Why Bitcoin is doomed to fail, and there's nothing you can do about it.

[Peter R]

Harro,

Please un-noobify me I have been involved with bitcoin for 2 years and know many things about it!! THANKSSS

JohnyBigs (original poster), I understand that you've been involved with bitcoin for a long time, and perhaps you are upset by selling your coins too early.  But don't you see: you can still be an early adopter.  And with your experience, you probably have a lot to offer to help us advance this game-changing technology.  

Bitcoin gives everyone a second chance.  

Peter I see that you cannot make any arguments against the posting, so you do the typical I can't argue with what you said, so I will attack your character.

It's the typical Bitcoiner elitist complex. There's still time for you to come back to the rest of the 99% which I thought the movement Bitcoin was about, I guess it's still the same scum 1%

I think a lot of people are passionate about bitcoin for ideological reasons.  We feel that it will make the world a better place for us and our children.  

The excellent side benefit is that by supporting the bitcoin system, you can also make money.  This is actually quite important because it empowers early adopters (who are so inclined) to take risks and shift their careers to focus on bitcoin development.  It is a really amazing process if you think about it: instead of raising cash through angel investors of VCs, the market "rewards" early adopters with the funds necessary to advance the very technology they are passionate about!

Yes, early adopters who hold their coins have done well, and will possibly do very well in the future.  I don't think this is any less ethical than early innovators in technology companies making big money.  People who committed their time and capital early in the game risked more, and they deserve to benefit more.  

Lastly, bitcoin already is benefitting people in the 99% (most of us here)--it will continue to benefit the 99%: even those who don't adopt it till the very end.  Bitcoin has the potential to cut-out so many middle men and friction from our economy.  In a world where bitcoin becomes a global currency, people's paycheques would go a lot further due to these efficiency improvements.  

For the record: I am envious of early adopters too.  My mom sent me a write-up on bitcoin in 2009 and said she wouldn't mind "buying a hundred bucks of it, just in case."  I didn't even *read* the article!  I immediately wrote it off as some stupid idea that would never work.  If I had just read for 10 minutes to understand the mining process, the public-private key encryption, and what bitcoin actually is, I would be able to work full-time on it now.

P.S.: I didn't write up arguments against your posting because I just spent an hour writing up arguments against your and other peoples' postings in the zero-confirmations thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=371751.msg3980937#msg3980937).  Your critiques in this thread have been argued against in this forum for years and I felt it was less important that I address them.  Instead, I hoped to show lurkers on this forum that a common trait among posters who seem over-zealously negative about bitcoin is that they sold their coins.

[1714682106]

1714682106

[1714682106]

1714682106

[1714682106]

1714682106

[1714682106]

1714682106

[1714682106]

1714682106

[jbreher]

Yes so easy that's why all the solutions exist in the Bitcoin ecosystem today, right? Please explain to me how your going to counter point #1, you in your boxers vs. Trillion dollar governments and world economies?

I can't even tell what point #1 _is_. Perhaps you might explain how the fact that 'big guys willing to use violence to stay in power' leads directly to 'bitcoin is doomed to fail'.

If you can't understand point #1 you shouldn't even be in this thread lol, no offense, but if your serious, I don't know what to tell you.

Point #1 is the 1% will not give up their power and control to the 99% how hard is that to understand?

Oh, I understand your implication. I agree with you that those currently in power will stop at nothing to so remain.

Now explain to me _how_ they will destroy bitcoin.

[bitcoinpsftp]

This thread is a tribute to all the haters in modern history:

1.  The car is a fad.  Horses will never stop seeing use.
2.  Telephone?  that's a child's toy, it'll never become mainstreem.
3.  Television?  People will get tired of staring at a little box in their house.

Could go on forever.

[augustocroppo]

The excellent side benefit is that by supporting the bitcoin system, you can also make money.

How?

Yes, early adopters who hold their coins have done well, and will possibly do very well in the future.  I don't think this is any less ethical than early innovators in technology companies making big money.  People who committed their time and capital early in the game risked more, and they deserve to benefit more.

Your are doing a contradictory statement. People which bought BTC at the early years did not have a bigger risk when compared with the people buying today. That people had to spend less capital to buy BTC and the risk to loose the amount invested was lower than today.

Lastly, bitcoin already is benefitting people in the 99% (most of us here)--it will continue to benefit the 99%: even those who don't adopt it till the very end.  Bitcoin has the potential to cut-out so many middle men and friction from our economy.

How?

[dewdeded]

This thread is a tribute to all the haters in modern history:

1.  The car is a fad.  Horses will never stop seeing use.
2.  Telephone?  that's a child's toy, it'll never become mainstreem.
3.  Television?  People will get tired of staring at a little box in their house.

Could go on forever.

+1 bro, very correct.

[augustocroppo]

This thread is a tribute to all the haters in modern history:

1.  The car is a fad.  Horses will never stop seeing use.
2.  Telephone?  that's a child's toy, it'll never become mainstreem.
3.  Television?  People will get tired of staring at a little box in their house.

Could go on forever.

+1 bro, very correct.

Nope.

He is completely wrong.

Comparing apples with oranges is not an appropriate argument.

[bitcoinpsftp]

This thread is a tribute to all the haters in modern history:

1.  The car is a fad.  Horses will never stop seeing use.
2.  Telephone?  that's a child's toy, it'll never become mainstreem.
3.  Television?  People will get tired of staring at a little box in their house.

Could go on forever.

+1 bro, very correct.

Nope.

He is completely wrong.

Comparing apples with oranges is not an appropriate argument.

I am not wrong at all.  OP is scared that bitcoin will fail because people in power don't like change.  My examples are ALL of huge changes that have indeed happened.  Changes in currency will eventually ahppen whether people like it or not.

[augustocroppo]

I am not wrong at all.  OP is scared that bitcoin will fail because people in power don't like change.  My examples are ALL of huge changes that have indeed happened.  Changes in currency will eventually ahppen whether people like it or not.

...and wrong again.

The OP is just arguing why he thinks the Bitcoin software is not going to be used by a considerable part of the planet population.

Your comparison is nothing more than a fallacy.

Yes, I agree that people will change the way they use monetary currencies, but that alone is not an indication that a large part of the planet population is going to adopt the Bitcoin software to support their spending habits.

Sometimes people like you forgot that many people in this planet still do not have the conditions to buy a car, a telephone or even a TV. So their are far away to even think to buy a computer for the sake to use the Bitcoin software.

[QuestionAuthority]

Why is every popular post on this forum about Bitcoin failing? Why does anyone respond to these posters? Isn't it a better idea to just let them sink to the bottom of the cesspool and focus on more positive things?

[Peter R]

The excellent side benefit is that by supporting the bitcoin system, you can also make money.

How?

By selling a portion of their coins as the price rises using a logical divestment strategy such as the SSS plan (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=345065.0).

I know of one individual who was able to sell enough coins last spring that he could quit his job and work full time on bitcoin.  He has now come up with some new payment technologies that are helping bitcoin grow.  

Yes, early adopters who hold their coins have done well, and will possibly do very well in the future.  I don't think this is any less ethical than early innovators in technology companies making big money.  People who committed their time and capital early in the game risked more, and they deserve to benefit more.

Your are doing a contradictory statement. People which bought BTC at the early years did not have a bigger risk when compared with the people buying today. That people had to spend less capital to buy BTC and the risk to loose the amount invested was lower than today.

I actually agree that the profit potential in 2009 was greater than it is now: now the upper limit is to 100X-1000X your money, while in 2009 the upper limit was to 1,000,000X your investment.  But remember, there was more risk in 2009 too.  People thought it was a joke!  It took a much braver person to invest $1000 then than it does to invest $10,000 now.  Like Taleb says, the expected life of a complex system (like the Federal Reserve or the Bitcoin Network) is on the same order of magnitude as how long is has already lived.  When bitcoin was 6 months old and before it fought through even a single crash, it did not have the track record for robustness that it now enjoys.  

Maybe you could argue that the distribution of bitcoins is "unfair" because not everyone knew about bitcoin in 2009.  But whenever I start thinking like that (like I admitted earlier), I remember that my mom actually sent me an article about bitcoin in 2009 but I was too arrogant to even read it!  I think I learned my lesson, and I endeavour to be more open-minded now.

Lastly, bitcoin already is benefitting people in the 99% (most of us here)--it will continue to benefit the 99%: even those who don't adopt it till the very end.  Bitcoin has the potential to cut-out so many middle men and friction from our economy.

How?

It has the potential to cut out middle men from banking, international remittance, payment processors, contracts, notaries, stock-exchanges, registration of legal documents...open-up trade between small business in far away countries, and probably a lot of things we haven't even imagined yet.  Removing middle men where possible improves our total wealth, in a similar way that more efficient robots allow us to build electronic hardware cheaper and better.    

Furthermore, the "money" aspect of bitcoin is only the beginning.  Stefan Molyneux has done a nice job thinking up some of the possibilities (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4HGVJjqDVk&feature=youtu.be).  

[Heathrow]

3. FLAWED ARCHITECTURE

Size

11 GB today
100 GB 1.5 years from now
1 TB 3 years from now
10 TB 4.5 years from now
100 TB 6 years from now

You think average people will store a 100TB worth of data? No. The solution cut the blockchain into pieces and store the whole blockchain only on specialized nodes, kind of defeats the purpose of decentralized than doesn’t it?

Most folks I know already have several TB of data storage.  It's going to be pretty easy to keep up with this.  10 TB is going to be CHEAP in 4.5 years.

[samsam]

The biggest threat, IMHO, to bitcoin's adoption in the USA is how hardcore the IRS will enforce tax rules on bitcoin.

If the price of bitcoin continues to rise in the future, then people will probably be liable for capital gains or regular gains taxes related to bitcoin EVEN FOR PURCHASES OF GOODS AND SERVICES WITH BITCOIN.

Let me explain: Let's say you buy one BTC at $850, and 6 months later that one BTC is now worth $1,700. You then use that one BTC to buy a diamond ring for your significant other. For simplicity's sake, let's say the diamond ring costs $1,700. The IRS will consider that a gain, even though you didn't exchange the bitcoin for money since you exchanged it for something that was twice the dollar value you originally bought the bitcoin at. In this case, you owe taxes on the capital gain or regular gain of $850 (the price doubled, remember).

Most likely the IRS will only go after large purchases (people buying cars, houses, expensive jewelery, etc... with bitcoin) since they don't have the man power to investigate all transactions, but this does give me pause.

This is one reason I don't purchase anything at the moment with bitcoin until there is more clarification of how taxable transactions will be treated in relation to bitcoin by the IRS.

[Bismarckbkk]

Pretty good points in the OP.

Many people say fiat is backed by nothing which doesnt tell the whole story.

Fiat is backed by guns and force by courts and jails. It may depreciate in value per unit but its value as a means of exchange for goods and services remains and can be enforced.

As long as the government has the power to regulate buisiness can be forced to only trade in certain currencies and if they do accept bitcoin there is an overhead cost for exchanging and you most likely have to pay a premium for exchange fluctuations which makes using bitcoin -EV .

Even right now getting bitcoin is difficult and expensive and anyone who buys bitcoin in order to buy something that is available for the same price in fiat is loosing money.

Bitcoin at this moment is a speculative market that still has alot of upside. Personally iam heavily invested in BTC to do well next year but I dont believe for a minute that it can seriously compete with governments.

[Interized]

OP needs to go back to the basics of how BTC even operates.

You do understand that the average hard drive right now is 1TB and within years we will be at 10TB etc. Same thing with connection speed.

OP endless rants about stuff he has 0 insight on.

OP is funny though.

[Operatr]

No benefit over fiat money?

That proves right there you have no idea what the hell you are talking about OP.

[Fuserleer]

It's easy to to state "yeah the future will save us", and 10TB HD's probably will be available cheaply in the future.

Global average internet speeds will not be up to the job though, this is supposed to be a global revolution right?  So you have to take global internet speeds into account, so...

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/07/23/akamai-average-internet-speed-up-17-year-over-year-to-finally-pass-3-mbps-while-mobile-data-traffic-doubled/#!pX4BB

The above report states that the current global average internet speed is 3.1MB, with a 12GB block chain it would take on average 31,000 seconds to download (about half a day) without doing any processing.  Lets assume for arguments sake that processing is free and done in real time

So you can currently download the 12GB block chain on an average internet connection in about 12 hours....cool.

The report above (and other sources) state that the year on year speed increase of the average global internet speed is about 17%, so in 5 years time average internet speeds globally will be around 7Mbps.

Lets assume that in 5 years time, BitCoin hasn't seen any growth AT ALL, and its daily use is the same as right now.  Since December 2012, the block chain has grown by around 10GB, so in 5 years time with ZERO transaction quantity growth from today, it will be 63GB.

That is 5x larger, yet average internet connection speeds have only doubled, so in 5 years time it now takes 80,000 seconds (or about a day) to download the 63GB block chain.

Of course, BitCoin is going to grow, over the past 12 months daily transaction volume is about double what it was last year, so if we take this factor into account too with growth of BitCoin at the same pace as the past 12 months, the block chain will be around 350GB in size in 5 years time.

Downloading 350GB in 5 years time on a 7Mbps connection would take 430,000 seconds, or about 5 days (without even processing it).

As we all know processing the blockchain is not a trivial task either, so the actual time for a general new user that wants to use the QT client or run a full node is looking at 2 weeks minimum to get up and running in 5 years time.

They could of course download a copy of the blockchain "pre-processed", but even then that is still 5 days waiting for a download to complete.

[Interized]

It's easy to to state "yeah the future will save us", and 10TB HD's probably will be available cheaply in the future.

Global average internet speeds will not be up to the job though, this is supposed to be a global revolution right?  So you have to take global internet speeds into account, so...

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/07/23/akamai-average-internet-speed-up-17-year-over-year-to-finally-pass-3-mbps-while-mobile-data-traffic-doubled/#!pX4BB

The above report states that the current global average internet speed is 3.1MB, with a 12GB block chain it would take on average 31,000 seconds to download (about half a day) without doing any processing.  Lets assume for arguments sake that processing is free and done in real time

So you can currently download the 12GB block chain on an average internet connection in about 12 hours....cool.

The report above (and other sources) state that the year on year speed increase of the average global internet speed is about 17%, so in 5 years time average internet speeds globally will be around 7Mbps.

Lets assume that in 5 years time, BitCoin hasn't seen any growth AT ALL, and its daily use is the same as right now.  Since December 2012, the block chain has grown by around 10GB, so in 5 years time with ZERO transaction quantity growth from today, it will be 63GB.

That is 5x larger, yet average internet connection speeds have only doubled, so in 5 years time it now takes 80,000 seconds (or about a day) to download the 63GB block chain.

Of course, BitCoin is going to grow, over the past 12 months daily transaction volume is about double what it was last year, so if we take this factor into account too with growth of BitCoin at the same pace as the past 12 months, the block chain will be around 350GB in size in 5 years time.

Downloading 350GB in 5 years time on a 7Mbps connection would take 430,000 seconds, or about 5 days (without even processing it).

As we all know processing the blockchain is not a trivial task either, so the actual time for a general new user that wants to use the QT client or run a full node is looking at 2 weeks minimum to get up and running in 5 years time.

They could of course download a copy of the blockchain "pre-processed", but even then that is still 5 days waiting for a download to complete.

Did you really need to write all of the obvious?

Someone could start selling hard drives with all the data since it can be copied extremely fast, but that is just one of the million ways to solve what some believe to be a problem.

Or they can use a regular light weight wallet like normal people.

"Hard" wallets will only be used by those who carry a lot of currency, or perhaps just to store savings.

Otherwise, most people live paycheck to paycheck, using online wallets won't have any negative effect on the BTC.

[Fuserleer]

So a proposed solution is to sell hard drives with the block chain on?  Seriously??  

Can I buy these hard drives with Bit....oh wait.....

And what if someone doesn't want to use a light client that relies on 3rd party nodes?  Doesn't that then become semi centralized and defeats the purpose?

[JohnyBigs]

That's cure of course the user in denial, will point out Hard Drives will keep up!!! Even if they do keep up, nobody is going to spend hundreds of dollars just to run the blockchain.

Secondly, Bitcoin is still dead even if hard drives surpass it by 100000 times in capacity, for all the other reasons above.

Bitcoin can barley process 100K transactions, it starts slowing down haha. Good luck transacting millions a day.

As stated before even if it can fix all these problems governments will regulate it and make it useless. Yes compare bitcoins a digital currency to cars a something completely new, or TV's. It's going to be fun watching your hopes get shattered, having Bitcoin in such a high realm.

Bitcoin is basically a decentralized payment system, it's not revolutionary but evolutionary.

Again 5 years later 100K transactions a day, and 3M users Bitcoin is already dead, no help needed. For Bitcoin to succeed it needs to overcome all of the issues in the OP, not just 1 or two hand picked ones.

Sorry to have offend thee o Apple fanboys, reality hurts, literally it's a scary world out there, don't leave the comforts of your computerz, or real life will punish you. Like when you tell a normal real person about Bitcoin and they laugh in your face, or you waste an hour explaining to them how it works and they still don't use it.

But it's ok you always have your safe base here at Bitcointalk where apparently everybody wants to use Bitcoin and it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.

The beauty of it is, instead of you doing something about the issues outlined above, like getting a petition together and sending it to the Bitcoin foundation, you just deny everything.

Again 3M users in 5 years thats a whole .0005% of the whole worlds population, it's MAINSTREAM!

[Interized]

So a proposed solution is to sell hard drives with the block chain on?  Seriously??  

Can I buy these hard drives with Bit....oh wait.....

And what if someone doesn't want to use a light client that relies on 3rd party nodes?  Doesn't that then become semi centralized and defeats the purpose?

I said it was one solution to what I don't even believe to be a problem in the first place.

You do not need to download the block chain, period.

The option exists though and for those who have slow connection speeds could cheaply buy one and have it mailed.

This is like our banking system, everyone uses currency but no one cares enough to verify anything.

To try and suggest using lightweight wallets defeats the purpose is just wrong in so many ways.

BTC is so much more than that.