.. has a belief in bitcoin AND lots of money to pay the electricity bills, salaries, rent, maintenance, and equipment upgrades.  Unfortunately, people who let their ideology or religion determine their investment decisions rarely have money to spare.

A pity, he would surely have loved to see this:


EDIT:
  Source article (at ZeroHedge)
  Reddit thread claiming that it is Bitcoinwisdom's screen

I am not feigning anything; my signature says what I think.  You know my name, my job, my face, my opinions.

Bitcoin was not meant to be a scam, but it has become one.

"Misguided" is what I see most among bitcoiners: partly because of wishful thinking, partly because the snake oil salesmen try their best to hide the truth and spread lies (like "China is not important", "adoption is increasing", etc.).

I contribute serious stuff to /r/bitcoin and make fun of bitcoiners on /r/buttcoin.  The latter I consider myself to be fully entitled to, as a small compensation for the insults that I get here, on reddit and on twitter -- merely for, once in a while, writing some unpleasant truths about bitcoin.

I don't know whether this has been posted here already. I don't know whether you will find it funny.
http://bitcalc.beepboopbitcoin.com/
(Be sure to click the pink square at top right at some point, it leads to the part most relevant to this thread.)

Yes, some jerk had edited that article to say that I had one of the largest bitcoin fortunes and was a great fan of bitcoin. So I had to fix it.  (Thanks, but no thanks, for reminding me of another reason to hate bitcoin.)


I must update it. There are many more things that people must be warned about.

I did and do both things.  Like thisand this for example.

As I explained several times before, I have about a hundred threads in my watchlist, but most of the time this is the only one that comes up.  (Second one is a bizarre thread about the BFL opera, and next is 'Answer the above question with a question'.)  And this is the best of them in several ways: most interesting news and issues about bitcoin get mentioned here.  Moreover, most people here are basically gamblers; insults and all, you are a saner crowd than the deluded fanatics and conmen that frequent some of the other threads.

I am not here to convince anyone, but of course I cannot rest idle when I see something wrong on the internet.  And if someone asks my opinion, why should I not answer?


Yes, they have been "addressed", but I did not find the answers convincing.

Note that the answer to almost every question about the future of bitcoin ultimately rests on what one believes that some persons or institutions will do in suh and such circumstaces.  Well, bitcoin believers and skeptics obviously have quite different views on such things, and there is little chance that debating will change that sort of belief...

As it says in my signature, I cannot imagine a plausible future where bitcoin will be successful.  I see many ways in which it could fail, those are two of them.  The more I read, the more skeptical I become.

Take the economy of mining, for example. Yesterday I found this paper claiming that the bitcoin mining network now consumes about as much electricity as the whole country of Ireland , ~1 GW.  I found that hard to believe, but it seems correct.  For what? So that some drug dealers can be absolutely certan that their customer will not double-spend them? So that no one can retroactively change the amount that someone spent on Overstock?  So that the police cannot seize the coins of ransomware criminals?

That absurd consumption of energy does not have any rational justification.  It does not even make the network more secure against 51% attacks, because it is still the case that 4-5 mining entities have more than 51% of the hashing power, and that situation is more likely to get worse than better if the network grows more.  Moreover, further price drops and/or the next halving may cause morethan 51% of the hashpower to be turned off -- and may be acquired or rented by a hostile entity, at scrap iron prices.

The absurd consumption of energy is merely a consequence of the block reward being fixed at 50 BTC irrespective of the price, and of the price being 50 times what the current use as currency would imply.  The overvaluation, in turn, is a consequence of the fixed supply, that created the mirage of a currency whose value will grow to astronomic levels; a mirage that led to a spiral of hoarding and absurd price increases.   The overvaluation also resulted in the block reward being 100 times or more the typical fees contained in a block, so that miners have essentially no incentive to include transactions in it.  Worse, the network consumes about 1 million dollars per day that must be provided by new investors, lured by the promise of fabulous speculative gains.  And the absurd will only grow if the price increases again.

This system simply does not make any economic sense.  It is not sustained by sound market principles, but totally by hype, by the belief of gullible people that they will become billionaries if they just buy as much bitcoin as they can and hold hard to it.

From what I have read around, most people who claim to believe in bitcoin's future do so because of various reasons -- because they own bitcoins, because they are employees or investors of bitcoin-related enterprises, because they see it as a way to buy drugs and other illegal things, because of hallucinations about it ending poverty, corruption, banks, governments... but almost never because they rationally believe that it will be a viable currency and efficient payment system.  Which is the only thing that it was designed to be, and it is becoming clear to everybody that it will not be.

I believe that we should always think about the worst that could happen and try to be prepared for it.

http://bizarro.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/172/2013/09/bz-panel-09-30-13.jpg

Sorry, I don't know anything about them...

If bitcoin survives and grows, I think that it is quite likely that the protocol will be amended with a government-mandated "black list" of coins that cannot be moved, and a "white list" of transactions that must be accepted even without a valid signature. 

If bitcoin succeeds, it is even possible that the current blockchain will have to be junked, and a new blockchain be restarted with suitable legal constraints and devices.

In either case, the bitcoiners who understand the goals of bitcoin will surely scream and claim (with reason) that those violations of the basic principles render the coin worthless.  The other 99% will not even understand what the fuss is about, and will mostly ignore the changes, or even approve them...

Those "bids", all for exactly 100 shares, cannot be real bids from end investors.  They must be only token amounts that the level-2 brokers entered only to have their names listed on that page.

The lower-tier brokers, if they care to keep their clients,  should be telling them to wait until trading starts before buying in.

If bitcoin collapses to 0 $/BTC, there will be thousands of furious bagholders screaming 'ponzi' and looking for someone to sue. Most early adopters who cashed out in time may be able to claim that they only believed the spiel and were just lucky.  The unlucky ones, and law enforcement, will go after the man who conceived and implemented the scam.  If he were to pocket hundreds of millions... Guess where that money would have come out of.  

Well, just looking at those huge spikes we can tell that the graph does not show "genuine level of activity in the Bitcoin economy".  

The explanation given by other posters for the last spike, in particular, shows why: "coins moved" does not mean "coins changed hands".  That goes for "old" coins as well for "new" ones.

Well, "<-----------------------" is a left direction, "----------------------->" is a right direction; do you really need more than one?

Sorry for taking it at face value, but in other threads people have been posting far weirder theories, in all seriousness. 

Kobayashi is a very common Japanese surname; I had a colleague with it.

Anyone finds it suspicious that the Coinbase CEO is Armstrong, like the first man to step on the moon? 

That is just a survey for now. If and when Kobayashi is ready to distribute the spoils, he may ask for real whether you want BTC or JPY; but he does not know yet whether that will be possible.  That's what I got from the FAQ he posted.

I understood that they only give you an exemption from trading fees, not an actual reward.  Isn't that so?

In the documents posted yesterday, Kobayashi says that he is still looking into the possibility of returning the BTC as BTC, but he does not know whether it will be possible or sensible.  In any case, BTC claims will be converted to JPY at a specified rate, and the amount awarded will be expressed in JPY, even if it gets paid out as BTC.

Sorry, I am confused.  Did you mean that the bitcoiners' claim of train-of-increasing-bubbles was pathetic, or that I am wrong and they never claimed that?