Happy Birthday Bitcoin!

Why is it that nobody is on hear bragging about all their profits? With all the talk we have had over the last year or so, there should be some guys on here that have made some real scratch. Did any of you guys actually buy any BTC?
 


It doesn't matter how many people are talking about it if you can't pay your taxes with it (legal tender). At the end of the day, that's the clincher.

Not a clincher for anyone holding BTC, that's for sure.

Pretty sure there's agencies out there in the world trying to present a solution to the problem you've posed.

Shit, tons of people were talking about gold and silver the last 9 years. They aren't any closer to being "money" than Bitcoin is.

Gold and silver as money and we're going back just 9 years.....??? :confused:


But no one doing anything legal (where they have to file and pay taxes) is doing business exclusively in Bitcoins. And before someone comes back at me about this, think about it real hard.

You're right. I don't know drug dealers who take welfare stamps or credit cards, just cash and BTC. Is this a point worth mentioning? :confused:

We know of legit businesses taking BTC alongside other forms of payment now, though. Isn't this the point?

I will give you something real hard to think about: If a drug dealers accept it as a form of payment, we're already far past questioning the legitimacy of the currency.
 
Why is it that nobody is on hear bragging about all their profits? With all the talk we have had over the last year or so, there should be some guys on here that have made some real scratch. Did any of you guys actually buy any BTC?

Thats rule #1 homie

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ihPOTDxMfE]10 crack commandments biggie smalls - YouTube[/ame]
 
Pretty sure there's agencies out there in the world trying to present a solution to the problem you've posed.
When someone comes up with an agency that solves paying taxes, I will literally dance with joy.

Gold and silver as money and we're going back just 9 years.....??? :confused:
My point is that I can make a stronger case for Gold and Silver, they have a massive institutional, and historical advantage on BTC, and they are no closer to being money than BTC.

You're right. I don't know drug dealers who take welfare stamps or credit cards, just cash and BTC. Is this a point worth mentioning?
I think my point was worth mentioning. I have no idea what drug dealers have to do with it.

We know of legit businesses taking BTC alongside other forms of payment now, though. Isn't this the point?
They take BTC, then turn it into cash. Then they use cash to pay taxes.

Cash is legal tender. Bitcoin for all intents and purposes is a stamp, coupon, receipt, ticket, or chit.

I will give you something real hard to think about: If a drug dealers accept it as a form of payment, we're already far past questioning the legitimacy of the currency.
I am not sure that follows. Drug dealers don't pay taxes. There was a story about 3 years ago that big city drug dealers in the US were accepting Euros as payment for drugs. Does that make Euros a money in the US? Can we conduct 90% of our affairs in Euros? I know I can't.
 
I am not sure that follows. Drug dealers don't pay taxes. There was a story about 3 years ago that big city drug dealers in the US were accepting Euros as payment for drugs. Does that make Euros a money in the US? Can you conduct 90% of your affairs in Euros?

Yeah I can take euros to any US bank and get it turned into USD
 
There is this perception that I am anti-Bitcoin because I hate freedom and libertarianism and technology.

That's not the case. I'd love to see a genuine market money emerge as the standard somewhere, if not everywhere.

That's not Bitcoin. There are too many flaws with it, and there have been a lot of flaws with its introduction and marketing.

The so-called "features" of Bitcoin are inconsequential to what money needs to be in order to become both a medium of exchange AND a store of value.

So yeah, I think Bitcoin is a bad solution, and most of the momentum comes from people with a speculative stake, or ideological zealots.

I will happily cheer the day we get a good money. The world will change.
 
You guys just don't know how painful it is to keep hearing the same old mistakes over and over again being made on this thread. I feel like we need to back up and start from basics, even with the libertarians on here, but that would take some serious time that I just don't have right now.

At this time all I can do is tell you that volatility is certainly to be expected until the day when the price of a bitcoin reflects the true amount of a major world currency's volume divided by the number of bitcoins in circulation.

We can speculate on how much that currency's volume SHOULD be, but if you do some quick back-of-a-napkin calculations and figure that bitcoins should displace maybe 10% of the world's precious metals markets, Paypal, Western Union, and some other services that the utility of bitcoin makes obsolete, and add these volumes of worth together, then you'll come up with an amount that is orders of magnitude larger than the current $3.8 Billion M1 value of Bitcoin in US Dollars. If it only grows 100x in price before reaching its' "true potential" then bitcoins will be worth about $30,000 each and volatility on it will range a couple of hundred dollars up and down a day, not thousands... Making the percentage of volatility much smaller than it is now... And therefore making trading your millibits not feel volatile at all.

It's really simple guys, bitcoin is still a baby. Perhaps just a fetus. These spikes are exactly the kinds of growing pains one should expect. Just grab a few coins now and hold on tight. Trading is your enemy; in a few short years you will indeed be sorry you sold any at all.
 
The answer to the volatility problem when BTC eventually trades at a price high enough where rises and drops won't represent a significant % of the total.

So the answer to extreme volatility from low liquidity is to increase liquidity? lol, no shit. The problem is convincing enough people to risk the volatility and actually push liquidity to those levels.

It is interesting that you're equating holding currency as a store of value.

Holding something like silver and gold is a store of value.

Holding onto USD or any printed paper money is pretty much a long-term guaranteed loss.

Store of value does not mean the entire value is maintained or increased, it means that the commodity or currency will be predictably valuable or useful at a later date. It is possible and fairly easy to model the future value (purchasing power) of the US dollar with reasonable accuracy. The same can not be said for BTC. The purchasing power of $100,000 USD in a bank account today will very likely hold the same purchasing power next week. In ten years that $100,000 will likely have the purchasing power of about $75,000 of today's dollars if we disregard interest. Confidence in future value is essential to a money. Listen, I have quite a bit of BTC myself, but I view it as many others do, as a speculative asset. At the moment BTC fails to function as a viable currency.
 
Interesting; some UT students have put together a logarithmic chart of the bitcoin price and it's actually a very steady,
predictable growth, possibly led that way by the predictable mining reward halvings and hash rate difficulty adjustments
built into the system:

GOYWUMo.png



Keep in mind, this chart doesn't say that BTC will be worth a million bucks in 2017; there is a limit of what the world economy
will allow for before that point, I'm sure.

But I'm betting that this limit is above $25,000/btc.
 
lukep, is that chart saying that if I buy $10K worth of bitcoins today, in 2 years they will gain $3M in value?
NEVER NOT BELIEVE

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcjzHMhBtf0"]Journey - Don't Stop Believin' (Live in Houston) - YouTube[/ame]
 
There is this perception that I am anti-Bitcoin because I hate freedom and libertarianism and technology.

That's not the case. I'd love to see a genuine market money emerge as the standard somewhere, if not everywhere.

That's not Bitcoin. There are too many flaws with it, and there have been a lot of flaws with its introduction and marketing.

The so-called "features" of Bitcoin are inconsequential to what money needs to be in order to become both a medium of exchange AND a store of value.

So yeah, I think Bitcoin is a bad solution, and most of the momentum comes from people with a speculative stake, or ideological zealots.

I will happily cheer the day we get a good money. The world will change.

What are these flaws? So far you have noted the flaws to be that governments won't accept it, namely the US. IE bitcoin won't work because the powers that be will force you to continue using their currency instead.

So the currency is flawed because the corrupt centralized government currencies it aims to displace will never accept it? Isn't this the battle?

That's like stating anarchism is flawed because you will never dethrone the current US government. Or what am I missing in your argument?
 
What are these flaws?
I probably have 200 posts about Bitcoin on this forum. You can look them up with the Advanced search "bitcoin" and user = guerilla.

That's like stating anarchism is flawed because you will never dethrone the current US government.
Anarchism is an ideal.

We don't have anarchism because of sucker/non-sucker dynamics.

That something will or will not happen isn't important. Causality is important. The Five Whys.