The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

[fancy_pants]

I haven't taught English since a bit before I got into Bitcoin. I'm completely focused on digital currencies now. I may not be terrifically good at business, but I can't seem to stop making things. The threshold for adoption is insanely low in Bitcoin (hence the lack of quality standards) so it makes for a pretty good place to test out your business ideas. If you succeed, you get some bitcoins that you can potentially decide to swap out for a more useful currency to you. If you fail, thank everyone for humoring you while you learn, make up for any financial liabilities, and take your lessons with you to your next project.

I can see why people call Bitcoin a "scammer's paradise" for the exact same reason. It's easy to close shop on one ponzi and open up again the next day across the street. Just wait until people start using Ripple IOUs. That's gonna be a show you won't want to miss.

Since you mentioned small time, Ripple, scammer etc.  someone is a couple of weekends away from getting a ripple IOU slot machine up and running ripplebandit.com.  Currently offering several risk levels of dice.

[Crypto Canary]

Almost every sentence if FUD.

No, but bitcon's uncertainty is real. That it has a chaotic exchange rate is fact, not something I'm making up.

[QuestionAuthority]

he needs to be a good boy for a while.

1 Corinthians 13: When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things.

(Relevant quote above should in no way reflect any kind of support of la Biblia, a book of childish stories of make believe.)

Regardless of OP's intentions, people here need to stop seeing questions of legitimacy as an "attack on bitcoin". It wreaks of cultism and "bitcoin is too big to fail" fallacy. The emotional responses to very real criticisms in the OP are embarrassing.

Currency competition is the key. Bitcoin, the proof of concept experimental currency that acts like a commodity, is just one. Ripple is another. Keep 'em coming, and keep on the fence about all of them.

I would agree completely Matt unless you’re just going to bash something every time you talk about it for two years and refuse to learn from the discussion.

BTW OP: I just bought cupcakes from a retail brick and mortar store in San Francisco that accepts Bitcoins at the register. Changes are happening. I'm sorry it's not at the pace that satisfies your need for speed.

[adamstgBit]

I joined awhile back, when Bitcoin was $5 and shortly before the (first?) bubble when it rose to $30 and then deflated back down. I promptly forgot about Bitcoin till I heard of this meteoric rise to $250.

Found my old wallet, and cashed out. That was a nice surprise.

But, after having read some of the recent threads here, the predictions and analysis, for those of you who've joined more recently, let me tell you this:

Apart from a bit more polish surrounding wallets (i.e. Blockchain.info), NOTHING - I mean NOTHING - has changed.

The same confused, disorganized agenda behind Bitcoin exists. There's been no coalescence of goals and idealogy behind Bitcoin to make it anything more than the faux-currency it was back then. Where are the businesses accepting bitcoin? Am I still relegated to buying drugs (Silk Road), some falafel at Mezze Grill, or some alpaca socks?

It's been nearly two years, and a pathetic level of progress. This is still the same motley crew of anarchists buying into the anti-establishment ideology, nerds who get their jollies from thinking they are a part of an emerging new "paradigm", and thieves manipulating and attacking the market.

Some of you may not have had the benefit of perspective, but I can tell you: this is still just a little casino, and nothing more.

DUMBASS!!!

[Matthew N. Wright]

I'm sorry it's not at the pace that satisfies your need for speed.

This is another valid point-- people who criticize the speed at which bitcoin learns from its mistakes and evolves accordingly have short memories. How long did it take solid state hard drives to be perfected? DVDs? The currency of your favorite country? Economies in online games? 4 years is not even the period of time it takes the average stable start-up business to break even (typically 3-5 years). Maybe when Bitcoin has been around as long as Ripple has, we can argue that it's not going anywhere, and frankly, I'll be right there to probably agree with the criticism. As for not going anywhere *now*, that depends on what "going somewhere" means. Price? User adoption? Currency code being accepted by Google?

I think for a small startup project with no formal investment groups backing it for advertising and marketing purposes (like *everything else has*), it's getting an enviable amount of attention. People just need to be more comfortable with the bizarre concepts of Bitcoin before it can increase adoption, and there are still many that I'm not comfortable with myself like potentially losing half my spending power in a day because of market manipulators. I'm also still off-put by the concept of losing my entire savings if my computer gets a virus.

The counter argument to all of this given by bitcoin devs is my point: "people need to learn to ______". Be angry at those people for not learning faster. At least until such time has passed that it is unmistakably bitcoin's issues (deflationary, mining, volatility, etc) and not people's inherent ability to ignore something useful just because it's new and complicated.

Anything can work eventually though, even communism if the right people are involved.

Disclaimer: I do not think Bitcoin will take over the world, destroy governments, cure cancer, etc. (even though I think the ideology behind it, will). I think it will most likely be used up until a point that it is popular enough for competitors to come into the market who will provide better solutions on the same principles, in which case Bitcoin will be more or less abandoned in favor of that, except by a handful of believers who paid too much for their coins to give up. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the smartest people in the world are still not even involved in Bitcoin. Give it time, keep those competitors coming.

[Crypto Canary]

Just like Nagle did!

I always sign up for forums so I can tell everyone what they are doing is lame. I find it an extremely valuable use of my time. No agenda at all, I just like knowing everything and sharing that knowledge with you "little ones".

That's not what I'm saying at all. Bitcoin proved to the world that a cryptocurrency can work, I just think we can do better, and clearly the world agrees. There's a lot more people talking about bitcoin than using it. If a cryptocurrency is to gain wide adoption, it must actually be a currency, and bitcoin by its nature is not, it is a commodity. The reason bitcoin is not being adopted faster is not because very few people know about it, but because a lot of people are aware of this fact. I think that there can be a global cryptocurrency, but it's impossible for bitcoin to be it- as is. Since bitcoin can't really be changed much as released, any improvement would be a new coin, and like I said before, I think we can do better.

[Matthew N. Wright]

I think we can do better.

We can start by not requiring a mining hardware race just to protect the network. Torrents don't need ASICs to protect their files. I realize it's all much more complicated than that, but not when you take the "money generation" part of it. Ripple could be Bitcoin's absolute replacement, as long as we can build a network of *actual* trustworthiness. Right now it'd be a bunch of random dudes on bitcointalk.org who've never met before granting frivolous amounts of trust that could never be recouped if they were scammed.

[Crypto Canary]

We can start by not requiring a mining hardware race just to protect the network. Torrents don't need ASICs to protect their files. I realize it's all much more complicated than that, but not when you take the "money generation" part of it. Ripple could be Bitcoin's absolute replacement, as long as we can build a network of *actual* trustworthiness. Right now it'd be a bunch of random dudes on bitcointalk.org who've never met before granting frivolous amounts of trust that could never be recouped if they were scammed.

Isn't Ripple centralized? I don't think that could do what bitcoin sought to achieve by definition.

[Matthew N. Wright]

We can start by not requiring a mining hardware race just to protect the network. Torrents don't need ASICs to protect their files. I realize it's all much more complicated than that, but not when you take the "money generation" part of it. Ripple could be Bitcoin's absolute replacement, as long as we can build a network of *actual* trustworthiness. Right now it'd be a bunch of random dudes on bitcointalk.org who've never met before granting frivolous amounts of trust that could never be recouped if they were scammed.

Isn't Ripple centralized? I don't think that could do what bitcoin sought to achieve by definition.

I think it's decentralized by nature, but being centralized for the time being (so yea, no way to argue that at the moment). It will not be Bitcoin, it will never be Bitcoin, and it shouldn't try to be Bitcoin though. Bitcoin is supposedly the "trust-less currency". Ripple is the "exchange medium that cannot function without trust" if you will, and frankly, in a world run by social networks and microlending, I think *that* is a much more realistic concept than needing to be a new ASIC every 6 months to keep your "currency" from deflating.