It's kind of a ridiculous question because the economy is growing, but that doesn't mean anything for the price of Bitcoin, which is actually the intent of OP's question. GDP is growing, the economy is adding jobs every month... these are measurements of a growing economy. A growing economy could help the price of Bitcoin, but not necessarily because these thing last are not directly explicitly related. The answer to the Bitcoin question is nobody knows, because if these things were knowable, they'd be super rich.

Really? Investing a bunch of money in Bitcoin, which could be up or down 25% in a single day easily, teaches people about saving money better than a savings account at a bank, where he money they put in is substantially likely to remain at a stable value for years? That's ridiculous! Bitcoin doesn't teach people about saving; Bitcoin teaches people about gambling. The act of saving is delaying consumption for future benefit. The act of buyin Bitcoin is guessing that the money you used might be worth more in the future, but has an equal chance of being worth far less. That shouldn't be confused with saving at all.

Everyone with a criticism of Bitcoin is not a fudster and every bit of bad news is not fud. Price doesn't only go down because of fud either. There are legitimate disadvantages to Bitcoin and clearly there are unsustainable trends when the price appreciates as rapidly as it does at time. When the momentum ant sustain itself, the market enters a serious correction, and that's completely normal for markets to experience. People who bought very high didn'tappreciate the risk they were taking on. I don't feel bad for them.

If anything, Bitcoin has more utility with a stable price. T would definitely help with adoption and use as a currency. The people you're attracting now are speculators and gamblers who are trying to profit in the short term off price swings. These are low quality users of the coin. If you lost them because the price was stable, that's a double benefit in my book. If it had a stable value, you'd have more people treating it like a currency, which I thought was the ultimate goal.

Your theory is that if enough ignorant people believe something strongly enough, it's probably important to learn from them? That's paraphrasing, but I think an accurate restatement of what you said. The masses used to believe in all manner of nonsense ranging from spirits to possession to human sacrifice, and that doesn't make any of those beliefs worth anything. I don't view economic ignorance any differently. The great things about facts is that they're true whether or not you believe them. Tyranny of the majority doesn't make something objectively true, it just makes the use of force to impose it more socially acceptable, which is an entirely different discussion.

I've been following the other thread already. I haven't posted anything in response because it's far too conspiratorial to get involved with. There's a lot of high level generalizations that are too vague to even really respond to without responding with equally high level generalizations that are basically just the opposite, and there's hardly a point to that. So I'll continue reading it to see if I have anything to add to the discussion, but thus far I don't.

Whether or not "money and finance are also a free market" doesn't seem to have any bearing in this thread. This discussion is about whether or not steel tariffs as proposed by Trump are going to do more good or more bad, and the details of that are specifically addressed in the posts above. Whether money and finance are free or not, we know with reasonably certainty exactly how steel tariffs will play out under the system as it is.

If more countries used a stable currency, they might have more stable economies, but I don't know that it would have an impact on the world economy. Take Venezuela for example. It's currently suffering rampant inflation that is wreaking havoc on the economy, mostly because the currency in use is worthless. If they were to use the USD, it would bring instant stability because the USD is much more widely accepted than the Bolivar. So it would bring confidence that whatever money you have isn't going to rapidly lose value if you don't spend it. That's not going to magically fix their broken economy, but it will help very much to keep it from worsening because the currency is unstable. As that relates the the world economy, I would think that everyone using the same stable currency would help more than it would hurt, but there might be some adverse consequences for nations that cannot issue their own debt and could have negative economic effects because of that.

Buffet doesn't do technical analysis of stocks, he does value analysis of companies. That's not the same thing. People who do technical analysis focus on nothing about the company and everything about the stock movements and trading patterns, almost in complete regard for the underlying company. Buffet is a pure capitalist. He analyzes companies looking for what is undervalued and he can make more valuable by buying and bringing efficiencies or capital to. Buffet's story is much more about the efficient utilization of capital, what can he do with his money that will earn the most return? That approach necessitates knowing what you buy, which is why he stays away from technologies and industries he doesn't understand.

Does anyone else see the irony of someone saying we have to stop capitalism but in the same post advocating for buying local products (a capitalist endeavor, which would support capitalist enterprise), while also having a personal message that says "Buying Paypal i have bitcoin 15% Preev rate PM!" which is also a capitalist effort?   

I don't think you yourself know what you believe, but apparently you're not as against capitalism as you think you are. Sounds like you're looking for a scapegoat for something and just picked capitalism without a clear understanding of what it is or even what your criticism is of it.

This is again making the same logic fail that I highlighted in my previous post. Your underlying assumption is that because something was once a higher price and is now a lower price, it must as a law eventually go back up to the previous price. So instead of recognizing this as a flaw in the logic, you're instead saying "my assumption isn't wrong, I just bought too early." When you say "wait for the right time after the fall trend stops to buy again" it's the same logical error in taking as a fact that if you just buy at the right time, the price is guaranteed to go up. Nothing in the world works like that; no price is guaranteed to go up from any specific price point.

The market itself decides what has market utility and what doesn't. The fact that everyone tries for the most market utility for their products in pursuit of wealth and not everyone achieves it is proof that the market picks the winners and losers. If you re-read what I wrote, I haven't written off lucky completely, I said it doesn't hurt. But ultimately, market utility of your product and not luck determines the wealth you take from it. Indeed it is NOT very different from saying that your wealth is determined by how much money you have and earn, because that's literally the definition of wealth. I'm just saying that the wealth comes from the market utility of what you as an individual create, not luck.

When Bill Gates built Microsoft, it wasn't luck that he built a tool that everyone just happened to find useful. He built a tool that everyone found useful because he surmised (correctly) that everyone needed it.

I don't know that Obama ever promised free healthcare to anyone. A program that attempts to reign in exploding cost of healthcare is not the same thing as free healthcare, so that's not a like comparison.

As for the tariffs and retaliatory tariffs, yes, we already know this will fail. If the objective is to protect the steel industry, it might help a little. If the objective is to protect as many US jobs as possible, we already know it's a lost battle. You cannot have steel tariffs that protect the steel industry and have no external consequences. The rest of the countries absolutely can (and will) retaliate and have already begun to do so. Tariffs don't happen in a vacuum, and there will be a price to pay for this just like there has been every other time it has happened.

Regulation won't necessarily cause price stability. A volatile price isn't caused by a lack of regulation, it's caused by rampant speculation on the value of the asset. So being regulated won't cut down on the rampant speculation going on. There are plenty of regulated securities and assets that experience high volatility, and that's because expectations on the value of the asset changes rapidly. I would fully expect Bitcoin to continue to be volatile if/when it becomes fully regulated, because people are still going to be trying to profit off it in the short term.

Derivatives aren't exactly a bubble because they aren't exactly assets. (Well, they are, but only under certain conditions.) They're essentially contracts, so to view the value of derivative contracts vs. asset prices isn't an even comparison. Derivative contracts pay out in certain situations, essentially a bet on whether or not something will happen (e.g. if the price of oil drops below $60 per barrel before 2018, you get paid money, and other contracts like that). Saying derivatives are a bubble is like saying Las Vegas is a bubble. It just doesn't make semantic sense because Las Vegas isn't an asset people are buying, it's an activity people are spending money on. That's not to say that derivatives, due to the amount of money involved, aren't a systemic global financial risk, because they absolutely are, but that's not the same thing as a bubble.

These two aspects are particularly troubling about the methodology and logic of the argument. The logical argument made is that nobody should naturally have thousands of times more wealth than anyone else because nobody can have an IQ thousands of times higher than average or be thousands of times taller. First, there's no logical link there. Second, where the author faults nobody having an IQ of 10,000, it ignores the fact that an IQ can't even be 10,000, which is why nobody has achieved it. Similarly, nobody can be as tall as a skyscraper because it isn't physically possible. By using as a model the fact that these things don't happen as a guidepost for what should happen in wealth distribution naturally, it seems the author is comparing two things that can't be compared, and attributing the difference to luck.

Bill Gates isn't rich because he was the smartest man in the world, or because he was lucky. He's rich because he built a product that hundreds of millions of people found useful and paid for. The main driver of wealth isn't luck or intelligence (although either isn't going to hurt), the determining factor is market utility of what you do.

It is spilling over to other countries, and already other industries. Canada, Europe and China said they would introduce retaliatory tariffs in response to the Trump tariffs, and Trump now has said that he would introduce more tariffs on EU cars imported to the US in response to that. So now we have an escalating situation of retaliatory tariffs that is threatening to grow even larger and affect more industries. The larger this grows, the worse it will be. The original steel tariffs are already having a direct effect (aside from the retaliatory tariffs) in that Electrolux has now halted a $250 million investment and expansion plan that was underway in Tennessee:  https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2018/03/05/electrolux-halts-250-million-project-springfield-tenn-after-tariff-announcement/394409002/

Trump made a lot of dumb promises to a lot of people who don't understand that you don't get anything for free, and the rest of the country is going to pay the price for him trying to keep those promises. The price of the steel tariffs will touch far more people in a negative way than the steel tariffs help end up helping in a positive way.

There's no reason to expect that regulation would remove the decentralized nature of crypto. Decentralized doesn't mean "unregulated," it only means that no one person or entity is the sole authority on verifying information in the ledger. Regulation of crypto wouldn't change the fact that the ledger is still decentralized and transparent, allowing anyone to verify information contained within the blockchain themselves, and it wouldn't cause a centralization of the ledger either. It may necessarily reduce anonymity, but that shouldn't affect centralization.

Point two is probably the most important one. And underlying that of course is that people are more comfortable with centralization than decentralization. We live in a society where there is an expectation that people who act unfairly will face consequences, and that the centralized payment facilitators who process transactions will operate fairly. If that weren't the case, companies like PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, Square, etc. wouldn't exist. Accountability is more important to keeping the financial economy working than decentralization.

Doesn't literally every ICO fail the Howey test? Unless you have the rare bird that actually goes the route of registering as a security and a securities offering with the SEC, every ICO is an unregistered security offered or sold in contravention of the federal securities laws, not to mention the state laws.

What would be the point of every corporation having its own currency? That would complicate trade and commerce, not facilitate it. Corporations want to reduce barriers to peoplebiying their products. If every corporation had its own crypto that required you to acquire before you could buy their products, that's just a hurdle towards people buying the product. I don't see this happening because there is no tangible benefit.

It isn't wise to expect the industry to police itself. The fact that such an industry group hasn't naturally arisen suggests that the people involved in this industry aren't so inclined. But it would be a mistake to expect them to self-police the issues that are causing people to raise the point that they should be regulated. Things that need to be regulated are so because they can't be trusted to act appropriately, otherwise there would be no call for regulation in the first place.