re: Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme—the Internet’s favorite currency will collapse.

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I think it absolutely matters. If you're an average person, hell, even if you have above-average intelligence, the technology can seem pretty opaque. If on top of that, you have lots of people who did nothing wrong (other than put real money into this) lose there shirts I can't see it ever being widely accepted and used as an actual currency when it's barely that today.

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Wiki disagrees with you....



Photo courtesy of the OT....

I borrowed your idea and added a little something.

Please do.

Jeff Berwick is his name. He's a cool guy.

This thread is awesome

<-----is not reading either. I can't form a coherent sentence with a dictionary. Why try shite like reading.

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Yet history shows that private currencies always end in tears; if central banks sometimes abuse the trust we place in them, the alternatives are worse.

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Considering this is one of my academic areas of expertise, I can tell you this amateur is completely wrong. Private coinage and currency, absent government restrictions and legal tender laws, have always provided a far stabler and highly sought after medium of exchange. Markets chose commodity monies such as gold and silver precisely because they put a rigid constraint on the government's ability manipulate and debase money for its own gain.

The argument for Bitcoin is not that it, itself, is the best possible medium of exchange, but that the competition that competitive money provides will help individuals choose the best money for them rather than having to rely on the historically atrocious record of government money. Though I'm skeptical the long term solution will be competing fiat currencies, the competition the produce will certainly be beneficial.

LINK


LINK

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huge demand for bitcoin already exists in argentina. They are desperate for anything that wont depreciate like their pesos do every day.

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Yeah, but the problem is that it's a shitty deal, because whoever sells a bitcoin for pesos can't convert those pesos back into dollars at a reasonable rate, due to the horrid capital controls. That's why you see the big price premium, which is not a good thing, but a bad thing.

The big problem with a P2P network is that there is no central management to raise demand for the currency for use in domestic transactions, like a Visa or MasterCard could do with their credit cards. It's hard to accomplish a bitcoin promotion campaign to get vendors to catch on when there is no bitcoin management to execute such a campaign, and even if such a campaign did exist, there might be legal cause for the SEC or other financial authorities to get involved.