Bitcoin Forum

I doubt he is right... I sure hope he isn't !

http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/how-why-bitcoin-will-fail/

It is strangely written indeed

Network Effect.

This guy is retarded or something

Has to be the dumbest article i have ever read. I am now more stupid than I was 10 minutes ago.

He actually makes a good point however, his analysis is flawed.

One of the strengths of crypto-currencies is that if someone tries to corner the market on one of them people can simply change to a different one...no different than what currency traders do with fiat.

Where his analysis is flawed is assuming the value will go to zero...the value of the crypto-currency under attack will simply transfer to a different one.

"Professor of Economics"

That's everything you need to know about his analysis of actual economics in the real world.

He seems to have completely missed the point that Bitcoins utility and thus value lies in its use as a method of currency transfer.

As far as I can figure out, he sees Bitcoin as a simple commodity whose price in a competitive market will fall to cover the cost of manufacture + a small profit margin. Just like cars or toilet seats.

Miss the point much ?

(And he's got tenure, I don't bloody believe it.)

He has no idea what bitcoin is and what's driving it. It's like me writing about ballet or something like that.

interesting article, but the guy seems to not be able to think about value in other than dogmatic view. He is wrong btw.  ;)

Let's say you have a car rental company named "Hertz" and it is willing to rent you a car for $100. Then suppose that another car rental company named "Avis" comes along and is willing to rent you a car for $90. And then yet another car rental company named "Enterprise" comes along and is willing to rent you a  car for $80. And to make matters worse, there are now hundreds of other car rental companies.

That guy is saying that "Hertz" should have gone bankrupt decades ago.

yeah that works in a perfect model word at the university and even there you know the theory has weak spots....nobody can tell you wheater the btc prices will rise or fall. the world is just to irrational to understand it. in addition to that you cannot think of an transparent world where information is shared perfectly.

interesting article but way to theoretical

Funny thing is people immediately reject this argument because it works against Bitcoin, yet many use the same principle to predict increase costs of mining and rigs pushes up Bitcoin value.  I dont buy it myself, but you cant simply reject the premise that the value of Bitcoin could be reduced by supply side pressure.

I can certainly reject the idea that any altcoin can supply the same need.  How are you going to acquire an altcoin?  There's only one way that is practical for 99.9% of the people:  Buy it with bitcoin.  Given that you already bought bitcoin, why would you pay with a different coin?  Bitcoin already met your need.  It's not like you want more slippage, and less security, and less people willing to accept your money, and the risk of using some fly-by-night pump-n-dump, and much more volatility, and massive inflation -- in short the things that always come with altcoins.

"But then the QuitCoin company comes along, with its algorithm, offering to sell you QuitCoin for $400. Will you ever accept such an offer? " no, I probably wont. This dude has no point at his theory.

The article is well written and he makes a strong point.

This is why I believe the open source code base for a successful crypto-currency needs the commit control given to a Benevolent Dictator, and all users should run the official client, so that the currency can be continually innovated to keep interest in competitors weak.

With constant innovation, the market will favor the one with the most developers contributing.

Please note, the author wasn't dismissing network effects. His point is that the natural desire for profit, will drive interest to invest in the undervalued thing. This will pull Bitcoin down if there aren't more novices coming in that are afraid of the altcoins. I believe there is sufficient supply of newcomers who will buy Bitcoin before any altcoin, thus his scenario isn't entirely valid.

Article makes a point but it isn't necessarily on point.

Perhaps I like Coca Cola more than Bobs Cola.

I like the taste. I am influenced by the 'brand'. Bobs Cola may be cheaper but Coca Cola is what I drink.

Many of these new cola drinks, I don't trust them. Not many people stock them, but they are cheaper.

Maybe when the market accepts them and they are branded better it will appeal to me more.

Maybe when they are more mainstream their price will rise to meet that of Coca Cola because Coca Cola is a market leader for cola drinks.

Why would Coca Cola drop their price because their is more competition?

Why isn't Pepsi priced lower than Coca Cola?

unfortunately for the author, he seems to assume that the attractiveness of a cryptocurrency is tied in a major way to the value in traditional currencies of its base unit. the selling point for all cryptos is its utility, regardless of its market value...

It is fundamentally true that multiple competing coins will divide the total capitalization of the market.

But, it would be a mistake to think that all the coins will have the same value, or that someone would value say, a dogecoin the same as a bitcoin.

The different coins will take on different values, exponentially different values, in fact.

The dominant coins can be expected to command the lion's share of the capital and capital growth.

hehe, just felt the same way

the fact that altcoin market cap is much lower than bitcoin market cap is proof that it doesn't work that way

if this guy was right, ltc would be 0.25 btc, and so on, but BTC is a major, senior coin and the others are copycats. Owning the altcoins like in the article, is risky because they are more likely to vanish than BTC and thus BTC has more value than others. Why should a coin that has less purchase power but more risk, be preferred?

The article assumes that coins are ONLY for payment NEVER a store of value.

In fact why are people not using Zimbabwe dollars? They are much cheaper so any reasonable person would swap USD into Zimbabwe dollars right? Wow such nonsense!!

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

The 0.1 Satoshi currency  ;D

non-sense, lack of real econ - keynesians never got it working anyways

It takes $630 to buy just 1 Bitcoin lol USD is worthless.

Yen is to USD as USD is to an insignificant chunk of a bitcoin. Yeah, we be way above society 8)
Let's spend the next twenty minutes insulting the author of that article now.

He completely ignores variables brought in by the vendor, buyer, and market as a whole. He also doesn't understand the difference between price and value. And since when are altcoin prices arbitrarily decided by whoever made them lol?

This article screams of college freshman who took a few economics classes and now goes around spewing 'wisdom' like he's an expert.

Also, wtf is up with his vocabulary. Far too many awkward or incorrect word placements to be taken seriously. The guy's a native English speaker, so there's no excuse. Don't writers proofread anymore?

Bitcoin will fail because adoption will be limited:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=400235.msg5718375#msg5718375

What exactly is your link showing that indicates limited adoption?  Adoption will be predicated on ease of use, improved infrastructure, amongst other things.  Price is mostly irrelevant since Bitcoin can be divisible to multiple decimal places making it easy to use for anyone.

Limited adoption does not mean failure. It means limited success. AnonyMint seems to believe that Bitcoin will die unless it replaces every currency.

I don't think that anyone expects Bitcoin to gain un-limited adoption. The adoption will most likely be limited by something, and the real question is when.

The author is an idiot. He obviously knows nothing about the overall altcoin markets.

I mostly agree with this forum member's that the author of the article is incompetent to tell about BTC, had never read such stupid things before

One of the strengths of crypto-currencies is that if someone tries to corner the market on one of them people can simply change to a different one

So he seems to be basing his assumptions on the labor theory of value (no subjective value, i.e. utility), which had been proven wrong right at its inception in the 19th century.

This author just ignores the network effect of the most popular cryptocurrency.  He assumes that each crypotocurrency is a good substitute for any other cryptocurrency.

By analogy, we can assume that the value of the US dollar will fall sharply soon because Vietnamese Dong is much "cheaper" to buy.

There is just too much faith in bitcoin now and as more adopt btc as a method of payment the faith increases, as faith in fiat currency and the traditional banking system decreases.. btc faith increases

VC interest in bitcoin based businesses has soared this year, they have the capital and with the right strategy over time these companies will grow, as the companies grow... faith increases.

Sure you can.  As long as demand is greater than supply, the notion that supply side pressure will reduce trading price in aggregate is absurd.

Also absurd is the idea that a coin with no network constitutes an alternative to a coin with a network on the scale of bitcoin.

It seems that you don't fully understand how supply and demand work jointly. When demand increases, it almost instantaneously gets balanced through price adjustment, so most of the time supply and demand are mutually offsetting each other (read are equal). Thus, if we have supply side pressure, it also gets balanced immediately through the corresponding price adjustment. :)

How many people didn't realise this was a necro.....?

Yeah, just noticed (though it was not me who bumped it)! :D

But such questions are always topical and can be asked at any time about virtually anything.

I have no idea who bumped it, but carpe diem!

I read this, and I have to say it was the stupidest thing I have read. Correction; the stupidest thing I had read before this, multiplied by cancer.

This person understand absolutely nothing about Bitcoin, and I still have to understand why he wrote that. Did he not have a story for a column and decided to say something is bad, even though he's done seemingly no research?

And no variables were taken into effect.

Yeesh.

+1

Metcalfe's law, every time I read some dumbass talk about network values, Metcalfe's Law.

So far, network effect is working well for bitcoin. But that doesn't mean there won't be another coin more suitable for payment gateway in the future.

Don't let facts get in the way of an agenda. Build your straw man, beat it, repeat ad nauseum.

Until that happens i just have to sit and wait for Bitcoin prices going vertical, when another better coin appears maybe i'm already buried in

my own mortuary business...

Now that Califorina has legalized Bitcoin, it will not plummet in price.

It is still not a legal tender though.

Federal government can no longer stop companies from accepting bitcoin in California.

This doesn't make bitcoin into a legal tender yet. You won't be able to pay, for example, taxes or public charges and duties with it. Don't let yourself get fooled about it.

I think the author of this article was dropped on his head shortly after birth or something.  My 12 year old nephew could've written a better article.

I move that we apply QuitCoin to this entire thread and particularly that article.

In order for something to be legal tender, any company must be forced to accept it for payment. In the US this is only true for the Dollar as it is "Legal tender for all debts, public and private"

Everyone seems to forget that all currencies fail to be legal tender outside its borders.

So if all currencies are foreign currencies in most of the places on the planet what makes them so different than Bitcoin?

I may be mistaken about this, but are the U.S. companies (in the U.S. territory indeed) actually forced to accept the US dollar? As I know, you (as a company owner) are free what currency to choose in payment for your goods or services, and if a contract stipulates payment in, say, euros, you (as a counter-party) can't ignore this clause and pay in dollars instead.

As I see it, in most places on the planet, Bitcoin is not even considered as a foreign currency. If not directly prohibited from settling accounts in (as in China or Russia), then it is treated as digital property. Thus payment in bitcoins will be viewed as barter (which is frowned upon in most countries if not outright banned).

Nice

I was reading it as
For purposes of argument, let’s say that a year from now Bitcoin is priced at $500. Then you want some Bitcoin, let’s say to buy some drugs.  And you find someone willing to sell you Bitcoin for about $500.

So lets say your thinking in 2011 your Silk Road and the only thing on the market and then the Black Market Reloaded comes along and then another drug exchange and another that does youtube advertising *_*.
Basically more than one can exist (- the youtube advertising one)

...and, there are even countries where legal tender doesn't really exist. In Scotland, for example, coins are legal tender (limited amounts in most cases, but £1 and £2 coins are valid for any amount), but no bank notes have been legal tender since 1946 (Scottish bank notes, and Bank of England 10 shilling and £1 notes). There are current Scottish bank notes (issues by three commercial banks), and Bank of England notes are widely used - but none are legal tender.

I'm not sure what the situation is in Northern Ireland, but I gather it's similar - Northern Irish banks also issue their own notes, though I don't know if they're legal tender there or not.

(For the sake of completeness I should add that Bank of England notes are legal tender in England and Wales, and accepted in Scotland without question - since they enjoy the same non-legal tender status as their Scottish equivalents).

Does Scotland collect their own taxes, and if it does, what money is accepted as payment for them?

Local authorities ("councils") collect "Council Tax" to pay for local services; they accept Scottish notes (and, presumably, though I've never tested it, Bank of England notes).

The Scottish Government has (limited - a few percentage points above the UK-wide tax rate) tax-raising powers, though to date hasn't exercised that power.

Thanx for the info. Could we then consider Scottish and Bank of England notes as legal tender (even if the notion is not formally defined)? To me, legal tender in the first place is what government accepts as payment for the taxes and duties it imposes on their citizens.

Probably - Scottish (and Northern Irish) notes seem to me to be, in effect, IOUs for Bank of England notes. My understanding was that "legal tender" applied to debts, so if I have a meal in a restaurant and settle up afterwards - the restaurant can't refuse my payment if I offer legal tender (obviously restaurants in Scotland are more concerned with receiving payment in any form than with the legal niceties :) ). I don't know at what point my Council Tax obligations become a "debt" - when I've paid in cash I've been paying in advance - but it's certainly a duty or obligation (or, at least, regarded as such by our city fathers...)

But what if it is made known to you before you take a meal that the restaurant won't accept what is "legal tender" there, will you be able to insist on paying the "debt" with it alluding to its being a legal tender?

For those still interested, this has been discussed on Bob Murphy's blog:

http://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2013/12/a-bit-of-silliness.html

http://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2013/12/yet-more-on-tyler-cowen-on-bitcoin.html

and here:
http://elidourado.com/blog/tyler-vs-tyler-on-cryptocurrency-network-externalities/

We need constantly infusion of "new" money to keep the price going up.

China, India and many countries are out of the question. Wall Street and pension fund are our last hope to pump it to new high.

I honestly don't know - it's never happened to me! I think businesses tend to be pragmatic - money's money, so as long as they can check it's not counterfeit then they're usually willing to accept it. The problem tends to be the other way round, using Scottish notes in England - though even that I've not found to be much of a problem recently.

My personal take on this is that the legal obligation here refers only to a state, which is bound to accept what is declared as a legal tender in payment for taxes, debts and whatnot. Businesses are free to choose which money they are willing to accept (unless it is directly prohibited by law indeed). Thus Bitcoin is made legal in California (together with other electronic moneys), but this doesn't in the least mean that you can pay taxes with it.

A restaurant, or any other business is not able to decline to accept any form of legal tender, at least in the US. Businesses may accept additional forms of payment as well, however if they are in the US then they must accept US dollars.

YAII ! (yet another Idiot Intelectual )