The traditional exchanges with shady plumbing.. On the blockchain it will be less prone to manipulation, force feeding with crap cheap dollars ( QE infinity), and overall investing will be back to fundamentals. Real fundamentals.
If miners are making money off of transaction fees, it's not frictionless. If someone is doing work to make the currency be viable - whether it be processing transactions or facilitating bitcoin purchases/sales or creating online wallets, etc - there will always be costs associated with that. No different than credit cards or Paypal. It's just that the beneficiaries of those costs are more widespread rather than a few centralized businesses. Beyond that, you are probably right that bitcoins will always have value. But that doesn't mean that value must increase from what it is now.
What do you mean by real fundamentals? and what do you mean by QE infinity? QE is ending and the dollar has been strong lately. And blockchain maybe less prone to manipulation but bitcoins are highly susceptible to manipulation. Also I'm not trying to talk down the technology. It's just that I have never understood why it is better than the current system.
the float is so low right now that yeah relatively large movement will cause a price jump.. the scenario we're talking about is when large-scale adoption has happened so the price has gotten to a point where manipulation is hard and meaningless it will allow for small IPOs again.. and microinvesting. really opening up the financial sector to 75% of the world previously excluded from the financial system. the current market system is very exclusionary.. the plumbing underneath the system isn't transparent like the blockchain. It will bring inclusion and accountability to finance
frictionless bc it's P2P and with things like greenaddresses and multisig, you can be 100% of instant confirmations. no trusted third parties required is what makes it frictionless. what did you expect 'frictionless' to mean? it just magically works on its own without any human input/control/investment? a group of computers doing all of this is about as frictionless as we're going to get lol
its a typical mindset to underrate the impacts of global economic inclusion and lower remittance costs... at the same time taking power away from ppl who rake windfalls while contributing nothing to the world and actually r****ding progress (bankers)
For some reason I really struggle with the concept of bitcoin mining/miners. What exactly is it these people are doing? How do they make money off of it? Who pays them? Why does the year 2140 have anything to do with when it will suddenly stop?
an inclusionary and transparent financial system will spur and redirect human productivity worldwide then theres everything else the blockchain does outside of the financial realm
Most of the money you use today is digital. Very little is paper. All your money is nothing more than entries on a digital ledger. The ledger is maintained by a centralized institution like a bank or a payment processor (Paypal) or a government. Bitcoin is also digiital money. But the ledger is not maintained in a single location or by a single person. The bitcoin ledger is distributed across a network of thousands of computers all maintaining an exact copy of the ledger. And the ledger is public. All transactions are published on the ledger for all time for anyone to see. But if there is no authority maintaining the ledger, how can you trust what is in it? Miners are the people that verify transactions and publish them on the ledger using their computer power. For doing this, they are rewarded with Bitcoin. This is how the supply of bitcoin is brought into existence. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/2cMjR0mB9Sc?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
The only way no trusted 3rd parties are needed (thus making it frictionless) in the world of bitcoin is if you're willing to store your wallet yourself and trust that you won't lose it. Cash works the same way, and it's no different than storing all your cash under your bed instead of having an FDIC-insured bank account. People choose not to do that for a reason - it's would be no different with bitcoin. No one is going to keep all their life savings at home and just hope for the best. If "banks" store it and protect it for you, there will be fees. If you expect businesses to accept it, there will be fees (unlike cash, actually). On and on. The real advantages of bitcoin are the ability to send money worldwide instantly, and the lack of central authority - not the idea of it being frictionless or cheaper than current currency options (cash, credit, paypal, etc). But 99% of people don't have a need to send money worldwide instantly, and 99% of people don't have a need for their currency to not have a central authority. In fact, I would guess the vast majority of people WANT their currency backed by a central authority. I think Bitcoin is a solution to a small problem - and it does great at that. But it's a niche problem and not something that most people have need for.
There are several billion people around the world with no access to banking that bitcoin can serve. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/vguBKUXM79Q" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Most of those several billion people that don't have access to banking aren't going to have reliable access to bitcoin either. And generally, most of them don't interact with the majority of the rest of the world so cash serves them fine. If they don't trust their local currency, they often transact in US Dollars. The local merchants they work with probably don't have access to or interest in accepting bitcoin either. For those people, bitcoin is much more of a hassle than just using cash.
Wrong. Mobile phone penetration is growing exponentially in the developing world. Smartphones are cheaper and cheaper. Hell you don't even need smartphone. Also, you ever heard of remittances? Probably not. They will interact with the rest of the world. That's what *inclusion* is about my friend. Americans don't care to.understand.though and that's OK too.. they/yall will learn soon enough
Even if a third party is involved with multisig it's still frictionless! You're really going out of your way to try and disprove this and it's pretty funny to me. Did you know over $400b are remitted anually with fees close to 10%? Doesnt sound like a small niche to me. More like a massive industry ripe for disruption
People can and will store bitcoin with trusted third parties like coinbase and circle in the "developed" world. Are there storage fees? Nope!
This is exactly what's holding bitcoin back atm. The people that need it, can't readily use it, because access is not easy enough yet. This is rapidly changing as SMS messaging phones are becoming ubiquitous in the Third World, and bitcoin platforms are being built to accommodate them. And likewise, the people that can use bitcoin don't need it right now. But if a currency crisis occurs (hyperinflation, bank run, seizure of accounts ala Cyprus), watch out.
If you have access to a mobile phone, you generally have access to traditional banking. If you'd like to explain what the rural villager in Ghana who will likely never travel more than 50 miles from his home in his entire life needs in terms of currency interaction with another country, please feel free to do so. I'm not sure the relevance of this. That's a transfer of currency. If you convert Rupees to Bitcoins to send to Mexico to convert to Pesos, you're going to have costs associated with that. Your system only works if the users at both ends want to end up with bitcoins, which is not the reality of what those transfers around the world involve. People want their local currency - not bitcoins. Most banks don't have storages fees either, unless you want more advanced services. And they are FDIC-insured. This is not an advantage to Bitcoin. For Bitcoin to prosper into something significantly more than it is now, you have to get a critical mass of people using it as their primary currency. If it's only a go-between, then there are fees involved to convert from/to your primary currency that make it less appealing. For example, shopping in bitcoins only is cost effective if you already own bitcoins and the merchant wants to end up with them. If either side is converting to their primary currency (as all merchants do now), then then you're adding costs into the transaction. And to get people to use it as their primary currency, there have to significant advantages for a large number of people. That's just not there right now. Niche advantages (like being able to send money across the world instantly or transact anonymously) are nice, but that doesn't drive mass usage. Bitcoin offers very little everyday value than you can't get from cash & credit.
no there are many people with mobile phones and no traditional banking.. most of africa.. and a lot of asia come to mind. the rural villager in ghana hasnt even imagined yet how he will be connected to the global economy yet. Crowdsourced philanthropist movements are only possible with blockchain tech. It unlocks the economic potential of such places the rest of the world neglects. Blockchain (bitcoin) remittance also works if the end-user desires local currency. Even with the costs associated (app fees, desk exchange fees), total fees will still be WAAAY lower than ~7-10%. Think 1-1.5%. All that extra going in the pockets of ppl who really need it. And now with extra spending power they can participate in the global economy. Again, we haven't even imagined yet how much economic potential goes neglected bc these people are essentially disconnected. Services like Coinapult Locks will allow people who so desire to lock their bitcoin value to a standard amount of USD. and in the end, bitcoin represents anti-fragility in the volatile world of devaluation of purchasing power. When stored safely, there is no need for an FDIC, and if people desire, then the third-party service will pay for insurance coverage from a private institution. It's primarily an investment asset. That can just as easily be used to transact as a close secondary function. It doesn't immediately have to fulfill the developed world consumers everyday functions for it to be successful. But ultimately it will. When the facades and decor have fallen apart.
