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June 17, 2011, 11:52:16 AM |
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So here's a question to the well established, knowledgeable, speculators and coinkind:
Seeing as bitcoins are quite a "free market" being driven purely by the shakey panic prone will of the early adopters, what of the attention of sharks?
I mean...with people making blogs about "why I'm investing all my money into bitcoins" and "300000000% growth!!" surely the professionals in the investment banks on wall street will take a gander, and decide to very easily crush the market to gain control? It seems a bit wild-westy at the moment, relying on nothing but trust that other people won't be jerks.
I mean...these are people experienced in harsh wall-street conditions, and watching the BTC/USD charts the last few days I've seen how fragile it is to manipulation. Even 1 well funded person can cause wild volatility, selling violently, causing panic to build their pie slice, etc.
Isn't this the biggest risk to bitcoins success? I don't really see a natural defense mechanism (except collapse and death) to combat all its coins to still manage to find their way into the pockets of people it was designed to avoid. What am I missing? The current holders and investors can only stomach so much before they decide to take whatever they can and leave.
I've noticed DDoS attacks happen quite frequently to pools, too...obviously if your network can hash quickly enough, knocking out competitors for a few hours means all the BTC are yours during that time (at least what you can hash in time, an unfair advantage). No big deal when BTC are worth a few dollars, but eventually if it survives, that block could be worth hundreds of thousands, or millions. I understand its difficult to achieve, but it's not impossible, and its lucrative. What is there to stop this happening? Because it will, if there's nothing. I know difficulty will be at play, but I don't think it'll stop people doing this.
I understand that the end goal of BTC is to build an economy that actually lets you trade your BTC for goods/services, but if the BTC production can be controlled, or encouraged into certain wallets (through bullying, not cheating), until you can get the majority of what you want via BTC and not need to transfer in and out of $$ etc, won't it just turn businesses trying to build stable prices off?
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