Bitcoin Forum

Jessica Irvine, the National Economics Editor at the Australian Daily Telegraph overviews Bitcoin and concludes: "bitcoin is a distraction. It's a classic bubble. Trust me."

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/business/jessica-irvine

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/business/jessica-irvine/bitcoin-a-bubble-best-avoided-argues-jessica-irvine/story-fnj45kvd-1226766825875

https://i.imgur.com/V1KNdwr.jpg

"Bit coins are created every day by users. Presently 12 million exist, but the founders have said only 21 million will ever exist. [...]
So should you run out an buy bitcoins?

Short answer: no.

Remember, currencies are only worth what people will pay for them. And that depends on trust and scarcity.

First, scarcity. While the number of bitcoins is supposed to stop at 21 million, whose to say that will happen? The whole point is that it is user generated and not policed by a middle man.

Which brings me to trust. All transactions must be based on trust, and it's hard to see how anonymous users making promises to each other can be trusted in the long term There is a genuine revolution underway in internet transactions. But bitcoin is a distraction. It's a classic bubble.

Trust me."

Trust me? She wants her readers to trust her when she has not researched her subject, has no clue about peer-to-peer decentralized consensus, the Bitcoin protocol, or what mining actually does. You don't have to be a programmer to know that the same software running on 200,000 separate computers which cross-checks its results is incredibly resilient. Did she not read that even the US Federal Reserve admits that Bitcoin is technically a tour-de-force?

This is a National Economics Editor happy to dismiss a revolutionary economic paradigm without learning about it properly. This might be OK when making a decision for oneself, but not happily advising thousands of readers who, presumably, she wants to take her articles, and indeed her newspaper seriously.

F- for this one. Got to try much harder.

(Not in the press section - because this is illustrating the general point that many journalists and economists who dismiss Bitcoin have not learned about it properly).

I love the part about "who's to stay they'll stop at 21 million".  I know right?  Should we take the miner's word that they'll stop mining?  She's a genius, nobody else ever thought of that one.  HUGE security fail...

o_0-

Wow what a retard.  You'd think she'd have the sense not to write about things she has no idea about!

This is kind of right I guess. It is hard to see for the enslaved how chaos can be prevented when the master is gone

This one is harder though. I haven't seen anything like this on the horizon

I hope she is trolling.

I'm an investor. I know absolutely nothing about programming. But it took me about 1 second of research into bitcoin to understand that the number of coins would stop at 21M. Surely if you just google "bitcoin" there will be a couple links on the first page that cover this.

Either she is trolling, or she thinks bitcoins are actually magic beans that can deny the laws of math.

Technically a network consensus to a hard fork could keep the currency flow going, correct?

Isn't she going to look stupid in a couple years?

She already looks stupid now :P

well yeah...to us

this is one thing that really irritates me. people come to conclusions before properly researching the subject.

my friend 3 weeks ago was condescendingly being a dick about 3 weeks ago, telling me that i'd be an idiot for not selling at $150. i haven't talked to him since.

She cant be that stupid.  A national economics editor cant be that stupid.  I agree with the post above, she is trolling.

I don't think a national economics editor trolls though.

why not? seems like economics "experts" go by conventional wisdom.. BTC is anything but conventional. that's what seems to happen in many industries, where people stop giving a shit about thinking in new ways.

People people people.

If all of the media is like OMG bitcoin is awesome BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY it's gonna be best thing ever, the price will go up even faster.

Which doesn't allow us to buy in as easily when it's cheap.

So we want everyone saying its a ponzi scheme, tulip bubble, so that the insiders can acquire more coins until it comes and slaps everyone in the face.

They're doing us a favor.

Well, if the public think it is a ponzi, they won't buy, and price will stay low.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7377/11021730443_0079741290.jpg

Definitely no troll there, just "F-" for homework, for sure.

I need to update the Journalist Honor Roll thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=326656.0

Exactly, people often falsely claim or believe that 'cryptography' some how creates the 21 million cap (people who 'know nothing about programming' seem to be very likely to hold this belief as our friend above dose), nothing could be further from the truth.  

It is only the honesty of the mining network (and by that we mean literally just the handful of major pool operators) that enforces the cap.  Obviously the high visibility of breaking the cap and the fact that many miners hold many coins that would crash (And I mean a Hyper crash the likes of which would make all prior crashes look like hiccups) provides a huge disincentive, but it's nothing more then an incentive structure, one that gets weaker all the time as mining becomes more of a cartel and margins become thinner.

http://econogirl.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/jessicairvine.jpg?w=300&h=450

Those are fake breasts. Trust me! I've seen breasts, and those are fake. I went to a doctor once and we all know some doctors specialize in breasts, thus trust me when I say them are fake breasts. There's only two of them, but who's to say that somewhere down the road more won't be added? Notice how she keeps her breasts hidden. I've yet to find a image of her naked breasts, but even clothed, one can clearly see that they are fake. Trust me, for I have the highest post count on this forum and I'm...

~TMIBTCITW

Except none of us believe it's actually a ponzi scheme or bubble. We believe it's legit obviously. No point in driving the price up to the moon prematurely, if it's really that big, it's going to get to the moon anyway, regardless of what the talking heads say.

;D

Fun thread.  What are the odds of miners getting together and forging fake bitcoins?  Isn't that a bit unlikely?  I'd assume that if miners stop mining, difficulty goes down, and more would come back in no?  Shouldn't the system stabilize itself, the less people mine, the more profit, and reach a point of balance?  Could someone really invest so much money as to have more than 50% of all mining power?

Now that I think about it, LC has an advantage there, that home computers are still very strong miners, and there are millions of billions of them.

Daily telegraph is owned by Rupert Murduch

its been suggested that Rupert Murdoch's family history on wiki is completely fake

Murdoch was born Keith Rupert Murdoch on 11 March 1931 in Melbourne, Australia to Sir Keith Murdoch (1885–1952) and Elisabeth Joy Greene (1909–2012), daughter of Rupert Greene. Rupert Murdoch is of English, Irish, and Scottish ancestry. His parents were also born in Melbourne. Keith Murdoch was a war correspondent and later a regional newspaper magnate owning two newspapers in Adelaide, South Australia, and a radio station in a faraway mining town.[8] Later in life, Keith Rupert chose to use Rupert, the first name of his maternal grandfather

She is an idiot

Badly researched piece, expect many more along these lines though

Of the last 5 years, miners have released bitcoins almost entirely according to the plan, other than certain periods of high fluctuation of hashpower, show me one government that was able to do that.

Yea, this I understand.  But is there a risk of someone getting a monopoly on the hash power, and then f'ing up bitcoin?  Or are there too many miners for this to happen?  I ask this more towards periods where normal people won't be able to mine for profit (it's happening now).

That might happen, and Satoshi made it clear in the beginning that it might happen. That's why it's a honest system, people don't try to make you believe everything is OK.

That being said, the exodus of small time miners may stop if the price gets high enough, at the current price miners get a revenue of 1/10 of that of Paypal each year, which still has large space to grow, a Paypal-scale revenue should enable millions of USB miners to make a healthy profit.

LOL @ women and economics.

It is true that cryptography has nothing to do with the 21 million cap, however its enforcement is (fortunately) not solely based on the honesty of the mining network : you can have as much mining pools as you want who would change the rules (remove the 21 million cap) and mine blocks according to these new rules, all the other nodes of the network would reject theses blocks. And these pools could represent 99% of the hashing power, their blocks would be rejected nonetheless.

It is also important to point out that pool operators control as much hashing power as their users are willing to give them : if individual miners realize that their pool operator does things they disagree with, they can leave the pool, leaving the operator powerless.

She wanna buy some at $150. What's the matter with that :)?

I love when idiots do not buy bitcoins at their currently low price.

Kind of ironic that "trust" is amongst the most important issues here. And when you do understand the merits of Bitcoin as opposed to central bank issued fiat, you know which one you can trust, without hesitation.

The Australians aren't going to trust Jessica Irvine much once they find out.

Hahahaha.... My second favorite part, after her not understanding bitcoin, is her not understanding scarcity.

"Gold has often been the worlds reserve currency because it exists only in a finite supply.
Likewise, diamonds are a girls best friend precisely because they are so scarce."

Um, here's what happens when you type diamond scarcity into google;

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/02/AR2010070203990.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-you-ever-tried-to-sell-a-diamond/304575/
http://www.neatorama.com/2008/12/01/10-facts-about-diamonds-you-should-know/
http://are.berkeley.edu/~sberto/DeBeersDiamondIndustry.pdf
http://www.pippinbass.com/artificial-diamond-scarcity

If she can be an economist, then I want to be ruler of Narnia.

And I'll trade you these RARE diamonds for bitcoins all fing day, government-mind-slave.

i learned about control of diamond supply in college.. and i did not even major in economics. this lady is such a joke.

never trust someone who says trust me.  And also a train guy in london said to me never listen to a woman lol, but anyway i dont think that's actually true

terrible that the media doesn't edit this kind of balogne.

oh well.

It's not their honesty though, it's economics. Even if someone could continue mining coins over the "cap" it would be idiotic, because as soon as that barrier is broken, bitcoin loses all credibility and plummets in value. All of the coins held by those miners as well as the coins mined from then on would be practically useless. Therefore, these huge mining pools who are sitting on tens/hundreds of thousands of coins have a very strong incentive to ensure that the cap is stable.

Think about it. What if the US gov said "hey, we're going to double the money supply this year! oh and also, there's a new way to counterfeit money that we cannot detect or prevent!" What would you do? You would trash all of your USD in favor of another currency or commodity as soon as possible.

I learnt the same about a few years ago via a Twitter link.

Bullshit! These are the kinds of sexist remarks that detract from the community, and makes all look like pigs! Some poor girl even started a whole thread on it: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=341467.msg3657556#msg3657556

Agreed. Rat is a loser and has gone on the ignore list. The only other `contribution` he`s made to the BC community is a pathetic attempt at creating a digital `shit list` to call out everyone he disagrees with, with no rational of why. Actually establishing a position and then explaining it with logic and reason is more than many people on this forum are cognitively capable of, sadly.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=344807.0

I'm pretty sure he's trolling. This is the internet, after all.

Hey look, somebody else didn't read the white paper!

Relax!

She's a journalist. bitcoin is an interesting topic right now and to write a well researched piece on it would require actual research and study as opposed to googling bitcoin and likely reading the opinions of other, similarly time poor print journalists. From this she has penned her 'comment' piece. In the end this kind of reporting just perpetuates a misconception, gets clicks and creates discussion (although the Tele's readership will have very little understanding of bitcoin so see u later discussion).

A solid piece from a non tabloid, non infotainment publication might have talked about some of the reasons bitcoin was created and has grown, about the financial sytem etc. Maybe some relevant quotes from credible sources to illustrate her opinion. But sadly, no.

It was either going to be a fear piece or a fluff piece. With the daily tele, a balanced take was never going to happen.

Well, you'd think she would at least read part of something, before making a claim.