $1000. Thats about $12 million. So one big buy of $12 million puts btc at $1000 - on all exchanges. However that increases market cap of BTC by $6 000 000 000  ......   500 to 1 leverage ratio on the way up. So now you have somehow created $6 billion of wealth with $12 million? Bernanke would be proud.

and that is why I am out.

Best quote of the week! :)

I just sold 1btc for £500! Madness!

lol so tell me I am not crazy - because you also see this? right?

btc china new high coming, a 50% drop in a few minutes wasn't scary enough for them, good buying opportunity!

I agree. Selling is madness.

 ;D

Yup! It is!  :D  ;D

... and then it's hilarious!

Natural selection at its best.

And the bulls are spending BTC to buy bear rugs!

The masses go wild in spades and only come to their senses again one by one.

In this case the crash already happened: 900 to 600.

I'm seeing this as the new minimal value. $600.

It's crazy. I sold 1btc last night for £400... When I woke up (7 hours later) I sold another for £500!!

Earned £100 for that sleep ;)

Jason, accept the reality, you are struggling now, I understand. There are investors - long term ones - not speculators like yourself - who transfer millions to exchanges and get BTC back in 10 minutes to be stored for years. This is what happens.

actually i disagree with the analysis that 100% of all investors made money in the past 30 days, like in all financial markets you'd be surprised how many weak hands panic sell (buy high sell low) and how many day traders lose most of their holdings (statistically most day traders fail). There are always winners and losers, usually more losers than winners.

Yeah, I mean, who is selling to all those Chinese investors?  Other Chinese investors.  So they are not all holding.  Statistically, half must be selling and half buying.

But if you understand how much money the Chinese middle and upper classes have and how few investment opportunities (even building whole cities full of empty investment buildings), then you will understand why the Chinese are very likely to buy and hold.  Because they have nowhere else to park their money anyway.

Except the trading noooooooob on GoXBTC who paid 22,213 yuan per BTC or $3,600!  

https://www.goxbtc.com/

+1

The volume is testament to that. If the initial statement were true, there would need to be a lot more BTC available.

 :o
This must hurt. Not enought coins at exchanges, we need more bear talk I guess

I would call it a big correction, not a crash.

Yup, you got the point.

So the Chinese are speculators now? I thought they were collectors  :P :P :P

Yeah, like from 400 000$ / BTC to 40 000$ / BTC. That's a really hard crash.

I estimate the value of a bitcoin at minimum $15 000. This  takes into account risk of failure of the technology and potential future value.  


They will continue to raise quickly because they are so undervalued. Definitely not a bubble. Something increasing != bubble.


I believe the market will raise to around $8k next year (edit: 3rd or 4th quarter next year).

3 million USD per day to keep this system up

woohoooooo is paying????

I bet you have put a lot of thought in this. Care to show us the maths behind it?

not quite right

at $1000 per bitcoin

miners will all be selling every coin mined to cover outrageous mining costs

that is $2.5 million a day. every day. including weekends.

plus people who want to cash out. assume 1% of people a month need their money or want some money (low in my opinion noways 12% turnover per annum), thats 120 000 coins. That is good for $4 mil per day.

so approx $7 million per day to stay at $1000 per bitcoin  - best case.

yay!

BTC-E from $823 to $375 in a few hours! lost over half its value in hours.

bitcoin will end up under $10, not $15 000.

Bitcoin: the billion dollar penny stock   TM

Congrats for being an idiot! The deeper the correction the more moronic the posters around here.  ::)

What the actual fuck.

http://i.imgflip.com/4w35n.jpg

about these corrections, all they do is sucker in more buyers thinking bitcoin can never really go down, based on past behavior (buy the dip!)

so everyone in bitcoinland extrapolates the past into the future - buy any crash because its a good buying opportunity. Bitcoin is different blah blah blah

until one day it isn't.... and the crash is the real thing.

Under $10 one day watch, I will break out this post.

In this run-up I saw the tape, I saw the market depth, I saw the greed, I saw the truth. Bitcoin is a stroke of genius for the creator and the early adopters. It's a monster for everyone else.

been a great learning opportunity trading something different such as bitcoin, there will be other bitcoin like markets in the future, soaking it all up.

Have you understood his posting?
Bitcoin is a dead end.

->  Massive Power consumption -> massive costs in $/Euro/GBP/...
->  New Money needed to cover these costs

It's a pyramide scheme, but a very clever one.

And you can still make a lot of profit in the next few years. But beware if you play the "forever" hold strategie.
Better cash out 2-3 times your initial investment and "play" with the rest.


There will be other cryptocurrency, with less power consumption and better distribution.

And another idiot enters the fray. Congrats to you as well! :D

Hey. No offense taken.
I'm not a 12 year old boy, that means I'm probably older then 50% of this forum.

You probably need to learn it the hard way. Bitcoin has no long time future. It will has it's uses a few years, but not much longer.

I'll buy and sell as long as I can make good profit. There are millions of pigs waiting to get slaughtered and I'll be there  ;D


PS:
You bought high in the april bubble and sold low?  ;D
Emotional traders are the best. Allways funny to see.

Have fun out in the cold!  ;)

Wise words spoken from a learned investor. It:s fun to hear speculation from the Winklevii and online contributors about a future with 100k bitcoins, but the above scenario sounds much more likely. I just wonder, once coins reach <$10, will the whole process repeat itself? Maybe with an alternate cryptocurrency?

I can see it now, "Guys, this time it's different! Bitcoin failed because it was the first attempt at a legitimate P2P currency protocol, but <insert name> coin is sure to make us all rich because it uses SHA 512 encryption!"  8)

you guys are so blind it's amuzing :) you are literally standing in front of the mountain made of gold, touching it, and saying "well it sure feels like some pile of rock" :) good thing I have exactly zero need to persuade you - you will understand for yourself, in a couple of years. or not, who the heck cares, everyone can't be on the future train, larger part of the population has to stay behind. natural selection.

please up this thread when we reach $10 per coin. or I'll up it when we reach 10k per coin. whichever happens first, wins, right? :) or you'll come up with some other stupid explanations why this will not work out and we all going to die in poverty? :)

This is exactly the kind of fascistoid anti-egalitarian discourse (usually spewed out by capitalist thieves who like to get rich without producing anything valuable) that the world is getting increasingly sick and tired of. You must be high on crack if you really think such a toxic system with a minority of winners and a majority of losers can go on indefinitely.

But by all means keep talking and behaving like this - if your right-wing extremism helps some sort of Neo-Communism come to power in the world as a reaction I'll be a happy guy.

Unless centralized, there will be not better cryptocurrency with less power consumption. Proof of work is safest.

Better distribution - like everyone gets one coin when it starts ??? Maybe possible for centralized cryptocurrency

All the history of mankind shows that it's the only system that ever worked. No matter which underlying economic model you establish, it very quickly filters out to the majority of losers, it's human nature. A tale from the past - some nordic people, eskimo or aleuts, believed that when gods made people, they used different bulding materials. 5% of people were made from stone, and they became the workers / hunters. 5% were made from grass, and they became healers / shamans. The other 90%? They were made from dog crap. It's kinda rude, but it's the truth my friend.

Only 10% of the eskimos got all the eskimo money? That sucks. But still, being made of stone or grass doesn:t sound too much better than dog crap. I mean, it:s a step up, but leaves a lot to aspire for.  :)

You should be so lucky. A large percentage of the human race lives in abject poverty, and is born to simply die again without modern food or medicine. A utopia is impossible without an incorruptible centralized control, so until that happens (if it happens) there's gonna be winners and losers.

No you are the short sighted moron.

You only see Bitcoin as a TRADE. Thus, to you, it appears like a pump and dump scam.  You are unable to see the utility of bitcoin.

You haven't REALLY researched it uses. You haven't REALLY learned about the eco-system developing around it. All YOU see is a $$$ attached and think that sentiment towards Bitcoin has something to do with the current price tag. Guess what?

It doesn't.

Bitcoin could go to $10 today and stay there 6 months and it would still become a disruptive technology in the world of finance. Crytocurrencies are going no where.

Now, how much is a bitcoin worth today? What the hell anyone will pay for one, that's what. But its going to take 5-10 years to know what the true value is.

By then you will have either changed your tune or come up with some justification as to why you didn't get involved.

And your going to look even more stupid then than you do now.

There's no such thing.

Yep, that's it, keep going with the arrogant and deluded justifications for your feelings of entitlement. Make them sound like "cold hard facts" and "rational explanations" if that's what it takes to convince yourself. You still have some time to bask in your delusion until your social debts come due.

I know I'll be revisiting this thread.  As fun as it is to laugh in the faces of the morons calling for the end when it crashed after $266...this is going to be even more fun because the stakes are so much higher!

Ok but please, even if you can't understand it now, just remember the smart guy from bitcointalk once your revolution comes through and you see 10% reaping all the profits at the expense of the other 90%. All you can do is change who's on top, and even then, not completely. Like it or hate it, does not matter.

Lol, sell and run away mate, this is obviously not a game for you.

What:s with all the name calling by the bitcoin true believers around here? Comments like these persuade me even further that the foundation of the bitcoin network is comprised of 12-year-old Internet trolls and guys like this whose belief in bitcoin is at a level comparable with religious fervor. It:s fine that your faith in bitcoin is unshakable, but how do you expect to rally other people to the bitcoin cause if you can:t even engage in a civil discussion without calling people stupid?


What utility? $700 for one coin (not including conversion fees) so people can go to Subway and buy a sandwich? I:ll stick with my credit card, which has far greater utility. If someone can create a "killer app" for bitcoin, it could be a different story, but that:s still a big *IF* and I don:t put my faith behind any new technology based only on the sunshine and happy thoughts of its supporters, most of whom have a financial/emotion stake in the asset.


I:ve been around this forum for awhile and I:ve never heard one convincing reason for why people would want to convert their money to bitcoin. Aside from buying drugs online and engaging in crimes against children.


You could be right about that. In my opinion, they:ll fill a niche market, but never compete on the same level with our current monetary system. Hence why I view them as very overpriced at the moment.

Crack is bad... mmmmkay?  ;D

You're not thinking big enough.

I'm actually 40, own several successful businesses and spent months researching bitcoin before investing a dollar in it.

Sorry for the use of the word "moron" but it is my opinion that you are being one right now.

Your comments about bitcoin are just the same ol rehashed statements that people have been saying since day 1.

That's ok. Keep using your credit card. Don't go research the developing eco-system and who is involved in developing those "killer apps". Nothing to see there but "sunshine pumping."

Give me someone who has spent months researching bitcoin, how it works, how it has evolved, all the players behind the scenes, where the VC money is coming from, how governments are actually reacting, etc.  Then let that person tell me why bitcoin won't succeed.

But you? You are bringing weak sauce to the table my friend. And you stand to be on the wrong side of history because of it.

He already did at about $400, and presumably moved cash into gold; I actually have no idea what he does here anymore :)

Even the co-founder of Bitpay gives BTC an 80% chance of failing and returning to near zero in the next few years. Until then, you might be able to make a nice return engaging in speculation, but I:m still waiting for that killer app that:s going to convince everyone to cut up their credit cards and jump onboard the train.

*chrip* *chirp*

The train is slowly leaving the station, and you're standing on the platform. By the time your killer app is developed it'll be 2000 miles away.

really?

anyone who knows why we buy bitcoins can see that is a 10k to 1m/btc idea with a good possibility it could be worth 0
that is why you invest as much as you can lose, because on the upside it is a 10X-1000X investment, and on the downside it is a smoking habit

step one
becomes an accepted speculation investment amongst average investers $500-5k/btc
step two
becomes an easy way to transfer money and buy assets around the world..  10k-50k/btc
step 3
becomes the collateral by which large import export is done around the world ie, a storage of wealth 100k-300k/btc
step 4
becomes the financial collateral by which large countries can repay deficit in trade 1m-10m/btc  

gamble and hope
invest and profit
speculate, and lose sleep

this is Bitcoin

People who register during rallies should not be allowed to post to speculation subforums. The moronic newbie posts are getting annoying.

link?

This is a nice chicken and the egg problem.  You aren't convinced about Bitcoin's chances for success because you don't see a perfect implementation of the technology yet.  But, on the other hand, I'm sure you're smart enough to know that initial implementations aren't going to be perfect (this is why 747s weren't invented by the Wright brothers and why Facebook and Google weren't among the first websites).  Now, I'm sure you recognize that airplanes and the Internet are essential to our modern way of life.  While I think it's fair to assume that Bitcoin may be inferior to its future (or even current) siblings, do you think it's fair to write off cryptocurrencies as a whole?

Reuters article from last month:
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/10/01/markets-forex-bitcoin-idUKL2N0HK1NS20131001

There we go again with "moron".. sigh. And if you:re referring to me, I have been around this forum since last spring. I really weep for any of you guys who are becoming so deluded that you absolutely refuse to hear any opinion that conflicts with your bullish optimism.

Your point is taken; and I certainly don:t dismiss cryptocurrency as a whole. I see it as unlikely that bitcoin itself will become a widely adopted currency, but that:s not to say there won:t be another form of cryptocurrency in the future that makes a big impact. And if that does happen, it will likely be developed by a big player, such as an Internet giant or by the existing banking system, with little chance of financial windfalls for earlier adopters.

there are several killer apps that bitcoin is:
- asset preservation and protection from confiscation and inflation
- private property
- freedom
does your slave card come with any of those?

Don't worry, bro, I didn't refer to you nor anyone specific personally. It's just that I see dumb posts by people in newbie status a lot these days so there has to be a correlation between that phenomenon and the price rally.

Okay, I:ll give you the point about confiscation, which was a reason cited behind the April rally. There is some validity to that argument, but as an American, I:m not concerned about having my assets seized. I:m not saying that it couldn:t come to that eventually, but it:s not something that I or your average citizen is concerned about in the slightest right now. If you live in Greece, this could be a valid issue though.

But before people begin using bitcoin as a store of value, it needs to become much more stable. Given the round of rampant speculation over the past two years, it seems that it would be a long time before we can actually settle into a price range. For the forseeable future, people will fall back on alternatives such as precious metals.

There is no quote in that article. Tiny built a company around Bitcoin. Do you actually believe he said that? Ok. Guess you do.

Yep just like MPAA developed bittorrent and postal service created internet. And everybody would just start using the centrally issued coin just because it's infinitely worse and has a fixed issue and exchange rate. You really don't understand anything about bitcoin yet, do you.

From the article:

Even some active players do not give high odds to that: BitPay Co-founder and CEO Anthony Gallippi estimates an 80 percent chance the value of bitcoin could go to zero.

Seems pretty clear to me how he feels.

from this thread: No he didn't

bitcoin is best used as part of your portfolio. i dislike having lots of cash. it is constantly losing its value as it is being printed like crazy every day. 10% cash, 15% gold, 20% silver, 20% bitcoin, 35% oil/land.

that is exactly what this is - a game.

Closest thing I can describe it to is a modified game of chicken.

but people with no fear will get killed as they will hold until the final crash.

so you have to be the bravest chicken that sells right as the final wave of "investors" buys in whenever that might be, before the ultimate collapse.

Yeah, I hear what you:re saying but it all circles back to the point of, what good reason do people have to convert their fiat to bitcoin? The benefits of the e-mail protocol and P2P file sharing were immediately recognized, and adoption was easy: just install the software and get going. I realize e-mail existed before the personal computer became ubiquitous, but anyone who saw it immediately could see the potential for sending a message in seconds rather than days.  

It took very little resistance to start using e-mail. You could get free accounts and send messages across the world instantly. With bitcoin... you need to convert your money, set up a wallet, protect the wallet, and all for what? Again, there:s no good reason that people would go through this trouble for their everyday transactions, pending some kind of revolutionary killer app... or killer utility... whatever you want to call it, that does not exist.

@jasonjm

You have said that you have a fair amount of trading experience, and I assume you've researched Bitcoin extensively before getting involved.

What is your reasoning when you assert that Bitcoin will ultimately collapse?

Have you given any consideration to the fact that it may actually grow to a much larger size and then last for some time as a viable means of exchange?

Sir, I am glad you're here, for if the final bear turns bull, it's time to run like a scared weasel.

You are a beacon of hope!

i can smell a crash, and im gonna buy buy buy!!! :P

Point well taken. Reason I am here : Trying to understand the psychology of bitcoin more clearly, so I can identify similar markets in future to trade (long or short, long if its early days, short if its mania days. If bitcoin was a truly liquid market with regulated financial instruments, I would be buying long term puts here).

I actually had a great trade on Tesla over the last few weeks (short), and I have to tell you, the responses to questions from bitcoin and tesla proponents have a lot of similarities, obviously different products though. When I see the words "game changer" or "disruptive technology" pop up, so do my interest levels.



Not saying a crypto currency could never work - I just do not believe its bitcoin.

I agree, just courious about the oil. Where you store the oil ?  :P

I'm bearish on oil. This shit has to end. We don't actually need oil for anything. These monopolistic fuckers just suppressed Nikolai Tesla's greatest inventions and are now trying to get the most out of it until they can.

it will ultimately collapse in my opinion for 6 reasons

1) there are too many fees relating to actually using bitcoin vs your credit card, there are fees all over the place on using bitcoin whether its losing 1%+ on the buysell conversion rate, or whether its every place you pass through taking their 1% commission. It is slower, you get no benefit, the merchant gets all the benefit - you get no dispute of charges, no points rewards. So literally no incentive to use bitcoins for legal purchases.
2) money going into bitcoin drives the price up, but adds no equity to the system, it leaves with the seller. So the only thing holding bitcoin up is the bids on the exchanges, which are dodgy to start off with. Bitcoin literally has no value outside of what the exchange bid price is. Even gold (which is bitcoin like in ways) can be used as jewelry or at much lower prices would have a lot of industrial uses. Most importantly a lot of central banks, therefore their governments, indirectly back gold. Go read an interview recently with a fed chairman where he was asked point blank if they would sell their gold to cover deficits and the answer was a simple no. Bitcoin does not have this level of support - not that I am promoting gold - i am not a goldbug.
3) the coins were distributed in an unfair and to be quite honest evil way. Whoever Satoshi is, he was a genius. This could have been quite easily solved by making the bitcoin algorithm reward miners with a certain number of coins per day based on something else - say based on the the total transaction volume of bitcoins in a day multiplied by the number of unique wallet addresses used. that way more coins come online as more people use it. So it DOESNT act like a pyramid, where all the early adopters have all the coins, and all the others are chasing fewer and fewer coins. Make it expand the coin supply at an acceptable rate - yet still make them more rare all the time so it doesnt inflate away. By bringing new supply on - based on more activity you keep prices way way more stable. If there is no increase in activity, then there will be no new coins mined that day. But noooooooo, Satoshi went the exact opposite route. More coins with nothing going on, and then less and less coins with more going on. Good for Satoshi, bad for us.
4) the exchanges are way too thin - no liquidity because of reason 3. Everyone is hoarding, not spending. Why spend bitcoins when they will be worth more because there are none to go around to match the massive interest in them? so then people argue you can STILL buy satoshis! - well do you really want to buy into a system where someone like the winklevoss hold so many coins, that in one day they can crash every western exchange at will. So what happens is you have these cycles of spikes and crashes. But what will eventually happens is the value of the coin becomes based on so few coins that when it comes time to sell, there will not nearly be enough to bids to hold it up, because the system will be so concentrated in the hands of so few.
5) massive waste of energy and resources used on mining wars. The higher the price goes the more miners invest. This becomes a direct drain on bitcoin, as the miners have to sell every day to support their infrastructure costs. This is like a vacuum sucking money out of bitcoin. If bitcoin were $10 000 right now, it would literally suck $25 000 000 dollars per day right out of bitcoin - and for what? it could perhaps have rather have been based on something logical like : 1 mining node per internet subnet /24 - if someone else on your subnet is trying to mine, sorry your software will keep trying have to wait for them to quit or put 24 hour max mining times. Mining equipment could be a regular computer CPU even an old one. So the network would be distributed way more evenly than currently it currently is - as its extremely difficult to get lots of /24 networks , hell it requires a whole lot of paperwork and justification nowdays, just for one /24- and with no waste on mining hardware or energy usage. you could also base a fraction of coins mined on wallets that have a lot of transactions (somehow not just roundtripping money, i guess the trans fee would have to be slightly more than the reward fee), rewarding people for using coins instead of hoarding. I dont know how practical any of these ideas are, I am just throwing stuff out there as alternatives to current problems, someone smarter than me will have better ideas.

so where does that leave bitcoin? real use is for anything outside of the law.

6) if bitcoin somehow does not implode, governments might put it to an end because of illegal uses. And please no telling me how you can never stop bitcoin. You can easily stop bitcoin. Shut down the exchanges and use deep packet inspection to block all bitcoin traffic. Bitcoin is dead then. Maybe not in every country but unless you travel all over the world all the time, for you in your own country its dead.

in the land ;P

he has a giant VAT of extra virgin olive oil. Even if we all move to electric cars, you can make tasty food for decades!

As for rewarding usage and/or punishing hoarding, the Freicoin people propose a system where any hoarder automatically pays a demurrage fee of about 4.89%/year for any FRC they're keeping off the market.

1)  Chicken and the egg problem again.  Being a small market, there are a few clear market "leaders" who have the funding and customer base to stand on their own.  Everything else is a side-business or a hobby of someone or some group of people.  Bitcoin is an infant and hasn't grown enough to walk all on its own.  As the market grows and competition increases, fees will naturally decrease, especially if Bitcoin is allowed free reign and isn't forced to walk a regulatory tightrope.

2)  Having a payment system that allows one to exercise more control over their money is valuable.  Facebook, as far as I know, doesn't have a single tangible asset outside of a few servers, buildings, and Facebook Credits.  But, the social networking utility provided by Facebook is valuable to both consumers ("Yay, I get a page all about ME!") and to corporations ("What are they clicking on?  What are they looking at?  How long did they look at it?  Are crop tops still in?").  Bitcoin is a means of transferring money to anyone in the world at any time without waiting days for a check or wire transfer to clear, without wondering if the coins are "good" or not, without...well, without a lot of the cost and hassle of traditional payment systems.  If you know enough about Bitcoin you can set yourself up so that you're ready to send or receive a payment at any time, and I think people agree that while, at present, it is rather difficult to initially acquire bitcoins, actually using them is pretty damn simple.  Once you're in the game, it becomes integrated into your natural way of life.

3)  Whether the coins at the beginning were distributed 'fairly' is debatable.  Bitcoin is a pretty radical concept (at least, radical compared to current systems) and such a large incentive might be necessary to convince anyone, no matter how capable, to give up large amounts of time and/or money to build the first blocks of infrastructure for a brand new market.  I can promise you all day long that if you work with me to develop my new Monopoly money currency then I'll give you 10% of all the Monopoly money that will ever be created, but you still have to be convinced that the the idea actually has a shot at success.  What incentive would you need to contribute your time to something so ambitious?

4)  Another chicken and egg problem.  As the market grows, liquidity will develop.  As the price increases, 'hoarders' with different mindsets will be cashing out when they feel the price is high enough.  The hoarding issue becomes a lesser issue the more the market grows.  

5)  Creating paper money requires lots of machinery.  Machines run on oil.  Vehicles transporting paper money to and from banks and other agencies costs money.  Physical coins are heavy and require even more energy to transfer.  I guarantee you it'd be a hell of a lot cheaper maintaining the Bitcoin network with a massive ASIC cluster than it would be to maintain the status quo of paper and metal.  

Also, don't forget, increases in computational power make for a more secure network.  The real world equivalent is expensive manual labor and brick-and-mortar security systems.

WTF?  So current fiat and PM's are made of magic fairy dust that have NO impact on the planet both in their extraction and their distribution? Again, WTF?