Posted on 11/26/2018 10:56:46 AM PST by NRx
If nothing else, bitcoin was supposed to protect people from governments that were destroying their own currencies — governments such as Venezuela’s, where inflation is said to be somewhere around 49,000 percent right now.
Lately though, bitcoin hasn’t fulfilled that mission. Not unless you think being down 81.6 percent, as bitcoin has been down since last December, counts as “protecting” you from the 99.6 percent losses you would have taken on your Venezuelan bolivar during that time. Which, if you do think that way, tells you more about the soft bigotry of crypto expectations than it does anything else.
The fact is that bitcoin has been around for 10 years now, but we still haven’t found one use for it. At its most grandiose, it was supposed to replace the U.S. dollar as the way people did business around the world. But at its most realistic, it was at least supposed to replace, say, the Zimbabwean dollar as the way people did business in places where inflation had spiraled out of control.
Why has bitcoin stumbled over even this lowest of bars? Because there’s a paradox that lies at its heart.
The easiest way to think about this is that bitcoin wants to make it so that you don’t have to trust banks to move your money, or governments to keep your currency from losing its value. Bitcoin does the first part by setting up a system where, instead of paying a middleman you know to process a transaction, the network pays a group of middlemen you don’t know to do so. That’s what bitcoin “mining” is. People race to be the first one to update the public ledger of all bitcoin transactions — cutting out the need for a bank to verify things...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Ask a Venezuelan if they’d rather have a nice fat chicken, or a hard to factor large integer of equal ‘value’.
Use a 2 year time period and compare bitcoin to gold.
Old lesson in a new coat - currency speculation will kill you.
Gloom and Doomers with their losses in BitCoin buying have created a lot of Gloom and Doom for themselves and their families.
Holy ****! Bitcoin is all over the place. Gold, by comparison is almost a straight line. Not sure what bitcoin supporters are looking for. But if it’s a stable store of value currency they picked the wrong one. It’s got more volatility than the stock market, by a factor. Gold on the other hand is doing exactly what a stable store of value should be doing... next to nothing. As long as the fiat dollar continues to not explode, gold should remain more or less stable.
Exactly.
Two different speculator markets with different expectations for the commodity in question. If one approaches bitcoin expecting a stable commodity, then one has not done one’s research.
Good investor advice - know more about what you are buying than the guy selling it to you.
Cryptocurrencies are not an “investment.” Any attempt to use them as such is naked speculation, and speculators always get slaughtered, and deservedly so.
The purpose of cryptocurrency is to escape the clutches of tyrannical government.
Once the IMF succeeds in outlawing physical money and they have all your assets as 1s and 0s on the IMF computer, they can erase you at will if you do not obey them.
That’s the existential threat the human race faces.
Alternative cryptocurrencies are a possible antidote.
Did a word search in the article, and not once did the word “socialism” appear.
This is why they are The Washington Compost.
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