Bitcoin Forum

http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/24195.aspx

Could use someone more willing to sign up and argue with ignorant people than me to go inject some facts into that thread.

No offense, friend, but you're fighting against the tide here.

These threads really boil down to someone saying "well, I don't think it's worth anything so I'm not going to use it." And then we all just wasted 50 posts talking about economics, misapprehensions about digital currencies, what open source means, the fed, libertarianism, drugs, and all kinds of irrelevant bullshit.

I've followed about fifteen similar threads and I've never seen anyone change their mind about anything, on either side of the debate.

I have a feeling that these threads will stop occurring as frequently when a bitcoin acolyte can point to a list of online stores and say, "if you had bitcoins you could shop here."

That said, don't let my negativity stop anyone. I just think convincing people to use bitcoin is a bit of a waste of time because when they're already contrary to the idea it is unlikely that you can turn them around.

Justmoon has made quite a good answer already.  I think that's enough for now.

qft

It all boils down to the fact you cant eat bitcoins.  :P

I can only hope the people who have been calling bitcoin holders irrational for months now will eventually start feeling a bit ridiculous as the exchange rate keeps rising.

Really, I would start worrying if I found that I was defining the "rational" agent as someone other than the guy currently sitting on top of a giant pile of money.

It's very hard for people to change their minds after they have publicly stated their positions, and possibly ridiculed people holding the opposing view. But luckily the people you are arguing with are usually not the ones you should be trying to convince. For every person attending these debates with opinions set to stone, there are hundreds of people just reading who have not made up their minds about the issue, and for that reason it's worth it to fight these seemingly pointless battles.

You know, a bubble always grows and grows. During the .com era, companies worth billions! Now, they don't worth anything at all.

Bitcoin *might* be a bubble which is still in its inflation phase. Whether it's a bubble or not, nobody can really know, we can only have intuition.

So you are both wrong.

You can if you boil them first ;)

I have a Mises account.  I'll take a look and might make some contributions.  I'm really frustrated with the Mises crowd for not bothering to correctly apply their own damn theories about money correctly to bitcoins.

If I get too pissed off I'll just tell them to eat some fucking carrots.  ;)

You really think most people on the mises forums actually understand economics?

Ha, ha.  Well they should with all the free material available there.  :)

I've made the best possible argument for the value of bitcoin: an offer to buy. Let's see if anyone puts their money where their mouth is.

ppl find it hard to change their stance on something they've been invested in for years.  i've been a PM bull for 6 years now and have started to convert some of my holdings to btc.  its always bothered me that i can't easily spend that bullion.  i've been impressed how much easier it is to move btc around.

You can give a pig the best vocal trainers in the world and all they'll do is squeal.  Problem is most people are stupid.

Explaining new concepts to people is a difficult skill to develop.  Knowing your facts is critical, but once you do the "soft skills" are all that matter.  If you don't have the soft skills to do it well, please don't bother.  Opinions on new things don't really harden unless someone argues with you.  Then you become committed to your prejudgement and much harder to sway later.  Nobody needs to won over today.  Most of the time, you should let bitcoins do the talking.

This is a solid analysis.  I do think it is important to correct misconceptions about bitcoins, but even that certainly requires tact. 

Nicely said.  I support mises.org, but yes unfortunately those folks have a kneejerk reaction to any money that isn't gold-backed.

The kneejerk reaction is understandable, because in the past they've only seen non-gold-backed money that is either a scam or is unsound.

Bitcoin is so radically different from anything they've seen before, that it's a natural first reaction to lump it with all the other non-gold-backed money systems that they've seen.

New ideas take time to be accepted. When the concept of "zero" was first imagined by mathematicians, it took centuries to be accepted as being real and meaningful. The same with the idea of the sun at the center of the solar system. And evolution is still not universally accepted.

A complaint/quote from one of the early proponents of quantum theory was something like
"The only sure way to get radical new advances accepted in the world of science is to wait for all the old scientists to die..."

Unfortunately, most people expounding their economic theories (and deriding others) are even less rational than your average scientist is..

Fortunately, we dont need to wait for them to die in the literal sense to try something new, only in the financial sense, which seems to happen a lot quicker.

I dont claim to be skilled enough in global economics or monetary theory to say for sure whether the new idea of bitcoin will definitely fly or not, but it seems different to anything that has been tried before and incorporates new technologies that were unthinkable 20 years ago that it sure seems worth a go.

To all the "old school" economists who think they know everything there is to know about money I suggest that people point out that just 20 years ago the idea that you would be able to sit at home, click a few buttons, and within seconds be able to pull nearly any information/music/video (and more) from across the planet into your lap would have been ludicrous..    That every citizen would have more computing power in their telephone than governments used to influence the outcome of world wars with encryption. 

With technology like this powering Bitcoins "new money" idea system, anyone who simply writes it off as not even worthy of serious consideration based on their historical understanding of money is a luddite fool in my opinion.    (Especially when they are actually using that same new technology themselves (computers and the internet) to argue with their opponents about it..

But there is little point in arguing with fools, it just makes you look stupid too.   

Exactly. Instead of arguing, I posted this to the mises.org thread (http://mises.org/Community/forums/t/24195.aspx):


In the same thread, SunAvatar offered to buy call options, a sure way for anyone at mises.org to make money if they think bitcoins have no value.

In other words, don't argue with people who don't think Bitcoin is money. Just use Bitcoin as money.

Wise words.

+1

People were murdered for attempting to tell people outside of the fold about the square root of one.

The heck?!?  What's the story behind that?

That post was brilliant.

Oh, sorry.  The square root of negative one.  There is an unconfirmed story that such numbers were central to a mathmatics cult centered on a Greek island, wherein secrecy of the math was maintained by the threat of death to anyone who would share the secrets with the greater Greek cultures.  There is some evidence of the use of such "imaginary" numbers in the complex architecture of Athens, but no evidence of how the designs were calculated were ever found upon any building plans ever recovered, so this story is plausible.  I'm having trouble remembering the name of this math cult, so Google isn't helping me out much.

I think it was irrational numbers, like the diagonal of a unit square. So root 2 and such.

Maybe so.  Memory fades....

Probably talking about the Pythagoras cult. They thought the universe was mathematically perfect, that any phenomena in nature could be explained with rational numbers. One of the disciples discovered that the square root of 2 was irrational so Pythagoras killed him and made the others keep the discovery a secret. This is just a legend though I think.

I like 'em deep-fried  :P  :)

How true. Same with gold. I still like both! ;D