Scaling bitcoin to world economy is unrealistic.

[mobodick]

Yes, and with current progress of technology, how long do you think that will last?

By that reasoning, buggy-whip factories should have gone out of business as soon as word of the internal combustion engine got out.

Business is conducted on what is, not what might be.

Wait, i never said ANYTHING against buggy-whips.  

Also, i don't see how this applies to the fact that humanity is developing technology that makes it feasable to read someones memories.
Bitcoin is not nearly the size to 'conquer the world'.
Meanwhile technology marches on.
Before bitcoin is large enough to be a viable world currency it will, just like buggy-whips, already be put into the niche economy of 10-year old pony cuddlers and SM-dungeon owners.

[Domrada]

mobodick, I haven't read this entire thread.

But as far as your OP goes: you point out the one problem I have with bitcoin. It may be more or less of a problem than I realize, but it is a problem.

It's not a bug. It's a feature.

[Daily Anarchist]

Wow! There's a whole lot of economic ignorance in this thread. Please people, do yourselves a favor...

http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Henry-Hazlitt/dp/B001G8NW6Y/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1347814115&sr=8-2&keywords=economics+in+one+lesson

[finkleshnorts]

mobodick, I haven't read this entire thread.

But as far as your OP goes: you point out the one problem I have with bitcoin. It may be more or less of a problem than I realize, but it is a problem.

It's not a bug. It's a feature.

I know this.

And I can't really think of a better form of money. I also can't deny that a fixed monetary supply is not without its own issues.

[mobodick]

So bitcoin will not solve our global social problem of skewed economic relations, it will accumulate even more wealth in an even smaller number of pockets.

Isn't that they way it's always been ever since the first caveman used a weapon to bring down dinner or picked all the berries in an area, but only shared them in exchange for services.  Technology is not going to supercede our nature.

No it's from when mankind first started farming and ownership of land became important.  Before that as hunter-gathers your only possessions were what you could carry. Mankind lived under a form of anarco-socialism for most of its history. Mankind has only lived under capitalism for a blink of an eye and with the current credit-crunch and banking crises things may be changing again?

Bullshit.
Mankind stems from monkeys and all monkeys (including humans) have a strong social hierarchy.
Strongest monkey gets the best food and fucks the most females.
There is nothing 'anarco' or 'socialistic' about the human situation.

If you want anarchy then look at how lions survive as family groups.
Humans don't work that way.

Deny over 200,000 years of mankind living as hunter gathers then.  Anyway I don't think you really know what anarcho-socialism really means    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_anarchism

I'm not denying it, i'm just saying that people were always in a social hierarchy and especially in the hunter-gatherer situation that hierarchy of power dictated anything of value.
There was no anarchy and struggles for power were common.
There is no freedom if you're the bitch of the group.
You see the past as way to rosy. Reality in that time was harsh and lawless.
It was completely driven by physical dominance.
Humans dominating nature.
Stronger humans dominating weaker ones.
No fucking socialism.
Social anarchism is an artefact of modern society. No part of it goes further than a few hundred years.
Hunter gatherers lived hundreds of thousands of year ago.
They had no concept of socio-economics.
Strongest takes all and a group is stronger than an individual.
That was the system.

You are right insofar that humans only became aware of this situation when they settled and started to accumulate possesion.

Humans lived as hunter-gathers until less than 5,000 years ago.  There was no wars or power struggles other than those that exist in extended family life.  Just because you don't like the word "socialism" and you don't know what Anarcho-Socialism really means you can't argue with the basic human condition for most of its existence.

Edit:  Anyway this is off-topic and I did say "a form of Anarcho-Socialism".

What?
You've got to be kidding me.
So monkeys, of which we know they conduct wars, evolved into this peacefull little race called humans which lived a happy little life untill they became even less monkey and started to assert themselfs just like monkeys do?
Did not occur in reality.

I never said i dont like the word socialism, or anarchism.
I'm just strongly stating that that is not how monkeys (of any kind) organise socially.
The whole of the past 10000 years was devoted to a struggle of humanity to free itself from these local tyranies by increasingly abstracting them away from their environment.
It was less than 500 years ago that most peoples ass was owned by their landlord.
These social changes happen slowly as they require genetic change.
Selection works over generation and that is the level at which humanity needs to change to make all these ideals come true.
Untill then you can count on greed and power to rule the world.

[mobodick]

 author=mobodick
But when the incentive is to not spend too much, who is going to take the risk of creating work for poor old father to build up his pension?

People have invested since WAY before fiat currencies and inflation. People are investing BTC NOW on GLBSE. People are working at mtgox NOW.

So to answer your question: "Historically speaking, going back infinite years or just 1; someone".

You are the one that cannot explain why people will NOT invest/spend BTC or other deflationary currency or why they are doing it now contrary to your theories.

People in history used to invest, but not nearly as much as now.
200 years ago you would not be able to go to a bank and ask for a loan to buy a house.
Now it is standard practice and embedded in our society.

So only 'someone' investing will not be enough to keep the economy spinning.

Most of the people who are now involved in bitcoin see it as play money.
They try out lots of things with big amounts of their stash.
When bitcoin rises further in value they will naturally become much more conservative.
Also, a lot of the people involved in bitcoin are young inexperienced people so their behaviour tends to be more reckless.
The first thing that will happen to bitcoin if it starts being accepted is that the general user demographic will include much more conservative people then it does now.
And conservative people will not be as reckless as the wild bunch here.
You cannot judge bitcoins future performance by it's pre-puberal frenzy.

[mobodick]

I am a blood donor too, is it really so hard to believe that I actually care about other people and genuinely think BTC would help them out?

No, but unfortunately that is not how most people think.
And it doesn't take a lot of people to screw up a system that is based on ideals.
It has been a problem throughout human history.
While i think it is important to have ideals, it is also unrealistic to think these ideals can be applied to the current situation, however good you think these ideals are.
So thinking about bitcoin developing along the lines of an ideal will not match reality and it is important to think in what ways reality will be different from the ideal.

[mobodick]

The OP question is indeed very important. I have some doubts, too.

Either the time will prove the Bitcoin idea as wrong and noone will care (and current early adopters will loose).
Or it will prove as fundamental and great idea - but then it will be STOLEN.

You may ask how one could stole Bitcoin. Simply. Setup alternative currency and offer you multi-million user base (Apple users, US tax payers, etc.) an easy way how to cooperate in new virtual currency based on similar ideas, but INCOMPATIBLE with current Bitcoin.

Check the IQ distribution curve. There is not enough geek to fight with average Joe.

Yes, i agree.
If the world will adopt a form of cryptocurrency it will not be bitcoin but some institutionalised state regulated form of crytocurrency.
That is how things stand at the moment and i dont see this changed without a complete world revolution that destroys most of todays economic value.

[Severian]

Bitcoin is not nearly the size to 'conquer the world'.

That's a poor metric to use for any tool's value. The rial doesn't rule the world but is still reliably used by tens of millions of people and isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

I don't think anyone rational expects bitcoin to take over the world. It's a new tool in the toolbox, and a damn good one.

[lovendahl]

Wow! There's a whole lot of economic ignorance in this thread. Please people, do yourselves a favor...

http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Henry-Hazlitt/dp/B001G8NW6Y/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1347814115&sr=8-2&keywords=economics+in+one+lesson

You can do better than that..
Here it is free of charge :

http://www.fee.org/library/books/economics-in-one-lesson/

great book.. a must read !

[justusranvier]

I don't think anyone rational expects bitcoin to take over the world. It's a new tool in the toolbox, and a damn good one.

I expect Bitcoin to do to currency what Bittorrent did to old media, what websites did to the newspaper industry, what VoIP did to landline phones and what email did to the postal service.

[Severian]

I don't think anyone rational expects bitcoin to take over the world. It's a new tool in the toolbox, and a damn good one.

I expect Bitcoin to do to currency what Bittorrent did to old media, what websites did to the newspaper industry, what VoIP did to landline phones and what email did to the postal service.
[/quote]

I'm right there with you. But we still have newspapers, old media, landlines and postal mail.

I take exception to using the metric of domination as the measure of success. Bitcoin has already succeeded. Now it just has to mature.

[justusranvier]

I'm right there with you. But we still have newspapers, old media, landlines and postal mail.

For that most part that will only be true until the last generation that grew up without the Internet dies.

[Severian]

For that most part that will only be true until the last generation that grew up without the Internet dies.

Surely so. But even now, the internet is only used by about a third of humanity. That number will rise as time progresses, but there will always be a segment of humanity that won't have any meaningful connection to the network.

It will be a long time, if at all, before the old infrastructures are completely gone.

[Adrian-x]

No it's from when mankind first started farming and ownership of land became important.  Before that as hunter-gathers your only possessions were what you could carry.  Mankind lived under a form of anarco-socialism for most of its history.  Mankind has only lived under capitalism for a blink of an eye and with the current credit-crunch and banking crises things may be changing again?

+1

This is so bang on. Things are changing we don't have to do much to make it happen Ben my boy, is doing it for all of us.
I predict even the concept of land ownership will change.

[Adrian-x]

It's almost as good as a ponzi...

I will go one further and say most of the value is comparable to a ponzi.
The economy needed to justify the current value has not developed yet, leaving a collapse as a viable option.

There is the economic circumstances in which Bitcoin has been developed and don't be fooled the timing is perfect.

Humans has to evolve so far as to adopted the wheel. Those idiots who thought it a fad all had to come around and pick it up later or fade away to Darwinian selection. Bitcoin will be that wheel, and if it isn't, I still have faith in Darwinian selection,  and my kind will disappear.

[Adrian-x]

There is no point in arguing bitcoin economics with people like DeathAndTaxes, Realpra, or evoorhees. They are heavily invested in this system and it is in their best interests to make sure that the wool stays pulled down.

We are all investigated in it, what is there to hide?

[Adrian-x]

No, what i'm saying is that if bitcoin grows to globally significant proportions that it's value would be so incredibly astronomically high that anybody who now owns even a small amount of bitcoin could in the future spend only a very tiny fraction of their coin and buy themselfs anything.
So in that situation the 'early investors' (basically all of this community) will get to keep most of their 50% of coin and put it in action against 99.9999% of the rest of the world that will own the other 50%.

This was my big problem with Bitcoin, think about this. The success of Bitcoin is not guaranteed, it has to succeed in a free market system. If it is horded and not distributed it will die. If anything goes out of balance it will die.

But being so well designed all the problems self correct you don't have to do anything except depend on your greed to make it succeed.

IE. Sell your Bitcoin when you think the system is about to fail (and so will all the other greedy people in this community.)   If it really looks bad and I am sure it may, the "old" coins will flood the market too. If things stay healthy the people will continue to save.  And if you see benefits in buying Bitcoin buy some, that benefit you see is part of the distribution process. You must not buy in to Bitcoin if it is going to fail, because that would be charity for those (clueless Austrian cripto, anarco egnaramuses.) of us that understand the problems with the fiat system.

[Adrian-x]

Tomorrow you could do a global wealth reset.  Blam everyone in the world has exactly the same amount of wealth.  Within 10 years you would see the distribution pattern being reformed.  Within 2-3 generations it would look remarkably similar to the situation today. 

There is one big difference with a fixed currency like Bitcoin, this will happen but we won't end up with the poor we have today.

An increase in the money base (money inflation) transfers wealth from the working class to the money class by means of the Cantillon Effect. It is not an ideology of Bitcoin users that prevents this, but a biproduct of a fixed money supply.

Cantillon Effect.
When the money supply is increased it affects relative inflation. That is the disproportionate rise in prices among different goods in an economy over time, that will benefit those who are first to receive the money and diminish the wealth of those in the economy who have to experience price inflation before earning the new money.

[Etlase2]

We are all investigated in it, what is there to hide?

The flaws of bitcoin, of course.