Bitcoin Forum

How many of you REAL MEN would put 95% of your entire life, solemnly and nearly absolutely swear on Bitcoin and its success? How many of you?

As for me, I do.

Who else?

While I not only vouch for bitcoins but also dedicate a good deal of my time and money to it, the simple fact that we get ourselves a pledge of allegiance and start thinking in absolute terms will drive away all the critic thought, thus making everything vulnerable and untrustworthy... but that doesn't mean it can't still be a good business model, look at all the religions out there that prosper.
/me docks

All currencies prosper on trust.

Here are the  assumed facts:

-Bitcoin is sound in concept and design.

-Bitcoin is not in the hands of pure greed nor corrupt power.

-Nothing can stop Bitcoin unless you eliminate all of its individual participants.

The only thing that can truly stop Bitcoin is a massive societal resentment which is highly improbable.

Bitcoin prosperity is almost certainly assured.

The only attack I can see is someone who wants to waste A LOT of money. Destroy the market. Make all bitcoiners wealthy and buy them all up.

I wouldn't. Bitcoin will certainly be replaced by something better at some point, even if it doesn't fail sooner.

Well, I don't see many Satoshi geniuses running around.

You don't need that level of genius.  Stand on the shoulders of giants before you.

I don't believe in guarantee.

You don't swear on a tool, you swear on an ideology.

It's a good thing we're excluding women, I hear they have cooties.

+1, especially within the field of CS things go fast and get replaced by better things (even if it is derived from bitcoin).


They are, just not in the field of CS/financial. These geniuses fill up a niche that nobody thinks of filling up, plus they need an open mentality to share their thoughts (most don't, can't or are considered crazy).

I've got a lot staked in Bitcoin, but I'm not nearly 95% sure of it.

It'll be interesting if there is another strictly better distributed cryptocurrency anytime soon. It surely won't sit around unnoticed for a year like Bitcoin did.

How about we just look out for each other "band of brothers" style so no matter if the tools go by the wayside the human beings still remain?

Without all of you supporting it bitcoin is just a piece of code. Remember that.

*carries his bitcoins in a man bag.

I've thought about that from time to time, and I cannot imagine any disadvantage of Bitcoin that can be improved without changing the essential nature of the currency.

Sure there are some minor issues. For example, an average block time of 10 minutes might not be optimum, but these are relatively insignificant things won't make-or-break a currency.

There are major issues too. For example, that it's difficult for non-technical users to secure their wallet. But all the major issues seem to be amenable to incremental improvement. It's just a matter of people putting in enough time and work to fix these things.

When you add Bitcoin's "first mover" advantage to that, I think it's highly unlikely that another distributed cryptocurrency will overtake Bitcoin any time soon.

Because Bitcoin's fundamentals are strong, a pledge of allegiance is irrelevant. And if Bitcoin's fundamentals were weak, a pledge of allegiance would be useless. So I respectfully decline Atlas's invitation to "put 95% of my life on it".

I would not put 95% of my life into any single thing. So call me a girly-man.

I agree. There are many things that I have (silver, USD, gold, guns) because they have value. Nobody should put 95% of their eggs in one basket. Although I can't complain, because the little bit of Bitcoins that I hold have more value because of these people.

Thank you for your sarcasm, lightrider. Glad to know I'm not alone.

As for the rest of you savages, if you want to remain marginalized and howling naked in the far and barren hinterlands of the internet, beating your cryptographically hardened chests with your bitcoin clubs imbued of black magic, adorning yourselves around dim fires with alpaca, drawing golden ratios in the sand with your primitive calipers, feel free to do just that. Enjoy your lives far from Rome's glowing light, short and brutish though they may be. And in the far distant future of 2021, long after your sideline civilization has been dusted from the roiling surface of the world, a woman will walk down by the riverbank and happen to pick up a bitcoin buried in the sand, puzzle over it for a bit and throw it back into the flow of the water - a primitive token as useless as the ancient old "warriors" who used it, long dead now.

If you exclude the biggest portion of humanity from being pumped about bitcoin, don't be surprised when we all turn our backs.

What is your net worth?  So your 95% of your fortune is in BTC?

pic or it didn't happen.

I'd have to be quite drunk.

But seriously, bitcoin is brilliant and the world needs it, yet there are quite some easily imaginable ways in which it could fail.

such as?

Bugs/exploits discovered. Government prosecution. Someone gets enough computing power to double spend with impunity.

What do you mean?

WTF is BK?

Well said.

Thank you.

Sexism will not serve to push bitcoin forward, only hinder it.

It's a technically sustainable model...that's why I'm here. Wink Anything is better than the fractional reserve monetary system...even exchanging beads and shells. I'm in.

Quite possibly... He was recently asking for advice on going to college.  I applaud your boldness Atlas, but you have a lot to learn.  For someone claiming to be a nihilist, you sure want to believe in bitcoin.

So your definition of a RealMan^TM (whatever that means) is someone who takes an irrational risk based on ideology rather than a sober cost-benefit calculation.  

That's romantic and cute, and I kind of admire your optimism.

But personally I prefer not to put 95% of my wealth behind a technology that may be brilliant, but is still in beta stage and has lots of possible failure scenarios.

I guess that makes me a non real man.  :(  

Just start convincing people that it contains a backdoor. Present some crypto mumbo-jumbo, some snippets of random computer code, etc as evidence. How many will make any attempt to verify the claim - or even really understand it - before simply going "zOMG BITCOIN IS A SCAM!!1!cos(0)"? Who is this mysterious Satoshi guy and why does he remain anonymous? Etc.