cvm, this u? https://www.facebook.com/steven.shearrill
It was on the fb plug in.
The lack of a backing authority is another assumption that does not have to be true. What if the IMF or World Bank were to support its own currency? Perhaps this currency could be used to provide liquidity to insolvent or unstable countries. To date, currencies have generally been tied to a particular country. This is a product of how the world is organized, and this does not mean that we cannot rethink this concept in the future, particularly with advancements in technology and communications.
You realize the World Bank and IMF are essentially instruments of the underlying governments?
I just used those as an example. It could be another entity. Maybe Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, and Ron Paul will form their offshore nation. Who knows? Focus on the concept and possibilities, not your own rigid interpretive framework of the situation.
Yes, that’s true. But if you and I transacted in something, we could settle in whatever currency we want, USD or Bitcoin or Rupees. Whatever. If Yellen starts printing like crazy, maybe I’ll not want to transact in USD anymore (hypothetical) and I’ll make you contract to me in Euro. All currencies are fragile in that sense… you’re just confident in the USD because they haven’t mucked it up recently.
If the USD was backed by gold or something else, then I’d see a more substantial difference. Then I know I can convert our contracted transaction into something tangible.
Ask someone from Argentina whether their Peso, backed by the full faith of the Argentinian government, is substantially more secure than a Bitcoin. And that’s a legit first world country currency.
^It’s my fault for using the word “backed” with two different meanings in the same statement. However, can you pay your taxes in Wampum beads? Can you buy gum in Euros? (only if the counterparty is willing). But you can always do so in dollars right? Ultimately the legitimacy of a currency depends upon the local legality of its use. Surely you can see the problems a shadow economy in bitcoin would pose GOTUS.
As you noted, all fiat money is dependent on whether the other guy assigns it any value, but that condition alone is not sufficient.
Am I the only one who sees the volatility of the value of bitcoins problematic?!!
Total BTC market cap is under $12B. That’s a mid cap stock. Plus, it’s illiquid and the few exchanges operate in a legal gray area. I’d find it problematic if there wasn’t volatility.
Pretty good article in last week’s BusinessWeek magazine about Bitcoin. Who made them, how many there are, how they’re mined.
Help me understand. So the ‘coin’ has a value that fluctuates regularly. It would be like having a coin in your pocket be worth 10 cents one day and then 1 cent the next. This just screams potential for scam, cornering, and fraud.
I include myself in this group. My question is will the supply be limited forever or at some point will there be more on the market if there is demand?
A buddy of mine has 70 or so bitcoins. He didn’t realize the price had run up (he had them back from when they were worth cents and forgot about them.) Now he is upset because he can’t remember the login stuff to get to them (he is ultra secure, so he had multiple layers between the bitcoins and the ability to get them).
And your dollar changes value too, just not as dramatic.
If you had spent the last year in Brazil, you would have seen the value of the US $'s in your pocket fluctuate quite a bit. Not as much as bitcoins, but still a fair amount.
Damn, that’s almost 60 grand that he can’t get to.
read the article I posted. It explains how they are “mined”, how the supply is always expanding, and that the world will “exhaust it’s bitcoin resources” at 21m bitcoin a sometime in 2140 (I think).
Dp
That’s because you don’t understand how it works. The possibility of btc being a scam or a fraud is nearly zero since it’s all open source. Every btc transaction is visible to the public - https://blockchain.info/. You may not be able to make heads or tails of what you’re looking at, but that doesn’t mean it’s a scam.
Now, the idea of cornering the btc market is an actual threat, but not very realistic. If someone was to possess enough power to mine over a certain percent of the new blocks - I think it’s 50% but not sure - they could, in theory, corner the market. But, people way smarter than me have written many papers on how that’s becoming increasingly impossible. The time to do it would have been a few years ago before mining became so popular (and so expensive).
Edit: This is exactly like a conversation I had with my brother about credit default swaps. He said he has no idea how they work or why they exist so they must be a scam. Think about how stupid that sounds.
But don’t you admit that given its complexity, there could be a backdoor somewhere no one knows about (this is true about many things digital. Recently released articles on NSA showed how some encryption actually had a backdoor built in). I mean, no one even knows who made Bitcoin lol
But I agree, it’s poorly understood and has massive potential. I mean, small businesses would LOVE a way to exchange money without interchange fees. I’m just always skeptical of computer things, since I’m friends with a couple “gray hats” and see the damage they can cause
Paper currency used to be an efficient way of bartering for good/services until the world governments started printing it like no tomorrow. Bitcoin (in concept) is the new and more efficient way of bartering but it scares me since it isn’t regulated. But then again regulation is all relative anyway
Anything is possible. But, if you do a little research you’ll see curroption or fraud really aren’t even small concerns among those that know how the system operates. There are concerns among those that think bitcoin is akin to hackers getting your credit card information from Target. But that’s really just silly. It’s not even comparable.
The appropriate response to your question, would be “a backdoor to what?” Are you saying someone could steal your bitcoins? Sure, just like someone can mug you and steal your wallet. But, most people that use bitcoins are very secure people. Use TrueCrypt on a flash drive (preferably multiple) and no one is getting in there. Could someone defraud you? Sure, there are scams out there just like anywhere else.
But, if you’re asking if some hacker could manipulate the mining process to corner the market…no, it’s not really a concern among those that know how it works. As mentioned above, the concern isn’t hackers cornering the market. It’s someone with a huge amount of computing power doing legitimate mining that could corner it.
If you really understand bitcoin, the popular response to “hacker” concerns is - “can you hack the internet?” No, of course not. You can hack webpages, but there’s no such thing as hacking the internet. Bitcoin is more analogous to the internet, not a webpage.