You are making a very big assumption... That Bitcoin itself can be considered stable ground with a stable value that will reflect in changing price as fiat currencies are debased.
That's a pretty large leap of faith.

(The word on gold is that an ounce of gold has always been about the right price for a gentleman's suit. You could dress up for it in Ancient Rome, and you can dress up for the same amount of gold in XXI. century New York. It's not entirely exact, but mostly it stands true. That's why you can speculate with gold against money supply - even though irregularities happen, like what happened in the last few years. However, Bitcoin has no agreed upon value. Over the last few years, a Bitcoin could buy anything from a can of Coke to a used car.)

Well, in the same vein, in the 80s you could have argued that if one day everyone will have a computer in their pockets, it will be made by Commodore.
Where is Commodore today?

As for the flaws, there are three major ones (to rule them all and in the darkness bind them):

Deflationary model.
It's a horrible idea, and a defunct system purposely discarded in the early 20. century. The problem with today's fiat currencies isn't stable inflation, it's manual control by governments in form of easings and tightenings. A currency with a stable, fixed rate of inflation would be preferrable. Deflation favors the lender (stockpiler) as opposed to the borrower (innovator / producer). For example, you buy a farm. The value of the farm will drop with time due to deflation, while the borrowed capital debt will stay constant (and accrue interest). It was bad enough a hundred years ago, believe me you don't want it back.

Messed up mining rewards system
The mining infrastructure, due to the borked rewards system, is ultimately self-destructive, leading the network toward centralization and eventually evaporation.
I've already written about this extensively. It pretty much counteracts all the big pretty words that were said in the manifesto, like "independence" or "decentralization".

Disproportionate holdings of early adopters
Due to the mining curve, the majority of Bitcoin is held by a few early adopters, and this will not change. Unless the goal is to create a new evil financial elite / illuminati to replace the current one, I don't see what good Bitcoin can do for us.

Okay, answer me this.

Who has both the resources AND the motivation to take absolute control over bitcoin through implementing a 51% mining takeover?

The... government, maybe? Bingo!

Look deep into yourselves, and ask the following question:
"Why am I in Bitcoin?"

HONESTLY.

If the response is "I read this awesome cypherpunk article in 2009 about a new libertarian, totally free currency, and I've been an advocate since", my hat's off to you Sir, even though I personally think you're full of it.

If the response is, however, "I read about it in the news, and realized that if I were an early adopter, I could be a focken millionaire by now, so I'm here because it's better late then never", then realize the following:
99% of all the people here, of all the people you're trading with, are here for the SAME REASON.

Be honest with yourself. You want to be part of the next big thing that will make you wealthy. That's your SOLE reason for being here.

There's only one problem with that. Bitcoin is not the next big thing, it's the latest big thing. It's already happened. You can't duplicate the success of early adopters. It's mined dry. The price has been to heaven and back. Once everyone has realized that, and the inherent flaws of the system become apparent, things will just wind down.
All these people will take their money and buy penny stocks or real estate in the asteroid belt or whatever. The miners will take their rigs offline because they won't even pay for their own upkeep anymore.

I'm not saying the idea of cryptocurrency is dead, but I'm certain that if a crypto will in fact make it to widespread adoption, it will not be Bitcoin. Bitcoin has several horrible flaws.

Well, it's not really investment. It's called speculation.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.

As for altcoins, 99% of all the interest around cryptocurrency is generated by a post-event hype of a successful get rich quick scheme that made millionaires of several early adopters (and it's quite clear that the Bitcoin train has left, you can't early adopt it anymore, the rocket fuel's gone).
Most altcoins come from the misguided hope of duplicating that success. Of course, the rate of success is unlikely to come even close to Bitcoin, but it will have a profound negative effect over time to the very idea of cryptocurrency as a whole. It's as if in the late years of the California gold rush, miners could just make up new minerals that are still abundant - and there would be people around to buy those at a premium.

However, given the inherent flaws of Bitcoin, I am sure that if cryptocurrency does go mainstream, it will not be Bitcoin, but some alt that has addressed those flaws. PeerCoin is an interesting step in the good direction, but its money supply scheme is still not inflationary enough to be useful as a currency, and in fact encourages hoarding to a ridiculous degree. Also, the transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake operation sounds shaky at best.

Your use of past tense is misguided. The game is still on.

...or, have IP bans only affect new user registration.

If a spammer's user account is banned, and he can't create a new one from his IP, I guess the ban has served its purpose.

People, having such anti-TOR, and not to mention stupid policies on a forum frequented by cypherpunks and libertarians is quite surprising.

Upon opening the page, I was greeted by a message stated I'm banned for spamming. At first I was a bit shocked, but then hit "new identity", and the message disappeared, apparently I'm not banned anymore.

Dear administrators.

Banning a TOR exit is not only useless in the fight against spammers (note, if I WAS a spammer, I'd still only have to click "new identity"), it's an affront to all that is dear to the Internet freedom fight that bitcoin too is part of. You are making TOR into a public enemy, and not in a very useful way.
If you want to ban TOR, please be honest about it and ban all TOR exit nodes.

Otherwise, I'd suggest you mandate registrations from non-TOR computers (you can use online lists of TOR exit nodes to ban them), but allow all IPs to log in to existing accounts.

Yep. Once the system is compromised, both the "crypto" and the "coin" evaporates out of cryptocoin. It will just be worthless random numbers on an HDD somewhere.

Most miners are looking at Bitcoin as a way to make some quick money. The lifespan of newly designed rigs is counted in months. Have no doubt about it, once the rewards drop, hashing power will dry up like a desert riverbed after rain.

The system looks inherently broken, and there doesn't seem to be a way of fixing it. Litecoin didn't do much to address any of this, Peercoin was an interesting idea, but it's eventually a dog with its own fleas.

All of you who say one should buy coins instead of mining rigs...

Do you understand what you are saying?

I mean, do you really get it, what you're implying?

Even saying it's a conspiracy of corporations...

Mining IS Bitcoin. The reason Bitcoin operates, exists, is that there is processing capacity allocated to it.

If mining becomes a monopoly, Bitcoin becomes compromised, and thus worthless.

If mining stops, Bitcoin becomes unusable, and thus worthless.

If you do not think it's a good idea to mine, then you should be SELLING your coins asap, because you're saying the roof is coming down, and soon.

Well it's their loss.

I mean sure, nobody says not to have an on-line wallet. But if you have a large sum of money (more than the average amount of cash you carry with you), you should put it on a paper wallet.

Having $100 in an online wallet can make it easier to order pizza for bitcoin, or whatever.

And there's nothing strange or new about this. Some 40 years ago, bearer bonds and materialized stocks were still a thing, and most rich people kept their reserves in a private safe somewhere in the form of paper.

If you have 100 bitcoins, keeping the code on any electronic device would be madness. Keeping them on an online server would be... Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck flipping out insane.

Print it out, seal it in an envelope, stamp it down with your family signet ring, or whatever, and keep it in a floor safe.

I wonder why it is that 90% of spammers and scammers have trouble with punctuation and newlines...

Think Wild Western bank robbery.

Someone hacks into their system, and drains all the coins. You're patently screwed then.

I haven't yet seen a major alt coin with a constant linear money supply. It makes perfect sense to have predictable low inflation over a long term. It would make for a much more stable and much more ethical system.

It still rules out the deliberate easings that central banks use to debase fiat currency.

I have a thing I want to sell. There's a guy who wants to buy it. We'll settle in bitcoin.

What happens? Well, the situation is similar to two criminals doing an exchange, each with a gun pointed at the other. It's a modified prisoner's dilemma. If one shoots the other, he gets both the money and the drugs.

If I ship before I get the bitcoins, the buyer can just walk away with the merchandise, and never pay me. Since bitcoin transactions are untrackable, there is no way for me to legally prove that I haven't been paid.

If he pays first, I can walk away with the bitcoins, and never ship. He has absolutely no way of proving that he ever paid me.

The only solution would be using a payment processor, but that takes away the very essence of why bitcoin was created in the first place, as it brings "banks" back into the business...

It may (will) undermine hashing distribution, and eventually destroy bitcoin.

"Mining is for an elite" = security and anonymity has been compromised.

Unless people start paying transaction fees asap.

Not much, apart from...
1. abandoning BTC in favor of a new currency specifically engineered to counteract this (Litecoin didn't do enough in this regard)
2. making BTC transaction fees a thing, and restoring profitability to small mining operations.

If you send BTC without a fee, you're killing BTC.

Nope. The stability of bitcoin is determined by live supply and demand. Lost money is dead money, it doesn't go anywhere. In a way it has an effect, as it lowers the potential live supply.

Practically, you could generate a paper wallet, put it in a treasure chest and bury it on an island in the Pacific. If it is found two hundred years later, and bitcoin still exists, then that money will be there waiting for whoever has the code.

The money belonging to lost codes will keep waiting until the cryptography is cracked, or someone finds the code.

It doesn't create income, so it doesn't have intrinsic value. It can be a good store of arbitrary market value though, due to its utility.


Erm... no. That is a bond.
A stock is a fractional ownership in an enterprise, which is, if you chose the stock well, a productive entity in the real economy with employees, market and assets.


In theory... But have you seen stampeding cattle? And stampeding humans?

Well, when dealing with charts, you need to look at the peculiarities, the personality of the data series. The money supply chart has sudden jumps followed by plateaus where the supply levels off. Also, it's nearly monotonous rising.
This indicates a series of consecutive easings.

If it were a price chart, I'd say it was a commodity during a time of slowing production or growing demand. It looks like a very rational chart, very fundamental.

A mania however, tulips or dotcom stocks or bitcoin, look different. They have increasing peaks with valleys ("bear traps") inbetween, and each peak looks like a heavenly spire thrusting toward the sky in comparison with earlier ones. They are jagged, as they aren't ruled by fundamentals or logic, but by emotion - greed and fear.


If we assume that bitcoin WILL be widely adopted as a currency...
Actually, we'd have to sum the bitcoin "GDP", that is the size of the bitcoin-based real economy, and compare the money supply to that in order to get a proper valuation.
As the current size of the bitcoin-based real economy is rather small, and is in fact seriously suffering from price volatility (you can no longer determine prices in bitcoins - you need to determine them in USD, and use the hourly exchange rate), those numbers are pure science fiction at this point.


From Wikipedia: In finance, intrinsic value refers to the actual value of a company or stock determined through fundamental analysis without reference to its market value. It is also frequently called fundamental value. It is ordinarily calculated by summing the future income generated by the asset, and discounting it to the present value.

Bitcoin generates no income, and as such, does not have intrinsic value by definition. It has a market value, that is based on people who are willing to accept it in exchange for goods or fiat currency (as of today, more fiat currency than goods).

True, I do not believe in bitcoin. I am not an antagonist however, I see it as a possibility. There are things that seem worrying, especially the current media hype surrounding it, and the apparent connection between price and (social) media attention.

Also, currently it seems to be a fad to glorify deflationary systems. Studying the history of US finance might dispel at least some of the halo from that school of thought. Deflationary systems punish those who borrow and invest in real production capacity (like machinery or farmland), and reward those who hoard money and lend it out. It can be (and has extensively been) argued to be the most antisocial monetary system conceivable.

(Honestly, if Bitcoin mining speed was constant as opposed to decreasing, and the potential money supply over infinite time unlimited, I'd have better hopes for it as a currency. Of course it would be a far inferior get-rich-quick scheme. )