Cryptocurrency: is it worth it?

[Winnah]

I could convert my BTC to AUD and be a thousandaire with a roll of bills in my pocket. Big fucking deal. Maybe I'll buy enough PMs to give myself agryria, maybe I'll invest my BTC in litecoin instead. My BTC are worth nothing until I decide to use them for something and I have not yet decided if and how I want to use them.

What is a big deal is that a decentralised, peer to peer currency system is gaining popularity, particularly in Asia. The rush of commodity speculation shows that emphatically. That it happens to coincide with an American senate hearing is not an indication that the senate investigation is driving the price up; Chinese investors are driving the price up, not American Exceptionalism. The upward trend occured well before politicians got involved.

Yes, BitCoin has failed to become a true argorist currency system, but that is beside the point. With the rise in popularity, the number of vendors that accept cryptocurrencies has been increasing. That is the true test of how viable BTC or it's competitors are, as a currency.

As for whether I have played pac-man, yes I have. You don't actually win at Pac-Man, you play until you lose, or you hit the kill screen, at which point only high scores matter. The real appeal of the Pac-Man image is that it shows that central banks now have to contend with a new paradigm that has the potential to chase them away.

Will Bitcoin do this? Probably not. Will the next generation of cryptocurrencies provide a viable alternative to debt slavery? I fucking hope so. If you don't want that to happen, then get back on the monkey short bus.

[Kaelik]

With the rise in popularity, the number of vendors that accept cryptocurrencies has been increasing. That is the true test of how viable BTC or it's competitors are, as a currency.

No, stability is also an important measure of viable currencies. No one will sign long term contracts based on a currency that spikes and drops by 300% on a monthly scale.

The real appeal of the Pac-Man image is that it shows that central banks now have to contend with a new paradigm that has the potential to chase them away.

Except for the whole thing were only idiots think that, and the new paradigm is never going to chase away stable currencies.

Will the next generation of cryptocurrencies provide a viable alternative to debt slavery?

You are a fucking idiot. How the fuck do you think the existence of a new currency even if it did actually work as a viable currency would do anything about "debt slavery" what the fuck do you even mean by your stupid Libertarian keyword of "debt slavery"? Do you mean people working at jobs for salaries? Why the fuck do you think a currency would "solve" that or that the concept of salaries needs solving?

[Maj]

I'm having a difficult time wondering why anyone would want to pay in Bitcoins when their value fluctuates so much.

If your price doesn't change as value goes up and down, then that means your sales will bounce up and down - no one wants to spend $900 on something that will potentially drop to $50 the next day.

If your price does change as value goes up and down, then that means that your income is wildly varying, and it will have an effect on anything that you have to buy in order to create your product.

Right now, Bitcoin seems like a glorified stock - highly subject to the whims of the market. But it's traded from person to person like digital cash. Its best use seems to be as an investment tool, not as a direct currency.

[Kaelik]

I'm having a difficult time wondering why anyone would want to pay in Bitcoins when their value fluctuates so much.

If your price doesn't change as value goes up and down, then that means your sales will bounce up and down - no one wants to spend $900 on something that will potentially drop to $50 the next day.

If your price does change as value goes up and down, then that means that your income is wildly varying, and it will have an effect on anything that you have to buy in order to create your product.

Right now, Bitcoin seems like a glorified stock - highly subject to the whims of the market. But it's traded from person to person like digital cash. Its best use seems to be as an investment tool, not as a direct currency.

Yes this is all 100% correct and what I was saying about stability being important in a currency.

[DSMatticus]

The real appeal of the Pac-Man image is that it shows that central banks now have to contend with a new paradigm that has the potential to chase them away.

Will Bitcoin do this? Probably not. Will the next generation of cryptocurrencies provide a viable alternative to debt slavery?

Debt slavery is kind of a stupid fucking buzzword, and you don't really do much beyond telling everyone you read embarrassingly stupid internet rants when you say it on its own. Insofar as it can refer to any social problems that aren't bullshit someone made up, it refers to the increasing inability of the lower and middle class to support themself or the increasing debt overhang and its catastrophic effects. The former of those is a result of wealth inequality (and has fuck all to do with central banks). The latter of those is a result of deregulating the financial sector in such a way that they could sell bundles of bad loans for cash upfront at no liability while telling everyone those bundles were super-safe (and has fuck all to do with central banks).

The solution to wealth inequality is to make owning capital less valuable relative to working, and that means redistributing wealth with a bunch of dirty socialist programs and taxes. The solution to a deregulated financial industry where suckering poor people into taking on debt and then fraudulently selling that debt as a safe asset for pure monies is a trillion dollar industry is to regulate the financial industry. And the fact the federal reserve tries to maintain a steady 2% inflation rate by manipulating the money supply really has no bearing on any of this.

The only thing the lack of a central authority does is remove the ability to adjust monetary policy in response to changes in the economy. If you think the only thing holding back cryptocurrencies from price stability is popularity, then you are an idiot (price volatility under the gold standard is an impressive thing). Things will happen in the economy, and depending on what those things are you will want to print more or less money than you were before. The inability to do so is not the solution to any problem we have, it's just another fucking problem we will end up having.

[Maj]

The solution to wealth inequality is to make owning capital less valuable relative to working, and that means redistributing wealth with a bunch of dirty socialist programs and taxes.

Actually... I read an article the other day wherein the authors suggest that another way to redistribute wealth would be to get companies to give their employees significantly more stock ownership. I found that a rather interesting take.

[ishy]

Actually... I read an article the other day wherein the authors suggest that another way to redistribute wealth would be to get companies to give their employees significantly more stock ownership. I found that a rather interesting take.

Isn't that just redistributing wealth by forcing employers to pay employees higher salaries?

The paying employees in stocks is already a common thing though. And while it can and does increase the bond between company and employee, I generally find the effect to be vastly overstated.

[Kaelik]

Isn't that just redistributing wealth by forcing employers to pay employees higher salaries?

The paying employees in stocks is already a common thing though. And while it can and does increase the bond between company and employee, I generally find the effect to be vastly overstated.

Yeah, I'm not how aside from government mandated pay you are going to do that, and I think in general people are going to object a lot more to the idea of mandated x% ownership going to low level workers than they are raising the minimum wage. Because mandatory ownership by the workers of capital is literally communism as opposed to just figuratively communism, so eventually some conservative will read Marx and tell all his friends this is the worst.

[DSMatticus]

The solution to wealth inequality is to make owning capital less valuable relative to working, and that means redistributing wealth with a bunch of dirty socialist programs and taxes.

Actually... I read an article the other day wherein the authors suggest that another way to redistribute wealth would be to get companies to give their employees significantly more stock ownership. I found that a rather interesting take.

Do you have a link? What was the gist of it?

If it were going to work, the reasoning would look like this: if you strip out the speculatory element, stock is just a unit of ownership of a corporation. A corporation is a bunch of capital. When employees own a significant portion of the capital they utilize, you call that socialism. It's an effort to juryrig existing capitalist notions that the public is comfortable with in order to emulate some of the benefits of socialism (empowering employees). And if you took it to the level of extremes you would have to get those benefits, it would be obvious socialism and people wouldn't be comfortable with it.

The general problem with capitalism is that capital-owners benefit asymmetrically from increased productivity, and the inexorable march of technological progress always brings increasing productivity. When the profits of capital go solely to capital owners while laborers have their wages set (basically) by supply and demand independent of how productive their labor is in terms of outputs, then capital owners necessarily get an increasingly large slice of the pie with every step humanity takes forward, even if all else stays equal (which it frequently doesn't).

[Ancient History]

That goes right back to owning the means of production; the foundation of Roman economy was the absentee landlordism where the rich guys owned the farms and vineyards and the slaves and coloni sharecropped it. Even at times where the central government was strong enough to enforce static prices for agricultural goods, the landlords did their best to squeeze every solidi they could out of their lands.

There are other issues as well, because when you have a big pile of money you start getting into the really arcane ends of the financial markets, where a great deal of money can be generated without producing any wealth, because no appreciable good is produced or transformed and no effective service is performed.

[Maj]

I found the link! It's right here.

I found the article extremely interesting to read, though I don't think I know enough about economics to really form a strong opinion on what it had to say. If nothing else, I thought the information about the Founding Fathers was fantastic.

[name_here]

Debt Slavery is an actual term that actually means something, and we don't have any of it in first-world countries and have not for centuries.

[Winnah]

Bitcoin price volatility is due to the fact it is not a mainstream currency. The 'cure' to that is widespread acceptance. The currency is only 4 years old, so you can view the volatility as birthing pains or as a speculative bubble, and only time will be the judge. I am not going to make proclaimations about the future under the presumption I possess some Deplhic insight.

Currently, my only method of using Bitcoin is online shopping. If I lived in Singapore, Jakarta or Stockholm, that would not be the case. Fortunately for me, I can pay for air travel using BTC as well as many services at my destination. So if I wanted a BTC holiday, using only Bitcoin, that is totally a thing I can do. All I need is my laptop, a flash drive and a toothbrush.

Debt slavery is kind of a stupid fucking buzzword, and you don't really do much beyond telling everyone you read embarrassingly stupid internet rants when you say it on its own. Insofar as it can refer to any social problems that aren't bullshit someone made up, it refers to the increasing inability of the lower and middle class to support themself or the increasing debt overhang and its catastrophic effects. The former of those is a result of wealth inequality (and has fuck all to do with central banks). The latter of those is a result of deregulating the financial sector in such a way that they could sell bundles of bad loans for cash upfront at no liability while telling everyone those bundles were super-safe (and has fuck all to do with central banks).

Fuck me. Keep flinging shit, clicking your fingers and beating your chest. Maybe if you rattle your cage enough, your handlers will take it as a signal you need jacking off.

Wait...that is unfair. Chimpanzees have been into space and I taught one how to play Pac Man the other day, so I'll try and explain flaws of the financial sector (endogenous money creation), how that competes with actual economic growth (tangible productivity investment) and why central banking is bad, as simply as I can.

To paraphrase Holmes; in the real world, banks extend credit, creating deposits in the process, and then look for the reserves later. The question then becomes one of whether and how the central banks will accommodate the demand for those cash reserves. In the very short run, Central banks have little or no choice about accommodating that demand.

Banks are able to do this due to the nature of fractional reserves, with equity requirements for credit essentially being non existant throughout much of the financial sector.

To plagiarise Keen; The Central Bank has an obvious motivation to lend: it doesn’t want to destroy capitalism. But why should Seller Bank lend to Buyer Bank in this case? Because it now has excess reserves relative to its Reserve Requirement: the transfer of funds from Buyer Bank increased its Reserves by precisely as much as Seller’s Deposit account rose, and since the Reserve Requirement is a fraction of deposits (10 per cent of household deposits only in the USA – there is no reserve requirement for corporate deposits), it now has a lot more Reserves than it needs. Better to lend them at the interbank rate to Buyer Bank than to get no return (or a very low return) on the Reserves themselves.

Finance per­forms gen­uine, essen­tial ser­vices in a cap­i­tal­ist econ­omy when it lim­its itself to pro­vid­ing work­ing cap­i­tal to non-financial cor­po­ra­tions; fund­ing invest­ment and entre­pre­neur­ial activ­ity, whether directly or indi­rectly; fund­ing hous­ing pur­chase for strictly res­i­den­tial pur­poses, whether to owner-occupiers for pur­chase or to investors for the pro­vi­sion of rental prop­er­ties; and pro­vid­ing finance to house­holds for large expen­di­tures such as auto­mo­biles, home ren­o­va­tions, etc.

It is a destruc­tive force in cap­i­tal­ism when it pro­motes lever­aged spec­u­la­tion on asset or com­mod­ity prices, and funds activ­i­ties (like lev­ered buy­outs) that drive debt lev­els up and rely upon ris­ing asset prices for their suc­cess. Such activ­i­ties are the over­whelm­ing focus of the non-bank finan­cial sec­tor today, and are the pri­mary rea­son why finan­cial sec­tor debt has risen from triv­ial lev­els to their current peak.

Capitalism’s crises have always been a prod­uct of the finan­cial sec­tor fund­ing spec­u­la­tion on asset prices rather than fund­ing busi­ness and inno­va­tion. This allows finan­cial sec­tor prof­its to grow far larger than is war­ranted, on the foun­da­tion of a far larger level of pri­vate debt than soci­ety can sup­port. This lend­ing causes a pos­i­tive feed­back loop between accel­er­at­ing debt and ris­ing asset prices, lead­ing to both a debt and asset price bub­ble. The asset price bub­ble must burst—because it relies upon accel­er­at­ing debt for its maintenance—but once it bursts, soci­ety is still left with the debt.

Are you starting to see the difference a full reserve, peer to peer currency system could have on an economy yet? My imagination is running wild. The stories of BTC investment in human capital throuout poor Asian and African nations already warms my heart as both a Libertarian and a Socialist, so I have genuine hope for the future if this evolves into a revolutionary practice, as oppossed to the latest in a long line of trends.

...Your choice is sedition of sedation. Any number can play.

[Username17]

Bitcoin price volatility is due to the fact it is not a mainstream currency. The 'cure' to that is widespread acceptance. The currency is only 4 years old, so you can view the volatility as birthing pains or as a speculative bubble, and only time will be the judge. I am not going to make proclaimations about the future under the presumption I possess some Deplhic insight.

You are an idiot. Gold as a currency is two and a have millennia old. And there were big parts of that time when the currency was accepted almost everywhere in the world. Guess what? Prices were still highly volatile. Let's consider just the gold standard inter-war era in the United States:



Yes, that is a shift in headline inflation of nearly forty percent in a single year. Going from nearly 25% inflation to 15% deflation in just a few months. That's insane. And the price of gold hasn't exactly stabilized in the last few decades either:



You cannot make a good faith argument that a commodity currency is naturally stable. Price stability takes a lot of fucking work and a central bank willing to adjust the money supply a lot in order to maintain it. In response to some deflationary shocks in 2008, the US central bank has increased the monetary base by about two and half times. That's literally trillions of extra dollars in circulation, to keep monetary stability. And it's worked. Inflation is low, but it's not negative.



A currency without an issuing authority can't do that. And that means it can't function as a currency. The very thing that makes libertarian morons stroke their penises about BitCoin is the facet about it which makes it literally impossible to maintain the kind of stability that is required to be a real currency in any meaningful sense. If you can't print up a bunch more BitCoins in response to the needs of the economy, it isn't fucking good for anything.

It isn't about it being too young. It's about it being fundamentally unsound as an idea. It's based on the monetary theories of idiots who don't understand what money even is, let alone how to manage a currency. BitCoin is not a currency. It is a trading card or a stamp. A token of value that only has value because there are idiots collecting the damn things.

-Username17

[Koumei]

And now someone has made a rival for Bitcoin: wow much currency

[Leress]

And now someone has made a rival for Bitcoin: wow much currency

So that is what that meme came from?

[Lago PARANOIA]

So. As far as currency manipulation via a non-expanding currency goes, what is the libertarian response towards the destruction of money? For example, what exactly are they going to do about a government that just taxes and then doesn't spend? Especially if the tax scheme is flat or even regressive like the ones most libertarians advocate.

The resultant deflation would kick the lower classes in the nuts much harder than the inflation they pee their pants over.

[erik]

And now someone has made a rival for Bitcoin: wow much currency

So that is what that meme came from?

Other way around.

There's actually a bunch of competing pyramid schemes cryptocurrencies.

[Kaelik]

Since this thread was bumped, in related news, bitcoin prices are down from when we last had this argument, and bitcoin is still a purely speculative investment with no consistent price, and people still aren't using bitcoins for anything they could use a credit card and real us dollars for because of that.

[Username17]

So. As far as currency manipulation via a non-expanding currency goes, what is the libertarian response towards the destruction of money? For example, what exactly are they going to do about a government that just taxes and then doesn't spend? Especially if the tax scheme is flat or even regressive like the ones most libertarians advocate.

The resultant deflation would kick the lower classes in the nuts much harder than the inflation they pee their pants over.

The Libertarian theory of money is not actually internally consistent. Money is supposed to be things with "real value" but that would imply:

• Zero sum exchanges.
• An ever larger amount of society's wealth tied up in Adam Smith's "dead stock."
• Any and all work required to store and verify the value of the commodity used as a trade good to come from... magic?

So here's a thing that's been bothering me about the whole BitCoin thing: the entire claim that it has any "real value" at all is that there is, ultimately, a finite number of them. After a specific time in the future, all BitCoin mining operations will have zero return because there will be no more bits to hash. At the same time, the entire claim to having "real utility" is that you don't have to pay transaction fees because the overhead of verification is taken care of... by the mining servers.

If the "real value" clause ever actually comes due, then even if BitCoins can be sold for a billion dollars each at that moment, the mining servers will still turn off. And then the financial infrastructure that every BitCoin transaction and wallet is freeloading off of will just cease to exist.

It takes real resources to store and verify commodity currency, whether the commodity is bars of gold or strings of numbers. Right now, BitCoin is paying for those resources with the issuance of new virtual coins. But the up front promise is that they are eventually going to stop doing that. At which point they will be paying for the resources required to maintain and verify these coins and transactions with... nothing.

So even if BitCoin doesn't have any particular scandal that makes it vanish into the ether of e-gold and other digital gold currency scams, the music still has to stop eventually. They are saying simultaneously that they can keep transaction fees down by paying for financial infrastructure with newly issued BitCoins and also that there is a limit to the number of BitCoins they will ever issue. And while both of those things can be simultaneously true for a while, in the long run one or the other promise has to be broken.

-Username17

[Orca]

Is the price bubble going to last long enough for the supply to run out entirely though? It wasn't a lack of possible new breeds of tulip bulbs which caused the crash in Dutch tulip bulb prices back in the earliest asset price bubble I've heard about, it was speculators getting out of the market. Similarly with the bubbles which I've personally seen.

[Username17]

Is the price bubble going to last long enough for the supply to run out entirely though?

Almost certainly not. As the number of coins in "circulation" increase, the amount of processor time required to verify them all increases. And BitCoin responds to that by increasing the amount of calculations required to get a new coin over time. This means that the minimum sale price of a BitCoin required to make mining economically viable increases over time. If the price fluctuates below that ever increasing price threshold, then the incentive to mine collapses. And if no one is mining, the system collapses. Coins can't be verified and transactions can't be processed.

Now, the threshold will come. Eventually, and indeed pretty soon in the grand scheme of things, the sale price required to make mining economically viable rises to "infinity" as mining limits out. But it's pretty obvious that with the asking price of these things being so unstable, it will pass that threshold with a dropping price well before it passes it with a rising mining cost.

Which brings us to BitCoin's only theoretical possible way to perpetuate itself in even the medium term: the mining concerns have to find a way to extract the real resources they need to continue running the financial infrastructure without relying on being awarded new BitCoins and then selling them. Which means in turn that they need a financial concern not in getting BitCoins, but in the commerce in BitCoins itself. So perhaps they could start taxing transactions, or they could be the actual operators of black markets like silkroad (making profits from selling illegal goods and services). In any case, without a conflict of interest, it's hard to see them maintaining interest.

BitCoin cannot continue to exist without breaking one of its core promises. And if the people who designed the thing understood anything about how their system works, they had to know that. Which means that it was a ponzi scheme from the start.

-Username17

[John Magnum]

Of course the thing is that mining has already become an insufficiently lucrative incentive to operate the transaction-verifying engine, and people are already charging transaction fees and prioritizing the transactions of anyone who pays up. Which means that the hullabaloo about how Bitcoins don't have transaction fees and are super equal and available to everyone are already completely false, and will get more false as time passes.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The US Dollar will stop having value when the United States collapses. A process which is guarded against by the United States Armed Forces, the most powerful military machine the world has ever seen; and the United States Strategic Food Reserve, a distributed collection of warehouses full of preserved food sufficient to keep the American people fed through fifty years of nuclear winter.

Could you give us some more information on this, FrankTrollman? Every time I look up about the U.S.'s food reserves on Google I just get redirected to ancient legislation, policy proposals, and/or scaremongering about how the food reserves are practically zero.

[Maj]

Not Frank, but...

In 2008, the US pretty much gutted anything that was left in its food reserve. A while back, Congress converted the grain reserve into the Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust, dropping the reserves to 4 million metric tons of wheat, sorghum, rice, and corn, for use as food aid to foreign countries and in case of major emergencies in the US. Unfortunately, there was no provision for restocking the trust once commodities were used, so that didn't happen.

The trust is also in charge of making loans to farmers to help secure their crops financially - weather and all that making farming a bit of an unstable occupation. The loans can be repaid either in money, or in the crop (essentially, the crop is collateral). The actual commodity inventory of the trust is managed by the USDA's Commodity Credit Corporation, which releases its inventory figures every year. Here is the latest PDF report (August 2013).

As you can see, the government has given out lots of loans to cover various crops, but we don't physically have those crops. What we do have is mountains of sugar and peanuts.