Crypto Currency Observations...

Maverick74 said:
But Baron the argument you are making is that price does not matter.
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You have to look at it on a more granular level. If I buy a bag of weed for $200 in BTC, and my buddies and I smoke it all this weekend, then I'm coming back to one of the darknet markets for another $200 worth next weekend. That means I have to convert dollars to BTC and use that BTC for my upcoming transaction. I really don't care if BTC is slightly higher or lower as it pertains to the dollar.... I just want my $200 worth of weed. But because I told my buddies how I got it last weekend, they now want in on the game to buy their own stash on the darknet themselves. This virally increasing demand for BTC in order to transact for the desired drugs is what has always underpinned the demand for bitcoin. And if you couple that with Tom Lee's assertion that many bitcoin owners are simply "hodlers", or people that just mine the coins and sit on them, then that means there's few bitcoins available for all the people that actually need them for real transactions. So there goes your supply and demand imbalance and the resulting price increase that never seems to end.
 
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Baron said:
...If it weren't for the drug marketplaces like Silk Road, Agora, Alphabay and countless others, then bitcoin would have very little usefulness.....That's why the 680 other coins out there don't have any success. There's no exponentially growing network of users that these alt coins are being integrated into as a currency standard.
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So in your opinion... would you see Etherium as one of those networks, but focussed on the more normal day-to-day life? As in (or so I understand) that Etherium is a network where apps etc are being build, where Ether is the general payment.

If Bitcoin is the payment for illegal services and trade on criminal networks like SilkRoad... Ether is the payment for legal services and trade on an online network like Etherium?

So in a legal usability sense, Ether would eventually have a larger value (in market cap).

Also, if BTC's main purpose is the facilitating of illegal trade... surely a rise in value to where it is now has nothing to do with this, but again is merely the effect of speculating it's going up anyway? Or do you believe that the use of BTC in illegal trade has increased massively in the past year?

I find the usability factor a very good point, in that without it... it has no merit. I've been quite negative on opinions that say it's a good value store, since it's limited supply. But the usability is far more important for survival of any coin like this.
 
Scataphagos said:
That said, I wish I'd have known about BTC when it was available for <$.01 and had the gumption to buy it.... "water under the bridge, now", you know.
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A pity indeed. But you were here at ET participating in bitcoin related threads in 2013 (I can remember posts you were trolling me). At that time, $100 was a very good price, as well as $200 in 2015. And actually I think if the price crashes in coming November to say $3000, it will be a good price as well, if you look back in 2020.
Problem with us people is that it's very hard to imagine what a disruptive new technology will do. History shows that over and over again: think of the "horse breeders" in 1900 when the car arrived, or the "Fax machines" when Internet popped up. Putting your money into something completely new and unproven is very hard....
 
Baron said:
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Drugs.
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You are right: Drugs did kick start Bitcoin in the early years. But that's no longer the only driver (very probably not even the main driver anymore: which proves the not existing price-dump when the lastest big dark-market was closed by the FBI earlier this year). Actually the current dark-markets are moving to Monero and Dash (because they offer more anonymity over Bitcoin).

Actually Bitcoin has currently many more drivers and real-use cases. Logically it's used for anything and anywhere Governments around the world are prohibiting something (all multi billion industries):
- Sex industry
- Gambling and Poker industry
- Gifts to "taboo organizations" (think Wikileaks).
- Drugs industry.

Further in industries where it's hard or expensive to do cross boarder payments:
- remittances
- capital flight
- legal transport of very large amounts of money (think millions).

And of coarse just as store-of-value, because your government is destroying your purchasing power. Think of: Venezuela, Ukraine, India, Africa...
 
Scataphagos said:
That said, I wish I'd have known about BTC when it was available for <$.01 and had the gumption to buy it.... "water under the bridge, now", you know.

OK... all you cryptocoin-philes... lemme have it. (I know, crypto is the "greatest thing EVER", and "I don't know what I'm talking about". Yada-yada-yada.)

:)

*What they have going for them... being 1st and the fame that goes with + issue limited to 21 million coins... we'll see if that isn't somehow diluted later. But for now, "party on"!
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I just found a "conversation" between us, from 2013.

upload_2017-10-24_14-23-33.png


Admit: I was right all that time :-)
 
JackRab said:
So in your opinion... would you see Etherium as one of those networks, but focussed on the more normal day-to-day life? As in (or so I understand) that Etherium is a network where apps etc are being build, where Ether is the general payment.
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The fact that you can store code/computations on the blockchain makes Ethereum a scalability nightmare. I'm not a current fan because I'm just not convinced it's going to solve any major problems in an elegant way. I mean, it's been years and still nobody has created a commercially successful application with it. It's like a development playground for really smart people, but that's about it.

JackRab said:
Also, if BTC's main purpose is the facilitating of illegal trade... surely a rise in value to where it is now has nothing to do with this, but again is merely the effect of speculating it's going up anyway? Or do you believe that the use of BTC in illegal trade has increased massively in the past year?
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Oh, the speculators have definitely played their part in the whole thing for sure, but I can guarantee that the BTC drug business is bigger now than it was last year, or the year before that, etc.
 
JackRab said:
Also, if BTC's main purpose is the facilitating of illegal trade... surely a rise in value to where it is now has nothing to do with this, but again is merely the effect of speculating it's going up anyway? Or do you believe that the use of BTC in illegal trade has increased massively in the past year?

I find the usability factor a very good point, in that without it... it has no merit. I've been quite negative on opinions that say it's a good value store, since it's limited supply. But the usability is far more important for survival of any coin like this.
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Both.

The 1,000+ other crypto coins don't have that... which is why they mostly languish and will likely never flourish to the expectations of their investors.

Lots of crypto investors hoping theirs will be the "next BTC". Unlikely.
 
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