Bitcoin

I can't believe the value of a bitcoin. I heard some friends talking about it during the summer, I didn't think anything of it. But a few months later, it's more than doubled in price

 

Vanguard Founder Jack Bogle Says ‘Avoid Bitcoin Like the Plague’ - Bloomberg

“Bitcoin has no underlying rate of return,” said Bogle, 88, who started the first index fund in 1976. “You know bonds have an interest coupon, stocks have earnings and dividends, gold has nothing. There is nothing to support bitcoin except the hope that you will sell it to someone for more than you paid for it.”


It’s “crazy” to invest in the digital asset, he added. “Bitcoin may well go to $20,000 but that won’t prove I’m wrong. When it gets back to $100, we’ll talk.”

 

someone posted here about how much they were making, it was impressive. i'm too old to understand it, but good luck to them. seems like the fed or the irs would squash it if it became to big.

 

currency takes so much faith, this is like starting a new car company, next to impossible.

 

ponzi scheme.

 

Did you buy some?

 

This isn't a U.S. thing. The Fed and IRS don't have the power to squash foreigners doing their own things in their own lands.

If he were a real proponent, he'd be mining or creating it.

 

there are no bitcoins in the u.s.?

 

It isn't something homed in or controlled from the U.S. It is decentralized, spread across the whole planet.

I missed that, thanks for the heads-up. But it does appear that NoScript on my Firefox setup should block it, and I've noticed no CPU hogging with any of my various Win10 problems.

 

Cryptocurrencies will only really make sense when they are actually currencies. If I bought Euros with dollars 10 years ago, I could buy back dollars today without much gain or loss. The same is certainly not true for bitcoin 5 years ago. If bitcoins were currency today, they would be causing massive deflation, causing everyone to hold tight onto them and not spend, crippling the economy.

They're also not long term sustainable investments, because they return nothing in real life. Companies grow their businesses (stocks), making money from loans (bonds). One bitcoin today will still be one bitcoin in the future. One could compare it to investing in gold, but it's still not a good analogy. Gold is used in millions of products due to its chemical properties and desirability for jewelry. In 100 years gold will still be useful for these things. What will a bitcoin be useful for? Nothing except being a bitcoin.

Bitcoin and digital "currencies" are interesting to study and understand, but they're not stable enough to be useful as currencies, and don't have any long term investment return potential. Moreover, I don't see the value to society in spending millions and millions of dollars on hardware and power to produce what is essentially smoke and mirrors. Great technology IMO, poor implementation.

Believing in Bitcoin as a form of currency is akin to believing in anarchy as a form of government. Yeah the Federal Reserve (and equivalent in other countries) is far from perfect, but it's a lot better than having no management of money, which is how Bitcoin behaves. There's no way to change the rules down the line once it's implemented.

The technology itself is amazing and it's cool to see its use being started to be implemented by banks for money transactions. So all in all, I think good will come out of this movement.

 

Bitcoins are nothing but a scam.

I remember about 5 years ago somebody talked me into spending $20 on the bloody things, and all I got was a receipt with some crazy numbers on it.
The coins never came!

$50......
Wasted.

 

^^ did you keep that receipt with the numbers on it?