I didn't downvote, but I have to wonder what you're threshhold for not being a scam is? What companies will have to accept it, and how long will it have to be around?
I'm pretty amazed that people still think it's a scam when huge companies with massive legal departments are accepting it. That's some pretty extreme skepticism.
BTW, there are plenty of easy, legitimate ways to short Bitcoin, but given your extraordinarily high threshold for "non-scam", I won't bother mentioning them.
PS: Bitcoins are valuable because people are willing to buy them. Despite what most people think, money is not magic, it's just an agreement.
> people still think it's a scam when huge companies with massive legal departments are accepting it.
Sub-prime real estate was a scam. Huge companies with massive legal departments protected themselves from the illegal part of the scam - all those loan officers telling people to lie on their loan applications. In fact these banks got their lobbyists to get them TARP bailouts after the scam had run its course.
Banks are willing to trade subprime "liar loans" once legally insulated, so big companies willing to deal with Bitcoin doesn't really mean much.
I didn't say it was impossible to short Bitcoins. They are not FX traded alongside the dollar, euro, yen etc. though.
The central question is, why do Bitcoins have value? Why did subprime real estate loans, pets.com stock and Dutch tulip blubs have value? Actually, both these things were hypothetically more valuable than Bitcoins. Bitcoins are worthless.
When the price of a Bitcoin drops below $100, are people here going to learn a lesson about how value works? I don't think they will. That's the thing - Bitcoin will crash, and those talking it up here won't have learned a thing. If they did, these scams (subprime, pets.com stock, dutch Tulip Bulbs) couldn't keep popping up over time suckering people in. People have no concept of the relation of price to value, and thus are easily fooled.
At what point would you accept that Bitcoin is not a scam? What percentage of the Fortune 500 accepting it? How many years? 10 years? 20 years? Can you give a number?
I mean, at least Prof. Bitcorn gave us a date. An open ended "it's a scam and you people are going to learn...someday" is not very useful.
And speaking of value, after years of paying $30 a pop to receive a few thousand dollars from Europe in 3-5 business days, being able to effortlessly send a few digits, pay a few cents, and receive that money in less than an hour is...highly valuable.
This is tangential to your point, but I recently did a international money transfer to a friend. The fee was $40AUD for <$1000USD sent. They received it in a day and a half.
For Bitcoin I need to:
* Get the requisite amount of bitcoins, plus a percentage extra to protect against fluctuations (BTC crashed is not a valid excuse for non-payment of rent)
* Help said friend set up a BTC wallet, plus security
* Find a trustworthy person willing to exchange USD for BTC at some agreed value
* Send friend to person and hope the exchange goes as planned.
I'd love to use BTC in place of IMT but it's just not easy enough yet.
Yeah, my grandma has also run into some troubles when trying to send an email. She had to:
- Investigate which PC she should buy
- Find someone willing to sell a PC at a fair price. This is a problem because PCs get old really quick, and some vendors will try to sell you old PCs at their original prices. I don't know how they expect PCs to be useful if they go down in value so fast. Why buy a PC today, when you can buy it at half its price in a year?
- Ask someone for help to connect all the wires
- Fail to send an email. Learn that she also needs an internet connection
- Investigate which ISP she should hire
- Etc...
With traditional mail, she just writes the letter and drops it in the post office.
When someone tries to use email and fails, they can lose some time.
When someone tries to use bitcoin and fails, they can lose their home. When silk road 2 lost their users' bitcoins to theft, there was a comment on Reddit about a silk road user who became homeless because they had converted their savings into bitcoin and stored the coins in silk road's webwallet. When the coins were lost, so was their home, since they could no longer afford rent.
Bitcoin needs to become pro-consumer with strong protections and convenience. There are dozens of ways to lose your money, so no one wants to convert a sizable portion of their wealth into bitcoin, which means no one has bitcoin on hand to spend at a whim. Eventually merchants are going to start wondering why they're bothering to let people buy their products via bitcoin since very few people buy anything via bitcoin.
If bitcoin becomes safe and convenient, bitcoin adoption will follow.
a lot of these people don't have that good of arguments, so they instead use crappy metaphors to make their points. they take something that is totally different than bitcoin and try to use that to make their point. but they need examine f it is a valid analogy. I don't think a PC, a consumer good, can be compared to something that's supposed to function as a currency. one is a store of a value and one has a functional use. if your grandma wants to save her money she should by stocks or bonds or something with low volatility. if she wants to send an email she should get a computer, not for storing value, but for it's functional
use. and if she wants to get around town she should by a car, even though they depreciate. I don know how op ever thought it made sense to compare bitcoin and computers.
That's a bit harsh. The metaphor made a lot of sense, because their point was that bitcoin is currently hard to use, and will get easier with time, which is true.
4% and a day and a half is outrageous. You can get < $1000 in BTC on Coinbase instantly if you have a high enough verification level and your friend can sell on an exchange in his country as soon as he gets them (10 minutes) to avoid the volatility risk.
Huge companies with massive legal departments don't accept bitcoin. They contract with smaller VC-funded startups to accept it and assume the risk and pay the large retailer in cash at sale time. The large retailers neither accept nor hold bitcoin directly, nor should they (as a merchant, you don't want to be holding something that loses 10% of its value during your business hours as bitcoin did today). The large retailers merely get to enjoy capitalizing on bitcoin as a purchase method.
That seems like a non-standard usage of "accept". Does everyone who accepts a payment method while hedging it also not count as another vendor who accepts it?
If someone accepts PayPal while insuring against the possibility of not being paid "not accept PayPal"?
If a non-US vendor uses forward/option contracts to maintain cash flow in the local currency, do they "not accept" USD?
This doesn't count as insurance, though, because no risk is ever actually held, it's farmed out. The most anti-bitcoin person in the world will accept USD that has been converted from bitcoin by an entity that is actually taking the risk, because by necessity it needs to hold lots of bitcoin reserves just to do business.
I chuckled a little bit when he said hashes people are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for... annd those dollars are printed on paper with old dead guys on it. Ahh the world this guy lives in must be an interesting one.
it's intriguing to me that no one has pointed out the inherent value of BitCoin:
You can commit nearly anonymous transactions over long distances with it. It's value over international currencies is in proportion to the size of the black market transacted via BtC.
There are many people out there who don't try to get rich, they simply mine a handful to buy small amounts of drugs on the internet. The "convenience" of that service raises the utility and value of BtC over e.g. dollars.
Of course, I say nearly b/c a dedicated sleuth could investigate a transaction, but ask yourself as a practical matter, will federales go after an 18-year buying a gram of weed via BtC? of course not. The complexity of the BtC transacation obscures such small transactions well into the realm of "safety."
> You can commit nearly anonymous transactions over long distances with it. It's value over international currencies is in proportion to the size of the black market transacted via BtC.
Eh, I think in the long run that will be more of a hindrance than a help, as it will give governments in many places a plausible reason to attempt to ban or limit its use (which would tend to lead to a vicious cycle of only criminals--however you define that--using it).
On a more practical level, I can't remember a time my credit card has been refused for local or international transactions (and any additional fees are largely invisible to me, the consumer). Paying with a credit card also carries certain advantages: If the goods aren't delivered, I spend 2 minutes on the phone and get my money back.
For the vast majority of consumers, the headache of converting local currency to BtC, learning how to use it, and finding a reliable escrow service will greatly outweigh the benefits of being able to buy drugs (especially as states decriminalize drugs). That keeps BtC firmly in the grasp of speculators.
> On a more practical level, I can't remember a time my credit card has been refused for local or international transactions (and any additional fees are largely invisible to me, the consumer). Paying with a credit card also carries certain advantages: If the goods aren't delivered, I spend 2 minutes on the phone and get my money back.
I donated to wikileaks. Except I didn't, because the US put pressure on VISA+MC, and reversed my transaction. That whole business convinced me of the need for decentralised currency.
Fast international money transfer is something that is already handled very well for those that truly need it. I know for a fact that the european central bank handles large volume transactions in a matter of seconds if not less. There is really no reason why traditional banks could not offer significantly shorter processing times for the majority of their services, it is just not in their interest to do so.
Interest is the keyword here. Banks collect it on their customers' money while they declare it to be 'in-flight'. This is the main reason why transactions that should take seconds are still deliberately delayed for days.
you honestly don't think the Feds won't develop a program that automatically tracks bitcoin wallets and finds their owners? I think it's obvious they will.
A century ago to the year, the second biggest economy in the world, Germany, had people saying the exact same thing about the Papiermark as you're saying. Anyone curious can go to the Wikipedia entry on Papiermark to see how that all eventually ended.
I'm pretty amazed that people still think it's a scam when huge companies with massive legal departments are accepting it. That's some pretty extreme skepticism.
BTW, there are plenty of easy, legitimate ways to short Bitcoin, but given your extraordinarily high threshold for "non-scam", I won't bother mentioning them.
PS: Bitcoins are valuable because people are willing to buy them. Despite what most people think, money is not magic, it's just an agreement.