Is BitCoin the currency of the future?

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rawfreedom replied on Tue, Mar 29 2011 3:42 PM

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Clayton is, as it seems. Any commodity could eventually be artificially reproduced in the next decades to come. Clayton is for a commodity-backed currency.

I do have my own concerns about Bitcoin, and am sure a better crypto-currency can be devised. All that being said, I just think that crypto-currencies will be the new gold. Whether it will be Bitcoin or any other digital currency that will stem from it.

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Clayton replied on Tue, Mar 29 2011 3:49 PM

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Any commodity could eventually be artificially reproduced in the next decades to come.

Yes, self-reproducing nano-bots will soon be manufacturing gold atoms from quantum foam.

Venus Project people drive me crazy!

Clayton -

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liberty student replied on Tue, Mar 29 2011 5:30 PM

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rawfreedom:

And what's gonna happen when scientists find a way to duplicate gold, which isn't as farfetched an idea as it might seem in the 21st century. 99% of innovation has been brought about in the last century, compared to thousands of years of civilization. Scientific breakthroughs are accelerating in an exponential rate.

It was called alchemy.  An obsession with turning lead into gold by chemical processes.  When we have the capacity to transform elements, we won't need money any more.

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Micah71381 replied on Tue, Mar 29 2011 5:51 PM

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We have the power to transform elements already, yet we still need money.  There will always be costs to every scarce resource, the only change is the amount of the cost.  Right now it costs a lot of resources to build a particle collider and running it is also very expensive.  In conclusion, I disagree with the assertion that once we can cheaply transform elements between each other money will be of no object.  However, raw elemental commodities will likely come close to equalizing each other in cost (so lead will cost about the same as gold +/- the cost of transforming from one to the other).

Even once we can cheaply convert energy to matter and matter to energy, both are still limited resources.  There is a finite amount of energy from the sun hitting the earth at any given point in time and there is a finite amount of matter in the earth.  Because both are scarce resources they will be always have value.

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Ultima replied on Tue, Mar 29 2011 6:16 PM

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The quote on these forums still doesn't work? :S

In reply to Micah71381, I just wanted to add that even with the great increases in access to energy that future technological advances will bring, it's entirely conceivable that the amount per intelligence expands at a much slower pace, and if the quantity of minds expands quickly enough, would even dimish per-capita.

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Micah71381 replied on Tue, Mar 29 2011 6:50 PM

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Ultima:

The quote on these forums still doesn't work? :S

The easiest way to quote that I have found is to click the reply button and then in the address bar change the "Quote=False" to "Quote=True" and hit enter.  It's a bit of a pain, but your reply page will reload with the post you are replying to quoted automatically (as I have done here).

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MoonShadow replied on Wed, Mar 30 2011 12:04 AM

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It's selection bias.  I wouldn't be posting at all if certian prople were not so close-minded and hell bent on spouting easily disproven falsehoods, even after such proofs have been presented.

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liberty student replied on Wed, Mar 30 2011 8:28 AM

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MoonShadow:

It's selection bias.  I wouldn't be posting at all if certian prople were not so close-minded and hell bent on spouting easily disproven falsehoods, even after such proofs have been presented.

Maybe that's your problem.  Maybe you should be posting at other times and for other reasons as well.  Single issue posters generally don't get a lot of respect around here.  There is no shortage of Greenbackers, Moslers, Bitcoiners, Venus Projectarians, Marxists, Statists etc who come to grind on the residents.

As far as easily disproven falsehoods, I haven't seen it.  That said, I don't think that because Mises proved socialism cannot calculate people have stopped pursuing or implementing socialism, and likewise, if Bitcoin is not commodity backed, neither is the crap in my wallet, and the anonymity of Bitcoin is very, very interesting.

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MoonShadow replied on Fri, Apr 1 2011 3:42 PM

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 "Maybe that's your problem.  Maybe you should be posting at other times and for other reasons as well."

Maybe so, but my time is limited.  I'm a mod on the bitcoin forum, and that seems to take more time than I expected that it would, and I don't have a great deal of free time to commit to this kind of thing anyway.  I'm not on the Mises forum often enough to form a history, I only know about these posts because my email lights up whenever there is a post.

i'm sure that you can relate.

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Maurizio Colucci replied on Mon, Apr 4 2011 3:37 PM

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I am getting lost in this long thread. Could someone please explain:

1) can you actually buy real goods or services with bitcoins today?

2) why did the first one who accepted bitcoins in exchange for real goods and services do that, when bitcoins still had no exchange value?

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Micah71381 replied on Mon, Apr 4 2011 3:44 PM

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Maurizio Colucci:

I am getting lost in this long thread. Could someone please explain:

1) can you actually buy real goods or services with bitcoins today?

Yes.  https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade

Maurizio Colucci:

2) why did the first one who accepted bitcoins in exchange for real goods and services do that, when bitcoins still had no exchange value?

They had non-exchange value to the first users.  We can only guess what that value is but at the top of my list are predicted future value and desire for economic change (destruction of centrtalized banking).

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filc replied on Mon, Apr 4 2011 4:01 PM

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Maurizio Colucci:

1) can you actually buy real goods or services with bitcoins today?

Kind-of

Maurizio Colucci:

2) why did the first one who accepted bitcoins in exchange for real goods and services do that, when bitcoins still had no exchange value?

Hobbyist

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NewLibertyStandard replied on Mon, Apr 4 2011 5:57 PM

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Maurizio Colucci:

I am getting lost in this long thread. Could someone please explain:

1) can you actually buy real goods or services with bitcoins today?

2) why did the first one who accepted bitcoins in exchange for real goods and services do that, when bitcoins still had no exchange value?

You can buy absolutely anything using bitcoins. But there are two minor catches. First, if there there isn't a regular retailer offering the goods or services that you want, then you're going to have to pay a premium to have someone go out of their way to get or do whatever you want. Second, if you want to buy something that's extremely expensive, such as a house, you'd want to split the transaction into many smaller parts over time or else you'd end up wasting a lot of money, because buying large amounts of bitcoins quickly increases their value and selling them quickly lowers their value. Buying less than many thousands of dollars in a short time isn't going to alter the market much.

Most all of the first bitcoin-dollar transactions were done by me. The Bitcoin program at that time had a note stating that it shouldn't be used for financial transactions just because the author wanted people to be cautious with their money. I researched how the program works and I felt that it was an absolutely revolutionary program. I believed in bitcoins and I wanted them to succeed, so I bootstrapped the economy by providing an exchange service. Pretty much from day one there were people who were interested in buying bitcoins and others who wanted to sell them. But the two types of people often didn't know what were reasonable prices for bitcoins and they didn't have an as effective way of trading as my website provided. I researched electricity prices and bitcoin production costs to determine an initial price. After I started trading, I adjusted how much bitcoins were worth to me based on production costs and availability. I was not interested in getting rich off bitcoins, but I did try to not lose lose money. After better exchanges came along, I stepped down, but I still have an interest in bitcoins succeeding for altruistic, not monetary reasons. Bitcoins themselves have had intrinsic value to me from day one. I wasn't the first person to exchange bitcoins, but my exchange service was the first very useful regular service which I recall off the top of my head. Bitcoins are worth a lot more than now than they were before, so it's painful to see the large amounts of bitcoins that I sold before their value increased very quickly after Bitcoin was first featured on Slashdot, but my goal of bootstrapping the economy succeeded, so although it's a bit painful, there's really nothing to regret. To date I may have made a little money, but for the most part I have mostly just broken even. So from a monetary perspective, you could say that I was just a hobbyist, but from my own perspective, bitcoins are more important to me than a hobby and the best way I was going to be able to help them succeed, was to treat them like a hobby rather than treating the like a business.

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filc replied on Mon, Apr 4 2011 6:13 PM

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Im not picking on you NLS but I have to just point this out.

NLS:

To date I may have made a little money, but for the most part I have mostly just broken even.

As accounted for in what? Made a little money in what? USDollars? Oops....

:)

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Micah71381 replied on Mon, Apr 4 2011 6:22 PM

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His efforts resulted in an increase to his total wealth.  It doesn't matter what units of measurement you use.