Is Bitcoin the Next Big Thing?

A major attraction of Bitcoin is that unlike FIAT currency, there will be a fixed maximum number of Bitcoin. This means it has the potential to retain value much better than FIAT currency, as you can't simply print more Bitcoin as you can FIAT.

With a FIAT currency system, the banks can and do create money out of thin air. This has led to inflated property prices and asset prices in general in the UK. It is not a fair system, because the banks can print money to keep themselves afloat, at the expense of the poorer sectors of the population that struggle to afford daily living costs, e.g. their property costs. Any system that allows a select few to control the money supply is by definition unfair. This is why Bitcoin is likely to meet resistance from those with vested interests, i.e. governments and the banking establishment. The reason I support Bitcoin is that it is fundamentally more egalitarian.

 

Present Bitcoin price is £14,656.25. Personally I don't think there will be a crash, I think it will continue to rise. The reason for this is that Bitcoin is being used as a store of value, so I don't think there will be mass panic selling. Also, FIAT currencies like the USD have their own challenges, and that could lead to people moving out of USD into Bitcoin. Recently, we have had the first steps of Bitcoin getting into mainstream finance with the introduction of Bitcoin futures contracts. My view is that there is a collossal wall of money that could potentially migrate into Bitcoin, and this provides further potential upside and will maintain support for the Bitcoin price.

The main risk is regulatory risk, i.e. if government attempt to outlaw it or ban it. However, remember here that it could potentially be quite difficult to attempt to regulate Bitcoin, by nature of the fact that it works over the internet and is decentralised, meaning no one government could have a major influence over it.

 

Other things to enter "mainstream finance" through futures contracts include speculating on the number of inches of snow, frequency of hurricanes, and movie box office revenues.... futures trading is just Paddy Power for people with LSE degrees.

 

It's too late to mine it for most, but they can still use it. It's egalitarian because no privileged elite can choose to print more of it, so it resists the stealth tax of inflation. For example, food prices have gone up quite a lot in the last few years, and that is a result of quantitative easing and the erosion of the real value of GBP.

 

One country couldn't do it unilaterally though, because then they would potentially lose advantage in the developing fintech sector.

 

Not really, many would consider the hard folks with Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold etc to be just that, a means of overcoming maximum supply.

 

Apparently there are still 4 billion people on this planet with no access to the internet, and 60 million in the United States can't afford broadband... in the richest country in the world.

15% of the global population don't even have electricity.

Factor that into any debate about whether cryptocurrency can replace fiat currency.

The only answer you will have is that satoshi's could be minted into a physical coin of some sort.

But physical coins can be counterfeited.

And counterfeiting increases the money supply.... and who controls the coin minting? And won't they decide how many to mint?

In the real world.... an impoverished farmer in Sierre Leone is not going to pull out a smartphone to pay for grain to feed his cattle with a QR code linked to his crypto wallet. Thus the dollar will remain the global reserve currency, at a push it may be replaced by the Yuan. A pipe dream would be a gold backed global reserve currency.

All this talk about central bankers etc, that's what scares me away from bitcoin and prove ongoing mania in my eyes. I find it much easier to talk about the various more realistic uses of blockchain technology in all sorts of transactions, including elections.... not things that are so left field as to point to borderline insanity.

 

Spot on.... would love to see a study done comparing the proportion of global cash (adjusted to reflect USD value) held in the continent of Africa vs the proportion of bitcoin currently held in Africa.

In this la-la utopian world where bitcoin becomes king.... it would appear that wealth inequality in a global context would suddenly get a hell of a lot worse?

Western people seem to have this habit of pointing to the top 0.1% and saying "they've got all the money", not realising that they are in the top few percent themselves and are therefore being pointed at by most of the rest of the world.

Bitcoin doesn't appear to be address wealth inequality in any way, other than giving some average Joe's the chance to make a better live for themselves (and fair play to them).

 

Bitcoin Value = Next fool to invest increases the value definitely not enough digital fiat currency to back this madness. I still invested though, soon to Jump ship early next year

 

I'm looking into investing in others that may ride the wave. Who knows but I am not going to gamble (and it def is one) a lot.

 

First one to the top of the pyramid!

 

Interesting article that suggests Amazon is the biggest threat to Bitcoin.

"Whether Amazon chooses bitcoin, ethereum, or something else altogether, their choice will have dramatic consequences on the existing cryptocurrency landscape. Cryptocurrency and the technology behind it are here to stay, but bitcoin and its reign as the number one cryptocurrency might not be."

https://hackernoon.com/amazon-is-the-biggest-threat-to-bitcoin-right-now-62a56d8435e4

 

Amazon might be an issue until Facebook mints its own, and Twitter its own, and Google its own, and Paypal its own (imagine the circular craziness) etc. etc.

Since there's nothing special or difficult about starting a cryptocurrency, and anyone can do so, you're forever going to be open to the fact that anyone MAY. And that's a ever-present threat to established crypto such as Bitcoin etc.

 

I wonder if something like this could be used for mining Monero at > GPU speed?
https://www.extremetech.com/computi...10-mx-fpga-taps-hbm2-massive-memory-bandwidth

(From what I've read, the limitation on ASIC/FPGA mining of Monero has always been the lack of local high-speed memory)

 

I think I could make a case for Paypal making some headway. Google has tried (and probably still is trying) to get a decent foothold in the money sector. Amazon is making some moves in payments but I think this may be a step too far for them, but then who knows especially when you are a large retailer and you can capture more of the payments value chain. If anything I think, perhaps strangely, I think Apple could make a move here and would be able to make something stick.

 

I've been looking into Ripple to try and understand, how its relationships with banks could influence the value of its coins... still haven't managed to convince myself that the link is valid, and whether it can explode in value like the others.

 

I think you're missing the thrust of my post.

I wasn't really thinking from the "X currency could succeed because it's backed by (BIG COMPANY)" perspective. Merely that any such household name launching its own currency would be a massive Bitcoin disrupter (since the BTC price is propped up basically by "belief" - anything that punctures the faith of the masses destroys the BTC price too).

Apple would indeed be a great example. They have a fantastic brand reputation (whether deserved or not) so I imagine if they were to launch their own cryptocurrency the Apple disciples would flock to it en masse and desert Bitcoin. Of course, Apple's whatever-it-ends-up-being-called might be no more real or useful than Bitcoin, but the damage would already be done in terms of eroding confidence in Bitcoin*

*Not least because it would focus the minds of many more "ordinary" people on the fact that anyone can set up more cryptocurrencies any time they like i.e. there's nothing special or magic about Bitcoin.

 

If anyone wants to sell some Ripple I`ll pay £50 for 50 coins

 

Any reason you can't just buy them on Cryptomate?

100 for £60.90 at time of writing.

 

I give up with that site, have tried a few times and it keeps timing out.