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Good points ;even Andrew Jackson $20[ Federal Reserve Note]LOL
SEC Denies Winklevoss Application for a Bitcoin ETF
- Thread starter ajacobson
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Good points ;even Andrew Jackson $20[ Federal Reserve Note]LOL
I always thought that big retailers are going to get on the crypto bandwagon and issue their own currency. Walmart, Amazon,Ebay,etc. What would be the advantage?
1. Huge product list immediately available for the new coin, killing bitcoin's network advantage.
2. It would be quasi centralized because the retailer would premine some of the coins (let's say 30%) ensuring that they are in somehow control, but the rest of the coins would be community mined.
3. They would back the coins with a minimum value, let's say $5. Thus users would know there is a bottom to the price.
So here is how it would work: Retailer (let's say Ebay) makes its Ecoin, and premines 30% of its ever existing numbers. They send 1 coin to every active Ebayer and those members can use it to any product on Ebay. Basicly it is a $5 discount for every user of Ebay, a promotion.
What it achieves though that immediately there are 100 million users. If the user doesn't use the coin in 1 month, it goes back to Ebay. Ebay would also make its own exchange and people could buy and sell coins. If price raises, that pays for Ebay's original investment, but they are big enough, they can swallow a little loss. After the original coming out of Ecoin, everyone could mine it, but Ebay would keep mining its fair share making sure nobody is a bigger miner than them.
You throw in a couple of advanced features and you have a bitcoin killer. The long used "bitcoin has the network effect and first comer advantage" argument could be killed in a day when Ecoin comes out.
Maybe I should pitch this idea to Bezos. I am sure Elon Musk would LOVE to sell Tesla coins for solar discount or whatever...
1. Huge product list immediately available for the new coin, killing bitcoin's network advantage.
2. It would be quasi centralized because the retailer would premine some of the coins (let's say 30%) ensuring that they are in somehow control, but the rest of the coins would be community mined.
3. They would back the coins with a minimum value, let's say $5. Thus users would know there is a bottom to the price.
So here is how it would work: Retailer (let's say Ebay) makes its Ecoin, and premines 30% of its ever existing numbers. They send 1 coin to every active Ebayer and those members can use it to any product on Ebay. Basicly it is a $5 discount for every user of Ebay, a promotion.
What it achieves though that immediately there are 100 million users. If the user doesn't use the coin in 1 month, it goes back to Ebay. Ebay would also make its own exchange and people could buy and sell coins. If price raises, that pays for Ebay's original investment, but they are big enough, they can swallow a little loss. After the original coming out of Ecoin, everyone could mine it, but Ebay would keep mining its fair share making sure nobody is a bigger miner than them.
You throw in a couple of advanced features and you have a bitcoin killer. The long used "bitcoin has the network effect and first comer advantage" argument could be killed in a day when Ecoin comes out.
Maybe I should pitch this idea to Bezos. I am sure Elon Musk would LOVE to sell Tesla coins for solar discount or whatever...
Unfortunately this is Utopian dream. If you let people choose to pay their taxes, how many will? One of the biggest problems right now is that of taxation in which corporations simply don't pay enough. They hide it all offshore, thankfully because of loopholes created by the elite and for the elite, but still, its a way to bypass it all. But this results in major structural challenges. Its impossible to try and assemble some sort of system for the masses if you give them all free will to choose if they want to pay and how much, etc.
We have free will to buy whatever car we want, and history tells us that many brands have peaked in popularity and dropped. We have free will to use whatever websites we want, and same story.
Currency cannot have free will. It has to be enacted through coercion, with the possibility of changing, through majority voting and all that jazz. But still, if you let people choose competing currencies, you're going to get major shakeups all the time, and the business world does not do well under instability.
Agree except for the part of physical money disappearing. I think more along the lines of - radio didn't disappear (completely anyway) once TV came along and TV once the internet came along and the internet won't once whatever eclipses it.
Paper money is still around today with all the physical money (gold, jewelry, art, rare wines, real estate, antiques etc,) and plastic, electronic and helicopter money in "circulation". What would cause it not to be in the future?
NIRP.
Digital yes, decentralized crypto, not so much. 98% of the dollar only exist in digital form on banks' ledgers.
The problems with bitcoin are many fold, the biggest could be competition. If you are for bitcoin, there is simply no good argument why you aren't for litecoin, ethereum,etc. Except you own bitcoin and you don't like competition, what is understandable, but not really a good argument for only 1 crypto in general. And when you have plenty of different (and some of them having even better features than bitcoin) cryptos, price should and will go down.
Right now certain fixes are in the works for bitcoin. But it is much easier to start fresh or fork a new blockchain than trying to reach consensus among miners and users. BU right now isn't succeeding, but something similar could, but it might kill the original idea in the process.
There's an assumption that a Bitcoin is inevitable. There are other possibilities:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/future-of-money-kenya-m-pesa-60-minutes/
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/future-of-money-kenya-m-pesa-60-minutes/
BTC is priciest because of the network effect. You and I can imagine a better social network than Facebook. The barrier of entry for creating a social network website is pretty low. But, realistically, we will never compete because of the network effect.
Also, bitcoin has the most developers working on the project. This is important.
Also, bitcoin has the most brand recognition. It can be spent on goods and services or exchanged for cash worldwide. Most of the other cryptos can only be exchanged on altcoin exchanges (for bitcoin to cash out).
Also, bitcoin has the most hashing power of any crypto which is necessary for defense of the network.
What gives bitcoin value? Is it tulip mania? This argument is always frustrating. As traders, who cares? I guess people who equate BTC with tulips never traded BS in the stock market. Nobody in olden times ever made money on the tulip or South Sea crazes?
Personally, I have grown more agnostic on cryptocurrency over the years. At first, the possible use cases seemed amazing, but not much has actually come to fruition. The current uses of bitcoin are speculation (of future disruptive uses cases and price advances), capital preservation in failed states like Venezuela and money laundering in unsophisticated regions (ie. moving money from Rwanda to South Africa). I think these reasons are more than enough to justify its current market cap which is less than Snapchat the last I checked. If future use cases materialize, the bitcoin market cap will expand. Also, there should be more than one long-term winner in this space. I like Monero, Dash and think Ethereum will probably go much higher. Ethereum, however, will probably run into technical problems in the future and not deliver all that is promised. There are also promising ICOs (initial coin offerings) which are similar to IPOs. Edgeless, for instance, is an upcoming ICO that is developing an edgeless casino that will make money off player error. It is not available to US citizens.
Opinion on Bitcoin Unlimited:
-bitcoin has hardforked in the past. There were network errors like double spends in the early days (I believe).
1. implement SegWit
2. work on the BU bugs and roll that out later perhaps branded as something else.
3. implement the BU replacement on a trial altcoin like Litecoin first.
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Are they free to make and easy to produce? Cryptos are when they start out. So your analogy was dead on arrival...
Show me ANY product in history that was easy to make and had no copyright protection and it kept or increased its value. No such a thing...
And you are saying you don't know if bitcoin will be the highest price in the future, so what exactly is your argument?