2013-04-03 Forbes: Four Reason You Shouldn't Buy Bitcoins

[n8rwJeTt8TrrLKPa55eU]

In spite of the troll title, this is actually a useful article by Tim Lee wrt. some potential worst-case risks, I'd been looking for something like this to give to nontech friends and family suddenly manifesting frothy interest purely due to the rising BTC price.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timothylee/2013/04/03/four-reason-you-shouldnt-buy-bitcoins/

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[kiba]

*When bitcoin price is not rising like crazy*

Friends and family said that it's scam!

*When bitcoin price is rising like crazy*

Friends and family wants in!

The problem with them family and friends is that they didn't bothered to understand how bitcoin works, why is it good, and why it might be bad.

[caveden]

On Lack of applications, that's a non-issue. The amount of applications Bitcoin has today is orders of magnitude higher than what it had 2 years ago. And it will likely keep rising.

On Scalability, it's perfectly possible to make it scalable. Of course, that will likely provoke a fork, with some people gripping strongly to the unscalable version. That will provoke price turbulence, bad press, but in the end, the scalable Bitcoin will rise out of all this mess as it has done before.

On Losses, it's a true problem, but it will become much less relevant once devices like Trezor are easily available.

Regulation is definitely the strongest of the risks he cites. It's unpredictable how far governments can go.

[n8rwJeTt8TrrLKPa55eU]

The problem with them family and friends is that they didn't bothered to understand how bitcoin works, why is it good, and why it might be bad.

Yes, unfortunately they all ignored my advice to buy when the price was $5, now they want to buy in at 3 digits. And their PCs are always riddled with virii which makes holding a local wallet impossible.  From past experience money and friends/family don't mix well, I know I'm gonna get implicitly blamed if anything goes wrong or the BTC price drops.  That's why an article like this is useful as a kind of prospectus to make sure they understand that the whole thing is not just a one-way rocket ride to a mansion, yatch, and supercar.  All of us here, who have been living and breathing Bitcoin for many months, know that the concerns in the article should disappear or get workarounds in the best case scenario, but Bitcoin is an unprecedented experiment and I don't want my personal relationships soured if the best case doesn't materialize.

[Rothgar]

Regulation is definitely the strongest of the risks he cites. It's unpredictable how far governments can go.

It's funny that a reason not to buy a mildly regulated currency is that it might be regulated. 

And people will still say that regulation is good.

[hazek]

A decent article I thought, for once some fair criticism and sound caution against headless pumping of money into something most who do it don't have a clue what it is or how it works.