I'm surprised this article is still here. A few months ago, a well-written article by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet criticizing cryptocurrency was removed by the moderators.
Bill Gates and Warren Buffet aren't exactly the kind of authors who you flag... You're free to disagree with them, but they do know a thing or two about amassing large quantities of wealth!
There are a lot of scams and swindles of the last few decades.
Student loans and medical billing are outright scams in the United States.
Purchasing a used car and many types of home financing are quite scammy as well.
Bitcoin is an asset with a wildly fluctuating price as people attempt to find a viable use case for it. It benefits from a strong network effect, not from its particular strength in storing or transfering wealth.
You can do stuff with a university degree, people recognize it. And you can do stuff with a car and money from a home finance. These might have predatory aspects to how you acquire them, but they aren't scams and nobody is being swindled.
You distinctly cannot do anything with bitcoin. There are a few dinky companies that will accept bitcoin as payment for unimportant knick-knacks and electronics, but that's about it. It will just sit, taking up space on a hard disk, until society decides to fully take it up as a currency (which won't happen in its current state).
An asset that has no use is not an asset, it's a liability.
Bitcoin's extreme inefficiency (in terms of electricity consumption) is the main reason why I didn't give cryptocurrency a second look when I learned about it several years ago.
It never made sense to me that something should have value just because it's expensive to produce. You'd think capitalism would reward efficiency and not punish it.
That said, I think that Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrencies will revolutionize a lot of things including:
- How tech companies are created and who will end up owning them (it will be developers and early adopters instead of VCs and investors).
- It will transform what it means for a project to be open source; the GPL license will become increasingly important.
- It will transform how people think about ownership.
One of the biggest innovations of blockchain technology is that for the first time in history, it has allowed open source projects to have actual financial value.
The value so far has been restricted to cryptocurrency projects but it will soon spread to other open source projects.
The value of a coin is not about the coin itself, it's about the community and the network of services that exist around it.
Proof of stake has never been shown to work and the largest projects attempting to move towards it, ie. Ethereum, are finding PoS's issues insurmountable. There is still no proof of concept for PoS (Casper), something that is becoming increasingly apparent to the ETH/BTC market these days...
tl;dr "You don't have to take my word for it: No less an authority than JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon has identified crypto as a bubble just waiting to bust."
[+] [-] PaulAJ|7 years ago|reply
The rest of the article is a combination of straw-men and ad-hominems. Move along. Nothing to see here.
[+] [-] gwbas1c|7 years ago|reply
Bill Gates and Warren Buffet aren't exactly the kind of authors who you flag... You're free to disagree with them, but they do know a thing or two about amassing large quantities of wealth!
[+] [-] nextweek2|7 years ago|reply
These are people who are worth listening to, but the first rule of investment is: past performance is no indication of future performance.
[+] [-] anoncoward111|7 years ago|reply
Student loans and medical billing are outright scams in the United States.
Purchasing a used car and many types of home financing are quite scammy as well.
Bitcoin is an asset with a wildly fluctuating price as people attempt to find a viable use case for it. It benefits from a strong network effect, not from its particular strength in storing or transfering wealth.
[+] [-] jbob2000|7 years ago|reply
You distinctly cannot do anything with bitcoin. There are a few dinky companies that will accept bitcoin as payment for unimportant knick-knacks and electronics, but that's about it. It will just sit, taking up space on a hard disk, until society decides to fully take it up as a currency (which won't happen in its current state).
An asset that has no use is not an asset, it's a liability.
[+] [-] cryptica|7 years ago|reply
That said, I think that Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrencies will revolutionize a lot of things including:
- How tech companies are created and who will end up owning them (it will be developers and early adopters instead of VCs and investors).
- It will transform what it means for a project to be open source; the GPL license will become increasingly important.
- It will transform how people think about ownership.
One of the biggest innovations of blockchain technology is that for the first time in history, it has allowed open source projects to have actual financial value. The value so far has been restricted to cryptocurrency projects but it will soon spread to other open source projects.
The value of a coin is not about the coin itself, it's about the community and the network of services that exist around it.
[+] [-] agorabinary|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cypher|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teilo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agorabinary|7 years ago|reply
Is this satire?