> The premise behind bitcoin-the-game is that the current wave of buyers must guess when (or if) a subsequent wave of buyers will emerge, this second next wave's participation being contingent on when (or if) they believe a third wave of buyers to emerge. If they guess right, the early birds win at the expense of the late ones. ...

This is a truly tired analysis. It goes by various names, including "greater fool theory." Notice how it applies to almost every asset being traded today?

Stocks? Remember dividends? Not so much these days. Poster child is Amazon, but there's a slew of others that offer virtually nothing to investors other than price appreciation.

Government bonds? Do do negative interest rates sound? You buy one of these because either you have to or you think others will have to.

Real estate? Please. Take away price appreciation driven by easy money and few would bother "owning."

What this piece ignores is the world's ever-encroaching governments and the ongoing assault on privacy - with money as the fulcrum.

Well, you could apply this to almost any of the highly abstracted financial instruments currently traded. Derivatives, options, etc. People claim they're "investing in real companies" (which at a very low level they are), but most of the time what is actually happening, is you are betting on whether other people will invest in the company, or what investor sentiment will be x months down the track. You aren't directly investing in the success of the company, you're investing in the investor confidence in the company. Buying stocks directly is of course, at least a bit different.

I see Bitcoin as much the same. Sure, it could be used as a real currency, in the same way that I could use options or bonds as real currency. I could ask you if you'd be willing to sell your car to me for x number of options I currently hold. But I haven't created a new currency, and the value behind that "currency" is just the investor opinion of it at any given time.

Somebody probably made the same arguments when the first paper money was printed and when the first government fiat came about. This is the next money and it's important because corrupt governments can not steal it or devalue it by printing.

Then I would say gold is exactly the same. In fact, gold would be a riskier betting game as information is less transparent (estimating supply, how fast It's mined etc) compared to bitcoin.

So many articles about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies today! I've devoted a lot of my career to blockchain, and here is my brief summary:

- Blockchain typically means a tamper-proof, distributed database.

- Smart contracts are like stored database procedures.

- Blockchains allow you to transact valuable assets - even billions! - without needing to trust your counter-party.

- However, you must trust the underlying software! This is a fundamentally different risk from usual financial transactions where you trust the institutions servicing the exchange, but not necessarily the counter-party. This turns finance upside-down!

- People can create financial products and services - even extremely complex ones - without any governmental permission, or if they need a real-world presence, permission from a regulatory body that is very amenable. And once granted, it's very easily to transact globally!

- If your curiosity is piqued, check out my blog post I wrote a while ago on MakerDAO and their decentalized stablecoin. It's fascinating! https://medium.com/@james_3093/the-dai-stablecoin-is-a-game-...

- Cryptocurrency and blockchain are some of the most debated, and IMO misunderstood technologies of 2019. They are interesting from not just a pure computer science perspective but also economics, philosophy, and psychology.

The author just described how bitcoin has property of money (being a speculative bet that a given asset will carry value in the future), and deduced that bitcoin is not money.

The problem with the Bitcoin game is there is no longer the 'millionaire overnight' scenario as a possibility. Sure, you could buy 1 coin and it could go up 10x, yet you'd still only be (at this time) $90k richer. Which isn't bad but the big climb from decimal places up to full dollars is where there was more possibility. Common folks can take a gamble on 100 coins for $1 a piece, they really can't take a gamble at $3k+ per coin. Thus, that's why we sit in the $3k to $9k range. Too few people to join, too many people holding on because they bought at a higher price.

I also don't think psychologically people want to own a decimal place of something but that's a different issue. If people could still buy 100 bitcoins, they'd probably do so.

He’s looking at Bitcoin in terms of dollars, but dollars also have zero utility, so they have to be traded for something, and there are an awful lot of them created every day. We’re way overcaptilalized, so most of this is going into speculative investment rather than consumable utility. In that regard, it hardly matters what form that speculation takes, the prices are mostly determined by capital flows rather than internal returns.

Fantasy Baseball : MLB :: Cryptocurrencies : Wall Street

To me it's like any other stock, except more volatile. When you use it for payments it's like selling some of your shares in a stock.

Bitcoin is gambling but the entire economy is also gambling. Luck is the only significant differentiator between winners and losers.

The reason why capitalism kind of works is not because it rewards productive people but because most people believe that it rewards productive people.

The economic incentive to work or invest is rooted in deception. Not so different from Bitcoin or anything else.

I think this article is kind of missing the point. Literally any tradeable thing can be used for speculation like this. The problem with bitcoin is that it seems to be primarily used for speculation.

This is one of the worst anti-bitcoin articles I’ve ever read.

Bitcoin is no game; over $7 trillion has been transferred since 2009: https://blog.coinbase.com/charting-the-course-of-bitcoin-11-....

We’re seeing the beginning of a new economic good being created right in front of our eyes and many of us won’t realize this until many years later.