Bitcoin Is Not Real Money

Townhall.com ^ | March 1, 2014 | Larry Kudlow

[cynwoody]

Bitcoins don’t require work. They require that you have money to buy expensive processors.

Gold doesn't require work. It only requires you to have a gold mine.

[CharlesWayneCT]

No matter what you can build in your basement that could “mine” “bitcoin”, Gates could build a million of them at the same time.

Maybe you can’t make any bitcoins, but if you could, Gates could make a lot more.

If you couldn’t make a dent in bitcoins, it wouldn’t be the case that bots could be profitably mining bitcoins.

Why would anybody ever build a single computer to mine bitcoins if, as you insist, you can’t make a dent with 50 supercomputers?

Up until now this conversation has made sense, but what you are saying now doesn’t mesh with everything I’ve read about bitcoins.

If you told me that bitcoins are like the lottery, it would still be true that the guy who can buy a million tickets has a better chance of winning than the guy who struggles to buy one.

Although I think your complaint is that there are so many computers currently working together on bitcoin that adding one computer can’t make much difference.

But if that were true, then you couldn’t explain why people would build a computer to do bitcoin. If it makes money to create a computer to do bitcoin, creating a thousand will make a thousand times more, at least for the millisecond it takes for that addition to bump up the difficulty.

Maybe though you are just agreeing with those who say that the time to mine bitcoins is past, because we’ve reached the point in the difficulty curve where anything you add to try to make more just drives up the difficulty to where the effort was a waste.

But what doesn’t make sense is to claim that you, in your basement, can profitably work to make a miner, but that 1000 other people could not do so at the same time; or one person with 1000 times the resources you have.

[TsonicTsunami08]

25 Bitcoins issued per block. Bitcoin is not the only cryptocurrency being mined.
There are industrial players mining Bitcoin because they are so valuable. The time for mining Bitcoin is way passed for the individual.

There is an entire ecosystem being built right under your feet but you can’t see it. Just as with your inability to envision networked home appliances. Just because you don’t see it coming doesn’t that it is not coming. Beleive me FRiend, it’s coming.

You said:

“Although I think your complaint is that there are so many computers currently working together on bitcoin that adding one computer can’t make much difference.”

I have no complaints, I’m a volunteer not a victim.

[CharlesWayneCT]

I meant “your complaint” about my argument. Not your complaint about bitcoin. The only thing you’ve said that was close to a “complaint” was that building a bitcoin miner was the hardest thing you had ever done in your life, harder than even being a marine. But I didn’t take that as a complaint, just as a statement of effort. I agree with you that hard work is not something to complain about.

I’m not clueless about technology as you suggest; my dismissal of the idea of a refrigerator having a drone deliver milk and eggs to my house is one of efficiency, not capability.

There are many things that we could do today, and many that we can imagine doing tomorrow. Being able to do doesn’t mean it makes sense to do it.

I’m not sure if something like bitcoin will ever make sense; for the sake of this thread, my objection is to the idea that bitcoin today has a utility for the common person as “money”. I look at is more as a speculative investment, something I clearly don’t want from the cash in my pocket.

As someone who does probably half my consumption on the web, often through proxies like paypal, or site-purposed currency like the “notes” we spend in “StageIt”, I do have some understanding of the utility of such things; I presume that when bitcoin is mature enough, or when something that replaces bitcoin is mature enough, the big players like paypal and google will incorporate the concepts into their structure.