Credit and debit cards, along with checks and promissory notes, are not substitutes for cash, because they are based on cash. The government can't just swap them out because the government issues cash, and all those other instruments you mentioned are privately issued and directly based on cash. If you got rid of cash and instituted bitcoin as the primary method of exchange, that would do nothing to fix the ails of society, so you've got a point there that it isn't cash. However, capitalism is innate to human nature. People are capitalistic even without cash. Complaining that there are greedy, corrupt or selfish people is about as logical as complaining that there are people. You can't separate everyone's self-interest from themselves to achieve a non-capitalistic utopia. People have tried to institute such systems (by force, because that's the only way they work) and they are invariably more evil and destructive than our capitalist system.

It's a bit worse than that. Solar City was a big installer and operator in Nevada and was hurt badly by Nevada's policies regarding solar power. The commissioners who are charged with determining fees and such were basically throwing a huge bone to the traditional power generators (not state-owned though, the largest electric utility in the state is actually owned by Warren Buffet's Berkshire) by enacting fees that target people with solar panels. The fees were hefty too, a monthly charge that eliminated all the cost advantages of having solar panels, and in some cases, even more making it worse to use solar power. The worst part is they refused to grandfather in anyone who already had solar panels, so it wasn't just on a go-forward basis. In response to the policy and rule change, Solar City pulled out of the state and laid off all their Nevada workers.

People trade electronic gold the same way they trade bitcoin. Aside from people who buy physical gold and then have to pay to have it stored securely, which is a downside in and of itself, most gold trade is in the form of contracts or shares of a gold-focused ETF, or in derivatives. There's ostensibly no difference between trading a contract for gold and trading a bitcoin. Both have high liquidity and occur without anything physical to touch. The difference I suppose is that bitcoin has a way of verifying ownership (the private key) and a mechanism for seeing transfer (the blockchain), and gold contracts are a centralized investment vehicle in which you have to have faith in the issuer.

But think about the people getting in to bitcoin at this point. If you're new and you're buying now, it's because you think this is easy money. You have no interest in the crypto or the blockchain, you're just a bandwagoner who hears stories about people getting bitcoin rich and you're looking for the same easy success. People like that are terrible for actual adoption, because they're the first to jump ship when it starts sinking. Without a doubt, I believe that there is a group of dedicated people who are pushing for actual adoption of bitcoin because they believe it's a superior system, but they are far outnumbered by the unsophisticated simpletons simply chasing momentum. My person opinion is this is a bubble at this point, and you should proceed at your own peril. The true bitcoin believers won't be able to sustain anywhere near this price when the pretenders start fleeing.

Yeah, but let's be honest here. Most, if not all, of those people just got lucky. You can call it faith or talk about trust and so on, but these folks just got lucky. Bitcoin isn't a business. It doesn't create profits or value, it's just a commodity that has taken on a cult mentality, and the earliest fools who rushed into it got lucky that it blew up as big as it did. There's no magic or special intelligence here, and no assurance the bitcoin bubble isn't going to burst just like the Tulip bubble did.

Profit isn't assured in equity trading either, that's not just a crypto attribute. There is a technical aspect to professional trading, for sure, but most of the people trading crypto are not technical traders. They're just a group of unsophisticated investors who jumped on a bandwagon and got lucky. Bitcoin seems to be an obvious bubble to me, so I think it's only a matter of time before they get burned, and they'll be completely blindsided by it because they all believe they're trading geniuses right now.

It's not funny at all if you have all the facts. JP Morgan didn't buy any shares with its own money. These trades are executed on behalf of their clients. Dimon is anti-bitcoin, and he means it. He's not putting any of the bank's money into it. JP Morgan still runs a business though, and if their clients want to buy bitcoin, they will facilitate that trade for a fee. The average person on this board wants to believe in conspiracies so bad that they are predisposed to take partial information and scream about what a racket it is.

The biggest challenge is the instability of bitcoin's price. It's impossible to store value in bitcoin reliably because the value changes so drastically. Businesses can't afford to conduct business in a currency that could drop so far as to wipe out the profit margin for the business. It's not the businesses themselves that are the problem, it's the volatile nature of bitcoin. Businesses will follow the money. If bitcoin stabilizes and it's cheaper than traditional payment methods, you'll see a lot more retail adoption. But don't expect it in the current environment bitcoin resides.

There's no reason to expect bitcoin to be a magic bullet here that's going to end income equality or more equally distribute wealth. Does any currency have this ability innately? Currency is just a representation of wealth. Changing the medium wealth is denominated in isn't going to make anyone more equal. If you were poor in USD, you're still going to be poor in btc.

I think this is generally because it detects a process running in the background and also communicating with a network that is not apparent. In order to hash, your computer has to send and receive information, and the fact that this is done in a background process probably trips warning bells for anti-virus software, since this is how malware programs generally work to spread spam email. Not a computer expert, but I can see parallels there that may be the reason some program prevent your browser from hashing.

Volatility from an investment perspective is any change over time, not just downward movement. Volatility is usually associated with a negative connotation because people want their investments to maintain a stable value. Wild swings are associated with risk. While it's true that this creates opportunities for traders, it doesn't create stability, which is an important component of a currency. I suppose it comes down to what you want out of bitcoin. Do you want a wild vehicle so you can trade it, or do you want a stable currency so you can use it to transact business? I would consider these two things to be mutually exclusive.

Work going into mining isn't what gives bitcoin value. Value is determined where supply and demand meet. Mining creates bitcoins, but it doesn't directly create the value, and there's no relationship between the amount of money you put into mining and the value of btc.  It just so happens that so much money is put into mining because bitcoin is expensive and it drives people to mine, not the other way around.

As for taxes, whether USD or bitcoin, the government's power to tax is the same. You can't avoid taxes just by switching the bitcoin.

This is not entirely true. Most money creation comes from the fractional reserve banking system, which the Fed can influence on a macro level with policy, but does not control on a micro-level. Because banks only have to hold 10% of their deposits and can lend the rest (thus creating more money), it is essentially the demand for loans which increases the money supply; banks are just a willing instrument on the supply side, since a bank cannot expand the money supply without someone who desires to take out a loan. This is a healthy function of an expanding economy, since the taking of a loan is confidence that the borrower will create more value than the loan is made, thus enabling him to pay it back with interest.

Seems to be an unrelated coincidence. Trying to link causality out of this with absolutely no data to back up the assertion is silly. Also, the conspiracy bent to the rest of the post (central bankers ordered the China btc crackdown) further suggests a rather lazy correlation.  Further confirmation is anything posted by zerohedge, which is the lowest tier of garbage information websites. They cater to people inclined to see non-existent patterns and believe in deep conspiracy theories, or are otherwise never going to be accused of being deep thinkers.

It's really arbitrary to consider bitcoin having "defeated" gold simply because the price of a bitcoin started trading higher than an ounce of gold. Why choose an ounce as opposed to a standard gold bar, which is 400 ounces? When trading large quantities of physical gold, you don't measure in ounces, you measure in gold bars. At 400 ounces and the current gold price of $1306 per ounce, a gold bar is worth about $522,400. But comparing the price of a gold bar to a bitcoin is just as dumb a comparison to determine if bitcoin has "defeated" gold, primarily because they're not in competition, and price comparisons are an arbitrary method to determine utility, which is what is ultimately most important in any comparison.

There is no practical difference between a coin "disappearing" and a coin being unable to be accessed to be spent. From the perspective of supply and demand, an inaccessible coin is indistinguishable from a non-existent coin in that neither will factor into supply. If a coin were to disappear, or simply become inaccessible due to lost private keys, it will decrease the supply available, and decreased supply leads to a higher price as stable demand chasing fewer coins necessitates a higher price (theoretically). Supply isn't the number of coins that are mined, it's the number of coins that are accessible.

Mate, it's a world of difference. The USD depreciates slowly over time. Bitcoin routinely experiences price swings in a single day that the USD has never seen in a month. There's absolutely no way to look at the data and conclude that it experiences volatility that is "not too different" than bitcoin. Going back to 1914, the highest monthly inflation rate on record for the USD is 23.7% in June of 1920, and the last time it's been above 10% in a month was 1981. For the last 30 years, it was been remarkably stable (compared to the inflation it experienced in the early part of the 20th century).

http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-inflation-rates/

Wall street grows ever more certain Bitcoin is a bubble. I can't even say they're wrong. Flirting with $6000 per coin and low economic utility? For as dumb as Jamie Dimon sounds every time he says anything about Bitcoin, the tulip bubble analogy looks less and less inappropriate all the time.


Blockchain utility doesn't make crypto not a bubble. That'll be important to remember for people buying now expecting to make big gains at this cost basis, and there's real risk there.

What distinguishes selling from "panic selling" to you? The gist of your post seems to be that only panic selling is bad. Perhaps what you've identified as panic selling is merely people taking profit off the table or reducing risk by selling out of a speculative asset. That seems completely rational to me, and a rational selling decision is one I wouldn't characterize as one made out of "panic." It seems you're upset that Bitcoin doesn't do anything but always go up, and that expectation is irrational.

This is demonstrably wrong. There is absolutely a way to see what the largest Bitcoin addresses are. The blockchain is a public ledger and all balances are public knowledge. You can search the blockchain for the addresses with the largest balances. As a point of distinction, it's much harder to know which wallets are the largest (a wallet being a collection of individual addresses) because it's not always possible to associated related addresses or link ownership to a common source. But you could easily come up with the addresses that are confirmed millionaires.