Bitcoin's late-stage bubble
Bitcoin advocates like to think that cryptocurrencies will replace regular money. So you would think that they would be keen to show how useful it is at a bitcoin conference.
An upcoming conference dedicated to cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology has stopped accepting ticket payments in bitcoin, suggesting that the method was slow, costly and labor-intensive.The North American Bitcoin Conference, held in Miami next week, said on its website that network congestion and manual processing influenced the decision to stop accepting payments in cryptocurrencies.
Last minute tickets were selling for $1,000.
"We have, and always will, accept cryptocurrencies for our conferences, up to fourteen days before the event," the organizers wrote. "However, due to the manual inputting of data in our ticketing platforms when paid in cryptocurrencies, we decided to shut down bitcoin payments for last minute sales due to print deadlines."
What's the point of bitcoin if you can't use it to buy tickets to a bitcoin conference?
Well, you could always use it to make an inside joke.
There are bubbles, there are bad investments and then there's dogecoin.That's the bitcoin parody that launched in 2013 in homage to the particularly silly meme of Shiba Inu dogs saying syntactically challenged things. Now, if none of that makes sense to you, don't worry: You're normal. The point is that this was a joke about a joke. A way for the technologically savvy and the self-consciously hip to show that they were aware of all Internet traditions, and tip each other for their online witticisms. As is often the case, though, the line between irony and sincerity eventually became so blurred that what was originally supposed to be a worthless currency was valued at as much as $2 billion a few days ago.
News Flash: Inside jokes aren't worth $2 Billion.
Comments
'98-'99 I was working server
support at a building on Microsoft's main campus - so many of my coworkers were buy Cisco & This! & That! cuz ... cuz ... cuz ... "It keeps going up!"
lots of people left holding whole lots of nothing when the dot.bomb bombed. of course, I'm sure this time the Ponzi Schemes are completely different ...
rmm.
But then I sigh; and, with a piece of scripture,
Tell them that God bids us do good for evil:
And thus I clothe my naked villany
With old odd ends stolen out of holy writ;
Having observed various
Crypto currencies over the last couple years I have come to the conclusion that they aren't in essence much different than regular digital money. Of sure there is blockchain or whatever but they can be extracted, hacked, stolen, and recently obtained by kidnapping the CEO of a Bitcoin exchange. A cool million in this case. As near as I can tell they are easy to create apparently there are hundreds of them at this point. What can you buy that regular currencies by the thousands can't. Fiat currency excels at the same purpose of cryptos and is more fungible. Trillions of dollars move globally nightly on the forex markets 24/7
Aside from purchasing illicit goods or some pissant crap from China or whatever they have one sterling value. They can be used to move money over borders that under a currency control regime. This is their one and only highly valued attribute. They seem to temporarily be one of hundred of thousands of kinds speculative instruments. As long as the Ponzi status quo continues they will be with us. But at the first sign of real trouble watch out. Caveat emptor. Heh!
Not like real currency
cryptocurrencies are like this
I moved all my Second Life Linden dollars into bitcoin
No, exactly like fiat currency
based on faith. No intrinsic value. Real wealth is food, water , air, and health.
Capital is just as fake
Yup, capital of any kind is just as fake as Bitcoin. It's just that the Petro Dollar has the backing of violence by the U.S. and years of propaganda to make people think it has inherent value. Hence why, most, if not all of our wars have been against countries who planned to do business not using the Petro Dollar. Our economy is so fake Banks and Wall street want to just do away with Physical capital so that way they can run the economy on an easier to control pyramid scheme (See the war against physical money in India).
If we were smart, we would create a ton of worker cooperatives, especially worker cooperative banks. These cooperatives wouldn't accept cash, and would only accept money from worker cooperative banks. The draw to use the cooperative banks would be 3 fold. 1) worker cooperatives who used the worker cooperative bank wouldn't get charged a service fee to accept money from the banks. 2) The banks could act like the fed reserve and just make "money" out of thin air. "You are now a millionaire, now you are a millionaire!" and 3) If there are enough cooperatives who accept the money, and people could start using this "money" at these cooperatives to buy necessities then it wouldn't matter that it was "made up" and would brute force real value for the 99% from these banks.
I love my Lindens!
Been "in game"
on-and-off for over ten years now. What few Lindens I earn on there pays the bills so I can continue working there. The money there is in "fake estate" (as I call it) as opposed to real estate here in the real world. After all, you're buying and selling pixels. If one has $10,000 US (2,540,000 L$) they could very likely double that in 3, 4 years just playing the slumlord market or simply "flipping" "property." Me? Alas, I do it the old fashioned way. Trade hours for Lindens. If you happen to be on SL you can find me working on my new digs (Club) at... Wink on Atlantis City. Still lots of plywood, and careful where you step.
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
Bitcoin's insane energy use make it unsustainable
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/bitcoins-insane-energy-consu...
Here we are trying to survive the damage to the environment from fossil fuel usage, trying to search out alternatives and bitcoin comes along to set us back a couple of centuries.
Greed knows no bounds.
To thine own self be true.
Who wants real world physical investments?
To me, this whole bitcoin schtick is a symptom of a reducced number of viable investments based on actual/real economic fundamentals (caused by too much money being at the top.)
Virtually all investments have become side-bets (derivatives etc.) bubble-creating investments, with the use of what was once considered Vegas money (a behavior brought about by all the money being at the top, leading to further impoverished consumer-bases that can't be relied on to generate economic growth that will outrun inflation).
Since virtually the whole market is a propped-up bubble machine not supported by real economic fundamentals, some investors probably see crypto currencies as not that much worse than the rest of the market (i.e. jump out before the bubble bursts).
Mike Taylor
Real world holdings are better
...but what I like about bitcoin is it can't be controlled by a government or a group of bankers.
I would also add there are bitcoin accounts that provide credit cards. Anywhere you can use a VISA you can spend your bitcoin. Of course there are fees with those accounts. The same is true of gold.
The other advantage of bitcoin is the holdings really will grow when the petro-dollar dies. Russia is selling to China for gold based yuans. I think the market and dollar are toast, and so do a lot of other people. If they are well off the buy bitcion as a hedge against the collapse of both the market and dollar.
Perhaps I listen to Keiser too much...but he has sold me on the concept, and if I was a 1%er I would own bitcoin, and be moving out of the market and off the dollar.
Instead I have the pleasure of gardening and not worrying about the loss of my holdings. Like mama said - a gambler's money has no home.
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
Understandable
That's why I own some gold and silver.
Bitcoin does serve a purpose, but that won't stop it from crashing in the coming months.
When the dollar crashes it won't be bitcoin that benefits. It'll be gold.
Physical capital is dying
When the dollar crashes peoples faith in physical capital will collapse too. That means gold as well. The truth is that we have the tech and surplus in necessities and goods that we don't need capital. Only sociopaths who love to have power over others, and people who grew up with capitalism propaganda hold us back from moving to a more humane economic system.
I must disagree
The dollar and gold move almost 100% inversely. What's bad for the dollar is good for gold, and the opposite.
Forget gold and silver
"lead" (ammunition) and water will serve you better in that scenario.
I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.
I keep hearing that
and yet, historically, it often isn't true.
Currencies collapse all the time, without society going full Mad Max.
i wonder whether there are any other essential
technologies -- and currency is a technology -- that you prefer to be "out of control"? To say that it cannot be controlled by governments or bankers is simply to say that it is at the mercy of the market system. Would you like your water supply to be similarly out of control? Would you prefer that the American food supply be market-based, rather than controlled by the USDA? (Aid for reflection: The result would be complete and final concentration of ownership/production at levels comparable to that of the media, and regular famines during which hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans would literally starve to death.) Personally, I want there to be more technologies that are under government control: Energy delivery systems, just for starters.
The worst thing about bitcoin is that it cannot be controlled. Most significantly, the supply cannot be relaxed when the economy requires it.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
When the government itself is privately owned, nothing works...
Unfortunately, the US government is privately owned by a relatively small group of relatively small groups.
If the US government was of, by and for The People and working in the public interest, then it would be controlling much more, in the public interest, and if it had always been so, we'd be looking at a whole different world and wouldn't be worrying about there being no future, possibly any minute now.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
It fills a speculation void.
We'll be in trouble when there's a rush on tulips paid for by bitcoin.
Beware the bullshit factories.
: rimshot :
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
Overvalued as an Asset.
Undervalued as a long term currency substitute.
The true value of a digital currency (or any currency) lies not in its ability to be financially horded, but in its use as a mean of exchanging goods and services. The more people use it to buy and sell, the more valuable it is in itself.
If nobody uses bitcoin, what intrinsic value does it have to justify is relative value to paper currencies which enjoy far greater use?
And therein lies the problem: the financialization of the currency harms its use as commercial means of exchange. Currencies establish the price of things, but if the currency itself is wildly overpriced, then everything it supposedly buys is wildly underpriced.
And who wants to sell his boat for a bitcoin then?
Even so, the idea of digital currencies as a replacement/improvement on the current state-sponsored fiat system remains undervalued.
In the crypto world, Bitcoin is already a relic. Meanwhile, there are a lot of very smart people working out the kinks in the blockchain, and when they do, watch out fiat money.
The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?
except that digital cryptocurrencies can be fiat currencies
as well.
or for that matter, they can be based on a commodity standard -- as with Venezuela's new petroleum-based cryptocurrency.
indeed, bitcoin's biggest flaw is probably exactly that it is not a fiat currency -- that its supply is fundamentally limited, making it inevitably deflationary, which is exactly what makes it an attractive subject for financial speculation. any currency you're afraid to spend for fear of lost future appreciation has some serious problems as a currency. (consider the problem of the "after-christmas" sales ... which led to some people foregoing christmas shopping until after the day itself ... leaving lots of merchandise on the shelves ... requiring even deeper discounts on the 26th ... motivating even more people to forego their shopping ... and so on.)
you're absolutely right that as long as bitcoin is an "attractive" speculation -- meaning, it is expected to produce better returns than speculating in sovereign currencies -- it will struggle mightily to become a useful medium of exchange.
and outside of its usefulness as a medium of exchange, it is uninteresting.
and because there is nothing unique about it -- anybody can create a cryptocurrency, and hundreds of people have done so and are continuing to do so -- i don't see any reason to discuss "bitcoin" in particular rather than "cryptocurrency".
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
If cyber currencies challenge any or all
all of the major fiat currencies, dollar, yuan. Sterling, euro, Swiss Frank, or yen the central banks will move to crush the cyber. A more likely scenario is rogue cybers will be outlawed and nation states will issue their own block chain currencies.
Yep, already happening
That's why I prefer precious metals.
Virtual money seems fine - until lights go out & you need cash
Laughing all the way to the bank - to discover that internet essential structure has been knocked out for days or weeks, or shut down due to some emergency, Obama having given the US President the right to shut down internet in any emergency - and in the Land Of Forever War, a perpetually additional state of emergency is also possible.
Physical money, if you have any, is still available whenever some disaster strikes, and such disasters are slated to drastically increase just as the virtual money craze is being inflicted on more and more people in various countries.
Almost kinda wondering if Bitcoin was inflated as propaganda, to get people excited about virtual money which anyone can hack into steal - especially criminal banks given the go-ahead to 'legally' steal depositors money to make up any shortfalls due to their adorable little financial tricks.
Any group playing any such little game could, I'd imagine, still make a killing by selling short in a co-ordinated fashion, once enough people are heated enough to buy en masse any that comes available 'because it keeps going up' - and won't drop while trading is brisk.
This just started playing on a mix...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFe59pho7O0&list=RDEFe59pho7O0#t=74
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
Bubble may be popping
Or perhaps some fairy gas exuberance is escaping the bubble