Bitcoin Forum

     I'm tickled by folks who swear up and down that BTC will be $10,000/BTC+ in a few years time, just as soon as BTC begins to catch on and garner more market adoption. Of course I would love for nothing more, but it seems like most of these predictions are little more than comforting delusions made by folks hoarding their BTC, laying in wait to become filthy rich!

    Bitcoin's big problem is that of adoption... Bitcoin just isn't easy enough.

   For instance, all of the promising articles coming out talking about how BTC is perfect for developing third world countries? Yes, BTC is in theory, great for people in developing countries, or who are victims of monetarily abusive governments... But access to a personal computer, let alone internet access which is NOT widespread in underdeveloped countries. In North America, 78% of the population uses, or has the ability to use the internet. In Europe, its 63%. Compare this to Africa, which is at 15%, or the Middle East, which sits around 40% and we can infer that the majority of the population does not currently have the ability to even run a Wallet. Even then, would they know how to backup a wallet.dat file? would they know how to encrypt? Probably not. Remember guys, most of us here are fans of and experts on computers/networking/technology.

   Beyond that, getting started with Bitcoin is just too hard. Describing Bitcoin to some one who either A. Isn't computer savvy, or B. doesn't understand economics is difficult enough. Downloading a Wallet is fairly simple, but then how to get Bitcoins? You have to sign up with Coinbase, (easiest method at the moment, at least here in the states with the exception of localbitcoins) hook up a bank account (Most people are too cautious to do this) and wait for verification... and then it kind of looses its anonymous draw as transactions can be traced back to a fiat bank account. People are not patient... If they aren't able to just download an iPhone app, they probably wont give it a second attempt. We need a super simple way to set people up with something lite like MultiBit.

    "But wait... What would I need to buy BTC for?" They will say... There are certainly far more business accepting fiat currency. "well BTC is for keeping value secure against inflation and government abuses, its also instantly transferable and fairly anonymous!" You'll implore. Ah yes, BTC can be used this way, and as I said before, the majority of us are storing our BTC this way. But this is the biggest problem... A currency cannot catch on, cannot thrive, cannot penetrate the market unless it is being circulated often. We don't spend our coins, because we are waiting for the price to increase... But we wont see any increase until more people start spending coins. Unless something crazy happens with the Global economy and people start dumping fiat into BTC... We are technophiles, and that is why we like BTC. Because it's a cool phenomenon spawned from the internet, and we love when we can get the internet to do new things.... I'm not saying that BTC is pointless, or a dumb idea... especially if you enjoy items from SilkRoad. I love BTC, and for some reason mining is a lot of fun for me, so I will continue to hold BTC and secretly hope to get rich quick.

     I do believe that given another ten or fifteen years, BTC could really become truly widespread, but my fear is that it will die off due to market stagnation long before it has that chance... What do you guys think?
  
   (Not trying to upset anyone! Just a discussion! Lets keep it civil  ;D  ;D)

You are assuming that the dollar and the euro will be rock solid currencies. With that assumption, you're conclusions are correct.

Is it very probable that USD and EUR will lose value and people will be looking for alternative money. When people see the financial collapse happening, they will be willing to learn how to use bitcoin.

Gold is pretty much useless, only makes sense as a hedge against fiat currency collapse. Yet the value of all the gold in the world is ~7 trillion USD. Bitcoin is ~1 billion. It's a gamble, sure, but I'd rather bet on bitcoin than on gold.

I'm assuming that the USD and EUR will be relatively stable for the next 10-15 years, yes... But if they did loose their value, why would people go straight to BTC? Most people are completely unaware of Bitcoin, and I feel that precious metals and physical valuables will be the obvious go to investment for most of the population.... That said, I am holding out for your aforementioned scenario!

If gold is $1315 an ounce theirs room for growth in bitcoin. Gold is $1315 an ounce despite their being three ounces mined per person on the planet. There aren't that many bitcoins to go around that's for sure.

Absolutely, I hear you, and I'm hoping it does grow... The only problem I see is that people (historically) revert to physical stores of wealth during crisis... We haven't really had a virtual option before, but with most USD/EUR etc. transactions being virtual now a days anyhow, will people be willing to trust another virtual system?

It sounds like you are making the assumption that nothing will change. I agree with you but only considering the current state of Bitcoin. Yes, right now there are some challenges with it. But people all over the world are actively working on solutions to these challenges to knock down the walls preventing acceptance. Almost nothing is insurmountable. As long as man can dream it, he can accomplish it. When Bitcoin becomes the perfect solution to solve your problem, whatever that problem may be, be it with a person or a whole country, then acceptance will be very swift.

This can be fixed with a hardware wallet like Trezor

The bitcoin ecosystem is growing, it takes time. Once getting a hardware wallet will be easy using bitcoin will be much much safer

Same for other things, it takes time and work.

This is absolutely correct.  Look how quickly and easily it has become to acquire Bitcoin through a service like Coinbase now compared to just three months ago.  A lot of little (or big) changes and improvements like that start to find synergy and work together to increase ease of use significantly - especially when there is financial incentive for companies and individuals to make Bitcoin "easier"

nothing would propel bitcoin more than some sort of bitcoin ATM

Imagine atm which allows you to buy/sell bitcoin offers you to choose any exchange you would like, be it gox, or bitstamp.
As a bonus it lets you to do so either instantly at current price, or set your own bids/asks.
You would use a hardware wallet to login, if you like.
And it would accept/dispence fiat (or credit cards if you do not care for anonimity).

Not true. It's not harder than using internet banking.
Even my mom is now using android phone to pay bitcoins for generic prescription drugs and saving a lot.
I spent about 15 minutes explaining her what is bitcoin and how to buy/sell it. She doesn't need to run bitcoin-qt, third party wallet is fine for small amounts.

Bitcoin adoption is going on and I believe that, if it doesn't fail due to some critical vulnerability, some day it will cost much more.

Portuguese, Spain and maybe Ireland is on the brink of an EU "bailout". If any of these "financial helps" will happen in Cyprus style then we can expect a mass of newcomers. So I think the bitcoin economy will see some interesting time in the next few years.

What are apple stocks useful for? What can you do with them, other then buy and sell.
Bitcoin is like the best stock ever:
- You can send/trade them with other people without a trusted third party involved.
- You can store them on a paper, usb-stick, computer, mobile, table, in your brain.
- You can easy launder bitcoins to make them fully anonymous
- You can actually directly buy stuff, though its not that wide-spreaded yet
- Like gold, its not bind to something. Stocks is always bind to the value of a company.
- You dont need a freaking bank or whatever company to buy bitcoin, you can buy them anonymously on the street
- etc

Ack, I stopped reading at "most people in the developing world have no access to computers". If you aren't aware of the degree of penetration of smartphones in the third world you've been living under a rock.

There's no chance that these paper currencies can hold stability for that amount of time. There's already indicators that Bernanke may back off on stimulus even tho he hasn't expressly stated. There's a portion of his board that want to back off and this will affect the phony stock market that is propping up this facade of stability. I'd venture to say that being stable longer than 5 years is pushing it optimistically. When those in the market get their clocks cleaned, watch out in bitcoinland - the ship is leaving the port.

Lot's of great responses here guys! I have to disagree with this though, there is simply no way the US would let the dollar die... especially so quickly. Without tax money, we would have complete infrastructure collapse and then you can forget about your internet connection to virtual currency. Paper currency is on its way out, but its going to be around for the next twenty years or more, I guarantee you.

Yes paper currency will be around for 20+ years, probably more. However the US government DOES want a decline of the dollar, though not a death. Its enormous debts are denominated in dollars so it is in the interests of the US government to see a decline in the dollar because this means a decline of the real value of its debts. The pound lost 25% of its value in 2008 and this was praised by many in "The City". Paper currencies are in a "race to the bottom".

Can you point me to your information? Even with smart phone adoption, currently the worlds internet penetration sits at just 34.3%... There are only ~1.10 Billion smart phones in the world vs 7.1 Billion people alive... See the first link below, even the predicted future penetration for African, Middle East, South/Central Americas and Asian Pacific countries sits below 50%.

http://printinthemix.com/Fastfacts/Show/727

and these:
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
http://www.gfmag.com/tools/global-database/ne-data/11942-internet-users.html#axzz2ZniYNN2W
http://www.go-gulf.com/blog/smartphone/

Ahh this makes sense... I guess the question is what will big Government turn to after they devalue the dollar? How will they collect taxes, and in what form will the average man be paid? I don't like the idea of the government collecting taxes from my bitcoins, but I also recognize the need for a tax paying society in order to function.

1. By listing the current rates of internet penetration in countries, you're totally missing the big picture. To make a prediction, you ought to be looking at rates of adoption. Adoption is steeply on the rise in the majority of Third World countries. It's doubling at a fast rate.

2. Exchange is a certain weak point in cryptocurrency infrastructure. But exchange is only vital for adoption in the early phase (now). Once the First World is using Bitcoin heavily, the Third World will most certainly follow. So, the difficulties of exchange are not particularly relevant imo. (If your paycheck is in BTC, and you can buy all you need with that BTC, what do you care how long it takes to exchange?)

3. "Without tax money, we would have complete infrastructure collapse and then you can forget about your internet connection to virtual currency." I agree that Bitcoin will undercut governments' ability to tax effectively. It's already too late to destroy cryptocurrencies, so they'll have to learn to live with them. It's too late. Government infrastructure collapse does not necessarily indicate technological systems collapse, however. Don't underestimate the power of the entrepreneurial spirit; I'm not so sure tech infrastructure will be any worse than it is now; it could certainly be better. (Naturally, connectivity may cost more. But then you'll be evading taxes with ease and that savings has to go somewhere.)

I never said it would die or vanish. The amount of printing and future liabilities is eroding the purchasing power and one of the main veneers hiding this is the continuation of pumping money into the stock market. When the bartenders stop serving, the rug will be pulled on the market and the greedy retail investors will be stuck holding the bag. Most people in the know have pulled out and/or have greatly limited their exposure.

What I am saying, like the other poster mentioned, the inflation will be magnified when this hoopla over the stock market goes away and middle aged people as well as retirees will be looking to diversify out of paper. The only way I see things turning around is if Rand Paul is elected President and has a decent amount of allies in Congress to stave off the cheap money policies and cut govt spending with a meat hook; and that means starting with reigning in the American Empire and abolishing whole govt depts. Also, govt regs need to be slashed to open up the private market for better job opportunities. As it stands, younger generations are screwed whether they go to college or not. Now, Obamacare is set to fleece the young in another way.

Two big wrong assumptions by the BTC devotees get thrown up in this and every thread:

1. It is rare/limited so is valuable.

BS - rarity does not always equal value, plenty of rare things are worthless, just search eBay.


2. Fiat currencies depreciate so they are bad to hold.

Yes, but only if you hold them in physical coins/note. If you have them invested then what matters is your investment return relative to their depreciation (inflation) and anyone who cannot out-perform inflation over the medium term is doing pretty poorly. No-one holds any serious amount of currencies in non-interest or non-investment formats.

The original posters points are true, Bitcoin is too-hard and has little compelling reason to be used, which is why real transactions with Bitcoin are very small. That said the point missed is that mobile phone penetration in Africa is huge and thats where it COULD become well-used.

"Two big wrong assumptions by the BTC devotees get thrown up in this and every thread:

1. It is rare/limited so is valuable.

BS - rarity does not always equal value, plenty of rare things are worthless, just search eBay."

I don't know who you are referring to but it certainly isn't me. I know that scarcity is a property that can make something valuable but only in combination with other factors.

"2. Fiat currencies depreciate so they are bad to hold.

Yes, but only if you hold them in physical coins/note. If you have them invested then what matters is your investment return relative to their depreciation (inflation) and anyone who cannot out-perform inflation over the medium term is doing pretty poorly. No-one holds any serious amount of currencies in non-interest or non-investment formats."

I don't know where you are from but in the UK it has been extremely difficult or even at times actually impossible to match the rate of inflation with bank interest. This is because the Central Bank's interest rate has been held at 0.5% for years and inflation rose to over 4% a while back. Also note that most methods of calculating inflation are selective and controversial. The UK moved from the "RPI" to the "CPI" in order to exclude certain costs and housing costs and house prices are excluded. Therefore, in the UK saving fiat currency in banks is a losing game; you will lose purchasing power. Guaranteed.

In addition you don't only need to worry about inflation but the devaluation of the currency. Pound Sterling lost 25% of its value in 2008. Pound Sterling and the US Dollar lost 90%+ of their value over the course of the 20th century.

This leaves investing, which means assuming risk. This is fine but the equity markets of the US and UK are problematic. The underlying economies are doing very poorly yet those markets are now as high or higher than the crash of 2008. There is a serious question mark over whether the prices of equities should be that high. One of the reasons for the bull stock market is the low interest rates and quantitative easing. It is possible that the whole equities market is overvalued at this point and will suffer a correction.

These concerns and more are some of the reasons why people are unhappy with monetary policies and skeptical about the ability of fiat currencies to store value.

Goodness, it seems like this is a discussion that pops up every week! It's a good sign to gauge growth though. If people are still asking how it all works and what it all means, I guess we still need some sort of "centralized, mainstream" outlet for the general public.

I believe Coinbase is approaching things correctly and bringing an interface that is making it easier for the everyday user to take advantage of. Slowly but surely we will start to see more and more adoption, it's too early to look at the BTC "system" as something 100% ready to go, it's only been around 4 or so years and is in a beta stage still. We can't compare it to the systems being used now which have been developed over many, many years.

I agree with you, people expect the currency to skyrocket, so they hoard as many BTC as possible and sit on it, lol.

Also, you're right. Most people I know would rather download an app that's quick and simple for BTC rather than get something like Multibit and learn how to use it. When I first started with this a couple days ago I got Multibit, didn't understand something, and then just set up a wallet on blockchain.info instead(and then put that all into inputs.io). No wants to secure their virtual money if it's not easy, because otherwise it may just be a complete waste of time, and many people have jobs or things to do.

Devalued simply means worth less not worthless.   They will pay people and collect taxes just like they do now.  It just might be that minimum wage is $48 an hour a Combo meal at burger king costs $60.00 and a college education (state college 4 years) is $1.2 million.

Firstly your pound depreciation in one year is a very selective statistic. There are other years it gained 25%. In fact 20 years ago in 1993 it was nearly exactly the same USD/GBP rate as today.

Regarding investing, of course it's hard to match inflation with bank deposits alone, but add in bonds/property/equities and it's very easy over the long-term. Yes there's some risk added, but over the longer term the volatility is averaged away. Is Bitcoin riskless?

Quoting that currencies lost 90% over the century is again true but nonsense, no-one would have held their money in a zero-interest deposit account for 100 years. Do the same maths with a mixed invested portfolio and you'll find it out-performs inflation. Barclays produce a study of this over the last 100 years:

http://the3500.wordpress.com/2007/05/19/equity-markets-and-the-upward-drift/

Note that all asset classes outperformed inflation.

Same for the USD:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jeremywarner/100003705/dump-bonds-and-buy-equities-says-the-historic-data/

if we are looking into adoption of bitcions in the world scale then 10-15 years is very short period of time for the world. Introduction of Euro in Europe took more then 10 years. Maybe for some country it is of any significance but not for the world.

biggest problem with predictions or prognoses is that we have to deal with different processes affecting, influencing each other during some particular place and time.  if we can build a mathematical model describing dynamics of world finances then we can see better where bitcoins fit into it and what processes will influence bitcoins.

I dont think adoption and future of bitcoins have any thing to do with internet penetration or with population. In Pakistan for example, most people are very poor and living on 1 usd per day, but traditional hawala remittance system remitting usd 70 bil per year, as remittance system it is bigger then Pakistani central bank. In india nearly the same. It make no sense at all to expect 80% rural populating in India to begin to use bitcons, but Indian hawala operators already using it.

Besides of speculating we know very little so far, what kind of economical events and in what way affecting bitcoins. Each of us are having different model in his mind and we are discussing outcome of the use of that models , based on use of my mental model I can predict that, and You can predict that, but we never compare models itself.

if we want to understand future of bitcoins we need a mathematical model describing dynamics of world financial markets, then we can use this model and we can see how for example, depreciation of currency in one country or inflation in another country affecting bitcoins and what opportunity its opening.

System Dynamics is a perfect tool for construction of such model.

What we need is a separate forum where all these rehashed, old topics can go to die. We can send the "a deflationary currency is doomed", "we need to do away with the 21 million limit" and "it takes too long to get six confirmations for bitcoin to be useful" threads there.

"Firstly your pound depreciation in one year is a very selective statistic. There are other years it gained 25%. In fact 20 years ago in 1993 it was nearly exactly the same USD/GBP rate as today."

Recently the trend has been downwards and it is worse if compared with a broader range of currencies, or compared to gold, because of course the US dollar is also weakening. So the pound is weakening against a currency which is itself weakening. My first statistic was selective but my second wasn't.

"Regarding investing, of course it's hard to match inflation with bank deposits alone, but add in bonds/property/equities and it's very easy over the long-term. Yes there's some risk added, but over the longer term the volatility is averaged away. Is Bitcoin riskless?"

By bonds I assume you mean corporate bonds. Government securities are worse than bank interest due to quantitative easier and reckless fiscal policies.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/may/14/uk-treasury-bonds-record-low
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-22/u-s-two-year-yield-reaches-one-month-low-amid-pimco-policy-bets.html

Corporate bonds are not friendly to retail investors for a variety of reasons. Equities? Property? Maybe and maybe not. All depends on the decisions you make and how things work out.

"Quoting that currencies lost 90% over the century is again true but nonsense, no-one would have held their money in a zero-interest deposit account for 100 years. Do the same maths with a mixed invested portfolio and you'll find it out-performs inflation. Barclays produce a study of this over the last 100 years:"

http://the3500.wordpress.com/2007/05/19/equity-markets-and-the-upward-drift/

Note that all asset classes outperformed inflation.

Same for the USD:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jeremywarner/100003705/dump-bonds-and-buy-equities-says-the-historic-data/
[/quote]"

If my argument about the decline of the fiat currencies over the 20th centuries is meaningless then so is that. We have entered some very interesting times in the last several decades with the mass printing of money being the new normal and interest rates held at genuinely historic lows for very extended periods of time. That historic data won't do you any good.

Your bullishness for equities is slightly concerning.The equities market is probably overvalued, in my opinion, and it is disconnected from the underlying economic reality. If you want heavy exposure to that market then that's your business.

My point is that holding fiat is less attractive than it has been for a very long time. If you don't believe me, ask the Cypriots, many of whom have lost their deposits, or portions thereof in a new "bail-in" model being piloted in preparation for its roll out across the globe. Many investors are pulling out of the equities market and putting their money in hard assets. These hard assets carry risk like equities but they are seen as a good hedge against inflation, devaluation and the potential for a debt crisis down the road.

I'm not bullish on equities actually and hold 0% public equities directly, although some indirectly through hedge funds.

Regarding govt bonds you're correct, they're a bad buy now (I hold none) but a great buy a few years back, especially long-dated or perpetuals.

Quoting GBP vs gold is meaningless as all currencies depreciated vs gold, but that doesn't make gold a good buy or currencies bad.

Choosing to ignore 100 years of historic returns by saying the world has changed is a fools game, the same economic ycles have played out many times through history.

Anyway this was a fun debate, but I think I'll leave it at that.