The unfortunate future of Bitcoin.

[BldSwtTrs]

How many people have predicted the death of Bitcoin?

A funny thing to consider is that in 1995 Bob Metcalfe himself predicted the death of Internet for 1996.

I predict 2015 will be the last year where people will still dare to call the death of Bitcoin. By 2016 it will become self-evident that talking about a future without Bitcoin is nonsensical.

[Chuckone]

At the moment this is true, but I think that's largely because of a shortage of non-BTC gateways.  Once there are more gateways that bypass Bitcoin, there will be no need to price all crypto in relation to BTC.

At that point, Bitcoin can't just sit there like gold can, because "just sitting there" requires massive mining expenditures.

I appreciate non of us can know how everything's going to go, but thats not the way I see things at all.

Whatever number of fiat gateways exist, there'll always be a need for cryptocurrency reserve. The ALT / BTC ratio has become a universal standard for measuring relative values in the altcoin market independently of the variations of fiat currencies.

I only see that situation consolidating - not least because so much of the trading volume is intra-crypto rather than fiat to crypto. Also, it's far easier for exchanges to set up BTC markets than it is to set up fiat markets because in the latter case there's the slight problem of a great big counterparty getting in the way called a bank.

What about using bitUSD/bitGLD as a reserve currency? No price fluctuation or price manipulation, pegged to the market value of their "real world" equivalent, no fiat involved, and on top of that the yield will likely cover for inflation (depending on adoption and volume of transactions). Can Bitcoin provide that much?

Current network effect gives the edge to Bitcoin, but take it out of the equation, and in time you might see a change in perception from the general crypto community regarding this edge.

[toknormal]

At the moment this is true, but I think that's largely because of a shortage of non-BTC gateways.  Once there are more gateways that bypass Bitcoin, there will be no need to price all crypto in relation to BTC.

At that point, Bitcoin can't just sit there like gold can, because "just sitting there" requires massive mining expenditures.

I appreciate non of us can know how everything's going to go, but thats not the way I see things at all.

Whatever number of fiat gateways exist, there'll always be the need for a cryptocurrency reserve. The ALT / BTC ratio has become a universal standard for measuring relative values in the altcoin market independently of the variations of fiat currencies.

I only see that situation consolidating - not least because so much of the trading volume is intra-crypto rather than fiat to crypto. Also, it's far easier for exchanges to set up BTC markets than it is to set up fiat markets because in the latter case there's the slight problem of a great big counterparty getting in the way known as a bank.

[Troglodactyl]

Also there is clearly no interest in improving bitcoin within the community. Because the process with which bitcoin upgrades itself is so slow, cumbersome and uncompetetive, bitcoiners have this cognitive dissonance that causes them to claim that bitcoin is already perfect and should not be improved further.

It isn't bitcoin's role to provide advanced functionality - at least not as far as its valuation is concerned.

They could leave it just as it is for a couple of decades and it would still accrue in value because its role (increasingly) is to act as the reserve reference for the entire crypto currency economy. It doesn't need to do anything fancy, it just needs to exist, exhibit rock solid blockchain security and be reasonably accessible.

A 20-30 minute block time is just fine in this regard. Meanwhile, the rest of the alt coin world can get on with providing the singing and dancing wherever it's needed in specialised sectors such as POS, ultra-anonymity, equity management and decentralised exchanges.

As long as everything else continues to be priced in the BTC reserve, developments in alts will continue to attract capital to bitcoin itself without it having to justify its existence in terms of technological bells and whistles. Bitcoin isn't in competition with alts anymore - it's value is a proxy for the entire cryptocurrency economy (the same way as the dollar reserve represented the entire western economy under the Bretton Woods system).

(P.S. Similarly, gold didn't loose its value when Visa and Amex were born. It just sat in vaults doing its "thang").

At the moment this is true, but I think that's largely because of a shortage of non-BTC gateways.  Once there are more gateways that bypass Bitcoin, there will be no need to price all crypto in relation to BTC.

At that point, Bitcoin can't just sit there like gold can, because "just sitting there" requires massive mining expenditures.

[toknormal]

Also there is clearly no interest in improving bitcoin within the community. Because the process with which bitcoin upgrades itself is so slow, cumbersome and uncompetetive, bitcoiners have this cognitive dissonance that causes them to claim that bitcoin is already perfect and should not be improved further.

It isn't bitcoin's role to provide advanced functionality - at least not as far as its valuation is concerned.

They could leave it just as it is for a couple of decades and it would still accrue in value because its role (increasingly) is to act as the reserve reference for the entire crypto currency economy. It doesn't need to do anything fancy, it just needs to exist, exhibit rock solid blockchain security and be reasonably accessible.

A 20-30 minute block time is just fine in this regard. Meanwhile, the rest of the alt coin world can get on with providing the singing and dancing wherever it's needed in specialised sectors such as Point of Sale, ultra-anonymity, equity management and decentralised exchanges.

As long as everything else continues to be priced in the BTC reserve, developments in alts will continue to attract capital to bitcoin itself without it having to justify its existence in terms of technological bells and whistles. Bitcoin isn't in competition with alts anymore - it's value is a proxy for the entire cryptocurrency economy the same way as the dollar reserve represented the entire western economy under the Bretton Woods system.

(P.S. Similarly, gold didn't loose its value when Visa and Amex were born. It just sat in vaults doing its "thang").

[Troglodactyl]

I don't put much store by this commentary.

Dowd (along with others) dismisses so many elephants in the room with this view that it borders on the foolish.

First of all, Bitcoin is still here and gaining huge traction with every week that passes. There is an entire industrial sector evolving around it including retail technologies, financial derivatives and more.

Dowd (and others) are highly selective in picking out a single dimension of Bitcoin's existence and projecting that into a catastrophic challenge that's insurmountable. It's not insurmountable. To me they are a bit like the people back in 1994 who said the internet wouldn't take off because http protocol is no use for video. Or it would die because it was it was impossible to find anything. All that happened was that Google got invented.

Secondly, dismissals of Bitcoin's viability based on hypothetical scenarios like this completely discount the concept of a "rights of passage" phase that a technology such as this has to endure to become trusted. Bitcoin "warts an' all" is becoming the accepted reference standard for cryptocurrencies *because* of it's troubles, not in spite of them. People are seeing that it's survived hacking attempts, a near-death by a 'media storm' of fud, competition from a flotilla of alt-coins numbering in their hundreds if not thousands, competition from more advanced blockchain technology.......and survived with barely a dent. After all that, the nearest competitor does not even exceed 1/30th of Bitcoin's marketcap.

All in all, these are hypothetical - not catastrophic - issues which just get solved the more people have an interest and a stake in its future.

Ripple is 1/4th of bitcoins market cap if you consider total network volume. I know it's a terrible way of comparing them since so much XRP is locked up with ripple labs, but if you want to compare active tokens only you also have to discount satoshi's coins and the lost coins from bitcoins market cap.

Also there is clearly no interest in improving bitcoin within the community. Because the process with which bitcoin upgrades itself is so slow, cumbersome and uncompetetive, bitcoiners have this cognitive dissonance that causes them to claim that bitcoin is already perfect and should not be improved further. So instead of looking at the best features from altcoins and trying to copy them (which was what most people thought would happen back in the early days), they simply spam SHITCOIN 5000 times, convince themselves it is not a threat, and forget about it.

Indeed.  I keep wondering if once Bitcoin is actually threatened seriously they'll get off their tails and go for more real upgrades.  Of course, by then it might be too late anyway.

[Rune]

I don't put much store by this commentary.

Dowd (along with others) dismisses so many elephants in the room with this view that it borders on the foolish.

First of all, Bitcoin is still here and gaining huge traction with every week that passes. There is an entire industrial sector evolving around it including retail technologies, financial derivatives and more.

Dowd (and others) are highly selective in picking out a single dimension of Bitcoin's existence and projecting that into a catastrophic challenge that's insurmountable. It's not insurmountable. To me they are a bit like the people back in 1994 who said the internet wouldn't take off because http protocol is no use for video. Or it would die because it was it was impossible to find anything. All that happened was that Google got invented.

Secondly, dismissals of Bitcoin's viability based on hypothetical scenarios like this completely discount the concept of a "rights of passage" phase that a technology such as this has to endure to become trusted. Bitcoin "warts an' all" is becoming the accepted reference standard for cryptocurrencies *because* of it's troubles, not in spite of them. People are seeing that it's survived hacking attempts, a near-death by a 'media storm' of fud, competition from a flotilla of alt-coins numbering in their hundreds if not thousands, competition from more advanced blockchain technology.......and survived with barely a dent. After all that, the nearest competitor does not even exceed 1/30th of Bitcoin's marketcap.

All in all, these are hypothetical - not catastrophic - issues which just get solved the more people have an interest and a stake in its future.

Ripple is 1/4th of bitcoins market cap if you consider total network volume. I know it's a terrible way of comparing them since so much XRP is locked up with ripple labs, but if you want to compare active tokens only you also have to discount satoshi's coins and the lost coins from bitcoins market cap.

Also there is clearly no interest in improving bitcoin within the community. Because the process with which bitcoin upgrades itself is so slow, cumbersome and uncompetetive, bitcoiners have this cognitive dissonance that causes them to claim that bitcoin is already perfect and should not be improved further. So instead of looking at the best features from altcoins and trying to copy them (which was what most people thought would happen back in the early days), they simply spam SHITCOIN 5000 times, convince themselves it is not a threat, and forget about it.

[unimercio]

I don't put much store by this commentary.

Dowd (along with others) dismisses so many elephants in the room with this view that it borders on the foolish.

First of all, Bitcoin is still here and gaining huge traction with every week that passes. There is an entire industrial sector evolving around it including retail technologies, financial derivatives and more.

Dowd (and others) are highly selective in picking out a single dimension of Bitcoin's existence and projecting that into a catastrophic challenge that's insurmountable. It's not insurmountable. To me they are a bit like the people back in 1994 who said the internet wouldn't take off because http protocol is no use for video. Or it would die because it was it was impossible to find anything. All that happened was that Google got invented.

Secondly, dismissals of Bitcoin's viability based on hypothetical scenarios like this completely discount the concept of a "rights of passage" phase that a technology such as this has to endure to become trusted. Bitcoin "warts an' all" is becoming the accepted reference standard for cryptocurrencies *because* of it's troubles, not in spite of them. People are seeing that it's survived hacking attempts, a near-death by a 'media storm' of fud, competition from a flotilla of alt-coins numbering in their hundreds if not thousands, competition from more advanced blockchain technology.......and survived with barely a dent. After all that, the nearest competitor does not even exceed 1/30th of Bitcoin's marketcap.

All in all, these are hypothetical - not catastrophic - issues which just get solved the more people have an interest and a stake in its future.

  lets not forget "print is dead", NOT

[toknormal]

I don't put much store by this commentary.

Dowd (along with others) dismisses so many elephants in the room with this view that it borders on the foolish.

First of all, Bitcoin is still here and gaining huge traction with every week that passes. There is an entire industrial sector evolving around it including retail technologies, financial derivatives and more.

Dowd (and others) are highly selective in picking out a single dimension of Bitcoin's existence and projecting that into a catastrophic challenge that's insurmountable. It's not insurmountable. To me they are a bit like the people back in 1994 who said the internet wouldn't take off because http protocol is no use for video. Or it would die because it was it was impossible to find anything. All that happened was that Google got invented.

Secondly, dismissals of Bitcoin's viability based on hypothetical scenarios like this completely discount the concept of a "rights of passage" phase that a technology such as this has to endure to become trusted. Bitcoin "warts an' all" is becoming the accepted reference standard for cryptocurrencies *because* of it's troubles, not in spite of them. People are seeing that it's survived hacking attempts, a near-death by a 'media storm' of fud, competition from a flotilla of alt-coins numbering in their hundreds if not thousands, competition from more advanced blockchain technology.......and survived with barely a dent. After all that, the nearest competitor does not even exceed 1/30th of Bitcoin's marketcap.

All in all, these are hypothetical - not catastrophic - issues which just get solved the more people have an interest and a stake in its future.

[cusknee]

This supports the value of POS

[luckybit]

http://www.cato.org/multimedia/daily-podcast/unfortunate-future-bitcoin