Bitcoin Forum

I have been using bitcoin for a little over 6 months now, and I have decided to label the entire thing pointless. First off, at the time being, mining is impossible to be profitable, so that is off the table for earning bitcoins. All the investments you made went to shit after the bitcoin crashes back in july and august. Bitcoins went from 30 dollars to 3, in a matter of moths. That is a 90% loss, over 4ish months. Even if you can get bitcoins at a good value, what the hell are you going to do with them. The selection of marketplaces that accept bitcoins is so slim, that it is just not worth it. That is if you can keep your bitcoins, which some companies (MyBitcoin) cannot seem to do very well. So my question, Why are you staying here, and supporting this dead, useless, unprofitable, currency known as bitcoin?

Thanks,
macintosh264

and yet you have a donation address up?  why don't you give away or sell all your bitcoin and find something better to do with your time if you think its so pointless?   you clearly do not see or care about the big idea behind bitcoin.

The concept of bitcoin is a fine one, but I do not understand why people are using it with the current standings of the market, the current standings of the major players in it (the big bitcoin companies), and the current standing of bitcoin acceptance.

Because they believe in it.

What do "they" believe bitcoin is going to become/do.

A man from Belarus, one of the most repressive and totalitarian regimes in Europe, just moved thousands of dollars to his family in Long Beach without fees or government involvement.  Before, he had to strap cash to his body, $10k at a time and hope some corrupt customs official didn't "confiscate" it.

In short, bitcoin exists outside of your petty money-making schemes.  Go trade the pink sheets if you want to "invest" in something.

Good point, but my question is more from a consumer standpoint. How can bitcoin be used in the marketplace with all of its problems, and why do people stand by it when the pickings in the marketplace are so few, that the currency's only value stems from currency exchange, not the value of the goods and services it can provide.

:)
Bitcoin is far from dead - it still works nicely as a currency and you can probably use Bitcoin at more places now than you could ever before.

Bitcoin is also far from useless - it really is the only viable alternative monetary system available. It is a very useful experiment to see if something like 'people's money' could actually work.

As for unprofitable... why should a currency be profitable?

But yes, there's still much to be done to get this experiment going but luckily there's many people working on that!

Maybe you should just check back in a year or two - maybe then Bitcoin is more to your liking.

If you really want to know why we're staying here (with Bitcoin that is), it's probably because there's many people seeing the great potential in Bitcoin but also realize that we have to work for it to get real.

You might as well ask why the Wright Brothers, and so many people before them, wasted time, money, and resources to develop heavier-than-air flight.

You know what I see in the ops posts? A bunch of words.

Anyone actively using bitcoins doesn't need to ask this question. He has no imagination and is just a speculator.

I use Bitcoins to pay for my food, my rent, and even use the blockchain to power my rotating love bed.

Peace.

I agree that the current incentives for the average consumer to use Bitcoin are slim, but there's entrepreneurs seeing the opportunities to create new businesses. Slowly it will become more attractive for customers as well - just not over night.

just... how? ;)

Excellent point, I mean, there are tons of successful businesses that are based off bitcoin. I am one of those, with my plunder, bitcoin debit, but I have done thinking after making bitcoin debit, and that is when I came to this realization, that bitcoin, in my eyes, is useless at this time, and I need to stop investing in, or buying into, it.

From what I read, and from what I calculated, there is only a select few with such circumstances.

1) Mining will always tend toward zero profitability - it's not a money-making scheme.

2) Your time horizon for "investments" is pathetically short. You're concerned with a price fall over the past few months... that's nothing. Come back in 5 years and tell us Bitcoin was a bad investment.  Besides, year to date, Bitcoin is still up 100%, and is way higher than that if you go back to its creation. I'm sorry you got involved during a price bubble, but if you're going to "invest" in something you better be ready for years of volatility.

3) If you don't understand the usefulness of Bitcoins, then I can see why your interest is so fickle. Send me $0.10 without Bitcoin and let's see what happens. Send me $100,000 in another country and see what happens. Try opening a store and accepting credit card orders from Cote D'Ivoire and tell me what happens. Try sending a paycheck to a home bank in another country every week and tell me what happens.  Try playing online poker from the US and tell me what happens. Try sending money between two of your own bank accounts 50 times and tell me what happens. Try preventing the Government from seizing your bank accounts or inflating away the purchasing power of your money... Do you want more?

4) "The selection of marketplaces that accept bitcoins is so slim, that it is just not worth it."  <---- dude it's been like 6 months since anyone really knew about Bitcoin. Give it time. Have you seen https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade) recently?

5) You cite MyBitcoin like that is common. Cite another ewallet that disappeared. The number of sites that ran off with peoples' money can almost be counted on one hand, and there are hundreds of sites out there. Be diligent and take responsibility for who you trust.

6) Those of us who are supporting this currency do so because we know it is mankind's single most important invention since the internet, for many reasons. I'm sorry you didn't get rich in 2 months.

tl;dr - what's the point? To fundamentally change the monetary system of the planet.

+1

The Belarus guy must be one of the few people doing such a thing.  One $10k 'visit' would be in the 5k BTC range being obtained and a bit later sold at today's prices.  If the guy and his family were using exchanges, it would not take more than a few of them to have a fairly noticeable impact.

I completely miss-estimated how commonly this form of 'transfer' would be and estimated the value of Bitcoin at much more than it is today.  I'm currently down a bunch of USD because of it.  Oh well.

I've not ever bothered to try to understand the ratio of trading via OTC vs. via Mt. Gox.  Anyone have guesstimates about this?

I agree with all of your points, and I must admit, I cannot think of a counterargument, except for in response to 5. You state that MyBitcoin is an anomaly, but what about mtgox, the fall of the giant e-wallet, and I will be back with more in about an hour when my internet connection is better. I am on a cell phone's PDA net, and I am on 1x, not 3g (or 4g for that matter), so I am having trouble researching.

Hello, wake up

Bitcoin is NOT a get rich quick scheme.

You expected to become rich by downloading a software and you didn't become rich? Oh i'm so sorry (no i am not).

And price actually went up from what it was in May (1 dollar or less).

You go away? Finally a good news  :D

+2

unprofitable, mining. Mining is not ment to be unprofitable. Satoshi (did I spell that right ???) designed it as a reward system, so it was designed to be profitable, but at this point, you can never find a block without it becoming unprofitable, and if you could find a block, at best you would come out even.

That's not quite correct. The reward system is so professional miners have an incentive, but as profits go up, more people mine and profits go back down, tending towards zero. Those who mine at a "loss" are speculating.

You will not get rich mining. The fact that the network auto adjusts itself is a clear sign of that. Anyway, getting rich is obviously not the point of Bitcoin.

I partially agree with you: I don't think that Bitcoin will save the humankind. Bitcoin doesn't have lots of advantages to the common consumer, but it has some interesting properties. The most interesting property is that it allows you to send any amount of money across the globe without paying fees and without relying on any corporation. This is unique and useful, but not for everyone - my grandmother will probably never want to send money to another country. So Bitcoin has a place in the world. It won't be as big as Visa or Mastercard, but for some specific goods/services it is pretty good.

My online banking required 14 days from when I change my phone number to allow me to do an international transfer.

It was little under 200USD. How easy would that have been.  On that note It also cost me 20USD to do.

Well, if profit is your game, down markets are just as great if you know what you're doing.  I've been able to profit 600% since the time AFTER the Gox hack.  I invested in a down market and have been doing splendidly.

But, that is irrelevant.  Your entire premise seems to be based on the idea that Bitcoin is about profit.  The entire thing is only a few years old...what do you expect to be able to buy with it?  Regardless, the number of available items for purchased has exponentially increased in the past year.

I'm also not sure why you need MyBitcoin to hold onto your Bitcoins.  Protect them yourself.  This may be more difficult if you aren't computer literate, but if computer illiteracy is a problem for you, then my guess is an online wallet service isn't the best option for you anyway.

I'm supporting this currency because it's not dead, its useful, I have profited and continue to do so, and because it still has the potentially to catch on mainstream.

Patience, grasshopper.  If you expect to get-rich-quick in this world, then realistically you must be either extremely lucky, ridiculously skilled, or just plain unethical.

For best results, be all three.  'Tom Williams' comes to mind here.

Okay, I have heard of Tom Williams here, but I do not know who this guy is. Someone please direct me...

He's obviously joking...

Tom Williams was the pseudonym of the MyBitcoin operator. He either stole or lost half of the site's coins, refunded the remainder, and then disappeared.

anyone know how Tom Williams was able to cash out his huge bitcoin stash?

Did people really get half their BTC back?  I somehow thought that Bruce got all of his, but most people got nothing.  But I was not...er... victimized by the guy and didn't really track things that carefully.

And I should make a slight correction.  I guess 'Tom' didn't really get rich 'quickly' in that he was a fairly early adopter and it took a fair amount of time before he decided to pull the plug and cash out.

And while we are dreging up old memories, is it confirmed or denied that the guy's real name was something like Dalin Owen and he is a Canadian and his father was also vocal on these boards and had a real thing against Bruce?  I remember some 'whistle-blower' of sorts posting something about that, but do not much follow-up.

You're looking at it wrong. Because of those reasons, and the obvious potential, now is the perfect time to be investing in bitcoin—now, when the infrastructure is still being developed, and the price is still relatively low.

Banking on a rather certain long-term gain is a better investment strategy than hoping to come out ahead short-term, wouldn't you agree?

After that, hopefully we'll realize the pointlessness of a monetary system.

Human beings naturally create and use money. If all monetary systems disappeared overnight, people would just begin trading cigarettes or something else.

In any society beyond hunter-gatherer stage, there will always be some form of money.

I feel the need to commit on the following, the joint.


I definitely agree with half of the first sentence--patience. But how I made/make mine is not mentioned in your second sentence. Although I've reclaimed lumber in the South, I just recently restated reclaiming here in the North--from scratch. And I started in a down economy. Of course, not all I sell is reclaimed lumber. I also deal in architectural salvage. Yes, I'm a picker. And I did know Mike Wolf prior to him getting his TV show. In fact, I used to set up next to him (3 booths down) while doing the Nashville Flea Market.

The following is how I do it. And everyone reading this can do exactly the same thing and profit just as handsomely. There's this site called Craigslist, and sometimes eBay, were you scouring the listing looking for something cheap and already know beforehand who you're going to sell it to prior to purchasing it, or sometimes getting it free. It's not luck. It's a numbers game. Yes, I've been lucky, but many times I've been unlucky by missing a listing by a mere few minutes. But there's a new deal every five minutes, or quicker, on average. My passion and a little knowledge just so happens to be old wood and architectural elements. What's yours (the reader, not directed towards the joint)?

It may have to do with being at the right place at the right time, but not necessarily. I've learned years ago the definition of luck: preparation meeting opportunity.

Bruno

Bitcoin has it's uses from a consumer standpoint. There's the obvious things you can buy with it from a certain TOR hidden service. There's also other methods where what you're buying may not be illegal, but you would prefer it being discrete (say, paying some woman to wear high heels and stand on your nuts, if the misogynist assholes on the forums here hadn't ruined that prospect for everyone). I've been saying for the longest time that if volatility went down, online poker and gambling in general (in places like the USA) would be a huge killer app for Bitcoin.

Finally, from my perspective, it allows pain-free microtransactions. I can't accept 50c here 50c there from a group of users via Paypal or credit cards, but I can with Bitcoin.

All you need to understand is that ever since USD parity, people have been grossly over-optimistic of Bitcoin's future. There's a pretty good chance it will still have a niche in a decade's time - there's very little chance it's going to be the world's reserve currency for international trade. We're arguably still in the long slide back down from the lofty heights of bullshit expectations - where will it stop drooping? If you knew that, it wouldn't be speculation. I've not really seen anything that suggests Bitcoin is in it's death throes, but I also won't make the same mistake of guessing that the slide downward is over, either.

Either way, Bitcoin still has utility for me. I'm accepting small amounts (a tiny percentage of our company's income, such that if it went tits-up tomorrow I wouldn't really be out anything notable) from customers who probably wouldn't be customers otherwise, and I'm using them to buy some interesting shit.

You missed the core issue.

You cant create cigarettes or "some form of money" out of thin air.

With current monetary system, ppl are effectively printing money EVERY DAY, out of thin air.

Money supply never equals to (not even close) to production.

This is why bitcoin is a proof of concept. Its finite, and cant never be created out of thin air. No corporations or government can control bitcoin supply.

There are some obvious and immediate advantages to using bitcoin, but to see the bigger picture you first have to understand the problem with our current financial system. Its not so much the government's induced inflation IMO, its the money creation process itself thats entirely dependent on ever increasing debt and perpetual exponential economic growth. Its really little else than a pyramid scheme, and its not sustainable.

Maybe this will open your eyes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsmbWBpnCNk&feature=related

Nice list! I have one more: "Try, as a merchant, to evade taxes while dealing only with credit card payments".
And let's not forget Silk Road.


OP has a point nevertheless, bitcoin is not very useful to the average consumer right now, and probably will remain like that for a while. Bitcoin can serve very well all those use cases you mention above, and many more, so it will mostly be useful to these people and also people like us, who want to push for a positive change in this whole crappy monetary system.

A bubble?! I thought the libertarian teachings convey that bubbles are impossible in a free market with "sound money", and that only the government can create bubbles through credit. Weird! ;D

Where does it say that?

(Note: not sarcastic; I'm interested in a source)

Here are some links to the "neutrality of money":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrality_of_money
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_Disequilibrium_Theory
Especially the problems with this theory explain why there are bubbles.

There can be more reasons for the problems:
money-supply (debs,printing money, ...), changing (growing/shrinking) economy, changing speed in money-trades,....

Hint: the german articles contain more information.

Care to explain why you think that a currency should be "profitable"?
Ask to people who have been hoarding Dollars or Euros over the last five years...

You are asking to a general group why their opinion does not follow an archetype of opinion attributed to a smaller specific group?
If something is pointless, it's your question.

Got it, you are here to make buzz around your product and you think people are naive enough to go check up your website.

I'm pretty sure the comment came from a Zeitgeist-centric perspective, that all money is an unnecessary impediment to human interactions. Such a perspective really doesn't look at the concept of money realistically.

That said, I agree, current monetary systems are a scam; despite the investment in them and number of people using them, they're far inferior to bitcoin.

Animals don't use money. Humans are animals. Humans don't need money. It's really that simple. Everything else is just a complex web of fallacious constructs manifested through thousands of years of FUD.

Humans use plenty of things that animals don't. Whether we "need" to or not. We don't need to use language... we could conceivably survive just grunting and hanging out in trees. We don't need higher math or music. But these are things humans naturally gravitate toward, develop, and make use of. No propaganda required. And, regardless of how some people might consider it an inherent evil, money (call it "advanced trade" if it makes one feel better) is one of those intellectual constructs humans develop.

I mean, seriously. You can't have a complex society with advanced divisions of labor and support it through barter. Even if you could, no one would want to. People, as a general rule, want to simplify the process just because it's convenient. Hence, an abstract representation of the relative value of our goods and services. AKA: Money.

1860

What is the point of electricity?  Those stupid light bulbs are bulky and burn out after a few minutes. Candles are much more reliable.

1890

What is the point of automobiles?  They break down frequently, you can't buy gasoline anywhere,  and the roads aren't suitable for them.

1980

What is the point of mobile phones? They are too heavy to lug around and phone booths work just fine.

1992

What is the point of the internet? Nobody has an email address that you can sent an email to, and it's not like it's ever going to be used for anything serious like commerce.

2011

What is the point of bitcoin...?

Agreed.  A barter system works, but currency will always evolve to facilitate transactions, and thats what bitcoin is doing.  It may never become a worldwide standard like people say, but it will still serve a niche market and that's cool. 

As with most people here I use Bitcoin because I believe in it and want to support it.  It will take time for something like this to grow and flourish but I hope Bitcoin will and eventually become an powerful tool that the whole world can benefit from.

Using Bitcoin today is like using the internet in the very early days and, I agree, unless you were excited by the idea, using the internet then was largely pointless.  My advice to those wanting a free, open, international, robust, mature, wealth transfer protocol is to simply wait a few decades.  If you ever decide to start using Bitcoin in the future you'll be more than welcome.

Personally, I get great satisfaction from actually using Bitcoin today.  I've bought hardware with Bitcoin, gambled, donated to various charities and organisations, commissioned work, and even paid for Go tuition.

I agree with all of this with two caveats:

Firstly, without the benefit of hindsight one cannot easily say that Bitcoin will be as important as the other advances you list.  Hopefully it will, I believe it has the potential.

Secondly, I still don't see the point of mobile phones.  The internet works just fine.  :p

Of course nobody can predict this for certain.

Perhaps Bitcoin will turn out like the automobile. Perhaps it will turn out like the airship. Still, it would have been exciting to be part of the airship industry in the 1930s and I would not have wanted to miss it if I was born back then.

Life is all about the journey.

The airship is still too far ahead of its time. The electric automobile was the first one developed before internal combustion, it too was too far ahead of its time. Most great ideas are.

I mainly use Bitcoin to move money from the UK to China - typically I can move about $150 per day with zero fees (actually I usually make a profit of a few $).
If you want to move smallish amounts of money internationally it's by far the cheapest mechanism.

Is there an exchange in China?

btcchina.com - it's linked into the QQ payment system (that links to my wife's Bank account in China). The market depth is small, but the demand is slightly greater than on mt.gox so I can usually sell at a small profit (but my intention is just to move my money, so the profit is a bonus)