5 Reasons Why Bitcoins are the Dumbest Investment Ever

by Darwin on April 4, 2013

bitcoin-chart

If you haven’t heard of bitcoins by now, you will soon.  They were recently profiled in this week’s BusinessWeek, they have skyrocketed since the Cyprus banking mess and in a nutshell, it’s an alternative currency play which resides in cyberspace only – there is no physical exchange, no regulatory oversight, not even an inkling as to who even invented the concept.  It may well be the most prolific internet hoax of all time or someday, people may actually use bitcoins for routine exchanges for goods and services (until a government finally takes it seriously and outlaws it).  Just this week alone, there was a runup and then a crash when hackers attacked a major exchange and investors sold in herd-like fashion.  But since $1.4 Billion in valuation can’t be wrong (the same flawed logic of over a billion people believing in various religions each [surely, at least a few billion are wrong since they can’t all be right!]), here are several reasons outlining why investing in bitcoins may well be the dumbest investment move you’ve ever made:

  • Speculation to the 10th Degree – Often times, speculation gets a bad rap.  Remember when oil prices were resulting in record gasoline prices at the pump due to those nasty “speculators”?  Remember when speculators were driving up the yields on European sovereign debt?  Whenever a set of free-market transactions move in a fashion that pandering politicians don’t understand or particularly like, they blame the speculators.  But in those cases, first of all, they’re often right.  Or they’re hedging. Or they’re speculating for some other legitimate reason, often times buying a share in a corporation or taking responsibility for custody of a commodity, etc.  But speculating on bitcoins?  It’s worse than gambling.  At least at the casino, I know that most games give the house an edge of 1-5%, often with a very wide standard deviation, so over a short period of time, I at least have a modest chance of making a few bucks or over a long period, I can bank on losing X.  However, with bitcoins?  There is NOTHING to go on.  You’ll never take physical possession of one, there’s very little history and what little history exists isn’t even a viable context in which to judge future returns.  Tomorrow, we are just as likely to see a 50% increase as we are a 50% decrease.  And just like we saw gold sputter out after the moronic gold ATM news, now we have a bitcoin ATM in the works and some guy got his name in the paper for selling his car for bitcoins.  Next, we’ll see a girl selling her virginity for bitcoins.  It’s a circus.  As close to pure speculation as you can come.  But speculation based on no thesis, other than hope.
  • No Real-World Utility - People invest in some very obscure things.  They invest in anything from art to wine to future cash flows from highway tolls. But all of these things have some sort of benefit – from paying cash flows to the likelihood to sell for more in the future due to scarcity and inability to replicate (you can’t recreate a vintage bottle of wine or a masterpiece).
  • Even Worse Than Gold – I’ve cited the downsides and absurdity in throwing your net worth behind gold before (which, by the way, is down 7% on the year versus a 9% gain in the S&P500 or if you want to go back a full year, same thing – PLUS SPY pays a dividend), but people just love the idea of an alternative currency play.  Something that is finite – that can’t be printed by a government with no spending controls.  Well, while I’m no fan of gold, at least it’s something with the following properties – it’s physical, it’s very easy to quantify and relatively easy to exchange, it’s been in circulation as a currency for millenia, it will always be a currency of sorts, and for the preppers – if all hell breaks loose and dollars become worthless, at least you could trade gold for something.  But bitcoins?  You need an internet connection and willing partner on the other side of that trade to conduct a transaction.  That scenario is laughable in the prepper playbook.  The internet would be down, cell phones wouldn’t work, it’s back to 1900 at least.  So, if gold stinks, bitcoins are even worse.
  • Hackable – There’s virtually no risk at all of your ownership in a stock ever being taken from you.  And cash and gold?  Sure, they can be stolen, but there are measures in place you can reasonably undertake to protect your physical assets.  But bitcoins?  It’s flying blind.  If hackers can take down government websites, steal the most prolific corporate secrets, hack military secrets and more, don’t you think they’ll figure out a way to snake some bitcoins?  Either by creating more for themselves, ultimately rendering the currency as worthless – or by just stealing yours out of your account?  After all, the whole system was set up years ago by who-knows and there’s no ongoing security measures, adjusting to an ever-evolving hacking environment, etc.
  • Making a Statement – Thinking as an economist, there’s nothing that bothers me more than people “making a statement” with their investments.  When it comes to investing, you should be seeking to make the most prudent investment for your given objectives, which usually include risk tolerance, time horizon and diversification goals.  But to invest in something because it is the antithesis of something you find objectionable?  That’s just silly.  You don’t like the notion of a government being able to print unlimited amounts of currency so you invest in gold.  We’ve seen how that’s worked out recently.  But to invest in something as random and speculative as bitcoins?  Come on.  If you want to make a statement, go out and vote libertarian or write your local Congressman.  Don’t piss away your hard earned money on an internet hoax.

Do You Own Bitcoins?

Would You Consider “Investing”?

{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }

Grayson @ Debt Roundup April 4, 2013 at 11:25 pm

I have heard of this, yet still have no clue what it is. In short, I would never invest in it and thing it is pretty stupid.

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gano April 6, 2013 at 2:48 am

What a hilarious lack of intelligence your remark betrays. Bitcoin may be a foolish investment choice but you wouldn’t know, nor would you know how to know.

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Value Indexer April 6, 2013 at 3:22 am

It’s an interesting idea but extremely high-risk for all the reasons you listed. Just to mention one of those items, the security virtually ensures that creating new bitcoins is restricted but the whole thing is run and managed by software. That software could allow attackers to steal some bitcoin. Transactions are irreversible so once someone steals your bitcoins (which has happened with amounts over $1M already) there’s nothing you can do unless you’re smart enough to steal them back.

That’s not quite the full story though. The system is cleverly designed so that the above is usually true and virtually impossible to circumvent unless you’ve got Google-sized computers. But I saw an article recently mentioning that last month a software bug caused some serious problems in the system. A handful of people were able to gather enough power to dictate what had really happened and overrule anyone who disagreed. If they wanted they could have changed the “unbreakable” rules too. And this is supposed to be decentralized!

I think bitcoin is being used a lot for illegal transactions so there is some market for it. That market may grow to include more legitimate uses – who knows? I’m wondering if I should toss in $100 and see what happens. Early users who did that a few years ago would be able to sell out now for a return of 1000x or more. If the system keeps growing (I’ve seen experienced tech businesspeople talking about starting to use it for large payments) it might be worth it. If everyone gets bored and leaves I haven’t lost much. It might be something like Craigslist that’s just the right combination of weird and practical to find a home and keep growing.

But for serious money forget it. I’m sticking with grown up currencies.

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JT April 7, 2013 at 3:18 pm

Not surprisingly, these valuations exist only with a really, really thin market. In the last 24 hours, only $8.1MM has changed hands despite a $1 billion+ total market. That just tells me that everyone who owns a bitcoin or is buying bitcoins is expecting this run up only to be the beginning. When everyone thinks something can only go up, it usually does the opposite.

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101 Centavos April 11, 2013 at 6:31 am

It would appear that the easy money has already been made by the early bitcoin miners. Now it’s a question of hanging on, waiting for the greater fool.

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KC @ genxfinance April 12, 2013 at 5:25 am

I’ve heard of this from somewhere.. Hmm, sounds a bit suspicious, isn’t it?

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Jenny @ Frugal Guru Guide April 20, 2013 at 3:31 pm

I’m not a fan of bitcoins, but I hate to say that most if this isn’t accurate.

“not even an inkling as to who even invented the concept.” Actually, we know exactly who invented it–or rather, defined the protocol. Satoshi Nakamoto.

“people may actually use bitcoins for routine exchanges for goods and services” People do. Every day. There are a number of sites, large and small, that take bitcoins, and bitcoins can be converted into any currency quite readily.

” However, with bitcoins? There is NOTHING to go on. You’ll never take physical possession of one,” No, actually, you DO have possession of them. That’s why they can be stolen. If you have a bitcoin, you HAVE it. What it’s worth is another matter.

” Either by creating more for themselves, ultimately rendering the currency as worthless – or by just stealing yours out of your account?” First part–not possible. That’s actually the point. You CAN find more–it’s called mining, and it’s how bitcoins are “discovered” in the first place, and there are a finite number that can ever be found, and as more are mined, it becomes increasingly difficult and more expensive to find more. But you can’t fake them or “hack” them like that. And YES, people can steal them, which is why smart people either use a bank–and yes, that requires trust!–or they keep them offline, where someone would have to break into your house to steal them.

“After all, the whole system was set up years ago by who-knows and there’s no ongoing security measures, adjusting to an ever-evolving hacking environment, etc.” Yeah, this statement just doesn’t make any sense.

“Making a Statement” I think you misunderstand the heavy investors, too, here. They aren’t making a statement–they are moving their worth into an arena that they believe is inherently safer, because they believe that the largest threat to fiscal stability is governmental actions. I think they’re wrong, but they aren’t out to prove anything. In fact, anonymity is a huge part of bitcoin investments.

No, I don’t have any bitcoins, but I understand them. 🙂

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Darwin April 20, 2013 at 3:55 pm

Sorry Jenny, but you’re demonstrating the same naivety and lack of understanding that many other people are. Point by point:

Satoshi Nakamoto – you’re kidding, right? That is not a person. It is a joke online pseudonym. So, no, you don’t know who invented bitcoins, nor does anyone else. So, that’s a pretty big gaffe right there.

For your next few points, unless you wrote the code yourself, you have no idea. For all we know, the creator of the currency is now minting a few hundred new ones a day and selling them off at the current inflated values and laughing all the way to the bank. Also, when your hard drive crashes, gone. If/when there’s some global calamity and the internet goes down (which is why many people that abhor fiat currency buy gold), similarly, you won’t have any of that precious currency.

Here’s the biggest question that would make this whole online hoax even more laughable if and when it occurs. There is ZERO barrier to entry. There’s nothing to stop some other anonymous coder to create yet another online currency, bytecoin (joking), which is even more scarce, more secure, and then boom – who needs bitcoin? This could iteratively repeat itself until the whole online currency meme it played out and everything crashes to zero.

It’s quite silly really, but someone is laughing all the way to the bank. It’s the most expensive hoax pulled on human kind ever. After organized religion.

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Anonymous July 16, 2013 at 7:52 am

“For all we know, the creator of the currency is now minting a few hundred new ones a day and selling them off at the current inflated values and laughing all the way to the bank”

The ignorance in this sentence is incredible. You CAN’T “mint bitcoins”, no matter if you’re the creator or the king of England, except (of course) by mining, which only generates a steadily diminishing amount of them. And you would know that if you knew anything about how bitcoins work, but you don’t, and yet you still write articles about them on your silly blog.

(Here’s a hint: bitcoin is not centralized, there’s no central authority that has power over the network, the algorithm has been reviewed by lots of people, all clients are open source and all transactions easily auditable)

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Jeremy Streich July 16, 2013 at 10:14 am

“[U]nless you wrote the code yourself, you have no idea.”

Actually the code is open source, you can read through it, or write your own client. It doesn’t matter who wrote it to trust it, what matters is that really smart people have looked through the code understand it and if you want to, you can too (just like kernel modules in Linux). I certainly would before buying bitcoins.

http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/code/252/tree/

Mining isn’t all about finding new bitcoins, it is also about balancing the ledger and proving that past transactions are valid (that someone didn’t try to counterfeit bitcoins) and the bit coins mined from that are the transaction fees on those transactions. The tech used is well understood, and if the creators have some secret to creating bit coins quickly (besides a lot of CPU/GPU power), that would mean they’ve broken RSA or SHA, and the implications would render SSL, TLS, GPG, and a number of NSA encryption schemes useless.

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Jake Erickson April 20, 2013 at 4:31 pm

I’ve heard a lot about bitcoins, but have never really looked into it. Based on your article I don’t think that there is a need for me to look into it either. I’ll stick with investing into mutual funds where I know exactly what I’m getting and how it works. Thanks!

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Jenny @ Frugal Guru Guide April 20, 2013 at 10:48 pm

It’s a pseudonym but it’s still an identifiable entity. Whether it’s Mark Twain or Darwin’s Money, there’s an identity there. The pseudonym doesn’t bother me in the least.

“Unless you wrote the code yourself, you don’t know”–no, that’s not how things work! Not at all! I don’t have to have written it. It’s OPEN SOURCE. Do you think people are taking this on faith? Or rather, do you think thousands of very well educated computer scientists are somehow ignorant of these “holes” that you claim to know through intuition?

You’re just saying stuff because you FEEL it. Please explain to me how bitcoins are exploitable, if you believe they are, and don’t just say they are because they have to be.

“the creator of the currency is now minting a few hundred new ones a day and selling them off at the current inflated values and laughing all the way to the bank” Actually, he probably has about 1 mil bitcoins at this point. He has sold none. He DOES mine them–not “mint” them–and he has to do it just like everyone else, AND the number of total bitcoins that can ever be discovered has a hard cap. You can’t just “make up” your own bitcoins. Also, all bitcoins MUST be added to the public ledger–everyone knows exactly how many bitcoins are in existence, and everyone knows how many are left to be discovered.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining

And for heaven’s sake, nothing would happen to bitcoins if “the internet” went down. You would still have them, and once you reestablished a connection to the internet, you’d be able to used them again. The internet also isn’t something that you can destroy at a stroke, which is pretty much the point and why anarcho-geeks love it. Someone could take out a particular group of servers, but taking out “the internet” would be like destroying every single street and road in the world. “What if every road in the world was gone tomorrow?” Well, in that case, gold isn’t going to be doing you one bit more good than bitcoins! Every government in the Western Hemisphere imploding in within the space of 10 years is more likely.

” There is ZERO barrier to entry. There’s nothing to stop some other anonymous coder to create yet another online currency, bytecoin (joking), which is even more scarce, more secure, and then boom – who needs bitcoin? ”

Again, you misunderstand. First of all, there is a HUGE intellectual barrier to entry–bitcoin’s protocols are quite ingenious, and there are very few people in the world even smart enough to come up with something similar, if they would care to, and it would take them a number of years to do it. If someone does develop another secure, private, and unhackable currency, then….so what? Yes, bitcoin could be worth nothing in time, but that would TAKE time, and people would sell off their bitcoins and buy the new currency. That doesn’t actually make the economy weak, much less unusable. Most likely, they currencies would exist side-by-side, as British pounds and US dollars do. We have hundreds of fiat currencies in the world right now, and that doesn’t make any of them automatically implode. We have US dollars! Who needs yen? That’s a question that doesn’t even make sense.

And actually, the big problem with bitcoins going forward, aside from the fact that they are SO speculative, is that at some point, all possible bitcoins will be found, and after that point, over time, bitcoins will actually gradually be LOST. Tangible money is lost all the time, but we print more, and we have a policy of gradual, controlled inflation. Bitcoins will be lost in the same sorts of ways–accidents, fires, being misplaced, being forgotten under someone’s mattress and thrown away–and they CANNOT be replaced. If bitcoins survive the wild speculation and do become a widely accepted currency, things are going to get weird over time as deflation sets in. (You can use fractions of a bitcoin to pay for things, but you can only divide it so many times.) Bitcoins really MUST have a finite lifespan as a currency because of this fact.

I think bitcoin is a very, very risky “investment”, like a penny stock. But few of the points that you have brought up are valid. Just because you don’t understand bitcoins doesn’t mean it’s shrouded in secrecy. It isn’t. The protocol is widely available for anyone to read and is by nature both secure and transparent. If it weren’t it would be useless as a currency. In fact, anyone with the money for the hardware (which at this point is pretty high) can get started mining for bitcoins tomorrow. And yes, I know several people (computer scientists in the computer security industry, BTW) who mine bitcoins and several others who have figured out ways to leverage bitcoins to make substantial amounts of money in currency and stock market trading quite separate from the “bubble.”

Anyhow, this is one of the better bitcoin Wikis. There are a number out there.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ

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Darwin April 20, 2013 at 11:27 pm

Jenny, lots of contradictions in there. Initially you posted with absolute confidence on all facets including the creator but now admit you have no idea who they are. Of course it matters who they are. You don’t think it could be the Chinese government, Anonymous or any other group of people laughing their asses off (and profiting) from this whole phenomena? Maybe it was divine intervention.

Of course the “internet could go down”. I’m no prepper but any number of very easily conceivable events could cause the exact scenario that preppers buy gold for. An asteroid a bit bigger than the one that just flew by Russia, nuclear war, even a simple EMP would send this country back to the 1800s for quite some time. Good luck using those bitcoins then – when there’s no electricity. Granted, holding US dollars, or even gold for that matter may not really matter much either when Americans turn into characters from “The Road” (awesome, completely realistic movie), but bitcoins would be worthless nonetheless.

As far as the other points, if it’s open source and so easy to understand and scrutinize, then why couldn’t an astute programmer simply create another similar competing currency? And why would it take years?

Then, if this is to come, as you suggested, the selloff would be so fast and furious that holders would have no time to react. Markets sell off before mom and pop investors know what the heck is going on (re: gold recently). Comparing bitcoins to US dollars and yen makes no sense. They are backed by the full faith and credit of actual governments and are the primary means of exchange going back centuries. Bitcoin is nothing more than an internet hoax cloaked in scrarcity.

On April 9, a bitcoin touched $240. Today it’s about half that. Great investment…

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Jeremy Streich July 16, 2013 at 11:45 am

“[I]f it’s open source and so easy to understand and scrutinize, then why couldn’t an astute programmer simply create another similar competing currency? And why would it take years?”

Same reason SSL, TLS, OpenSSH, and PGP/GPG haven’t been broken. They use asymmetric keys generated by strong hashes and encrypted using RSA encryption (or similar). SSL is used on https connections, like the one you use to your bank’s and stock brokers websites, and the code to do the encryption there is also Free Open Source. These technologies involve each person involved to what two keys:

– A private key each individual has to unencrypt and sign
– A public key that they can safely share that others use to encrypt and verify signatures

Even the person who encrypts using your public key can’t unencrypt the message. A message that’s encrypted to your public key can only be unencrypted with your private key. Publishing the public key in plain text in public doesn’t allow anyone to generate your private key from it without substantial (on order of thousands or millions of years) or in theory a few hours on a quantum computer (which at this point they can only get to exist in a lab for a few minutes).

A math analogy to make this would be looking for primes. We know how to look for new prime numbers, we take the next number, and try to devide it by all the numbers before it. Keep going until you find one that is only devisable by 1 and itself. Even knowing that, it takes considerable computing power to find the next one, and there may be optimizations you can perform, but there are no short cuts that can yield a new one without a significant investment in CPU/GPU time.

In computer science and computer engineering problems are classified by how long a turning complete language will take to solve it, and there are well understood ways of determining the order of scale (though not exact time) how long (how many iterations) a problem will take.

“Of course it matters who they are. You don’t think it could be the Chinese government, Anonymous or any other group of people laughing their asses off (and profiting) from this whole phenomena?”

The code is OpenSource, it doesn’t matter who the author is. If I wrote a math book, and anyone could read and understand it, work through hte math problems, and know if they were done right or not, then it wouldn’t matter who I was or my motivations for providing the math book. The problems are either correct or not, and anyone, with enough knowedge of the subject, could test to see if I was lying.

Open Source software has gained a reputation for faster patches to security issues, less security issues becoming exploits found in the wild, and more stability. The FAA for instance will trust a planes critical on board computers to run Linux, or BSD, but not Microsoft Windows. They do allow Windows to be used to display the code, if and only if, there is a backup system running a more stable Open Source product which it can fall back to if and when the Windows OS crashes.

The reason is what Richard Stallman calls the “many eyes” theory in security. It simply states the more eyes looking at any particular piece of code, the more likely vulnerabilities will be found and patched before they are exploited. In the case of closed software, it’s a closed box and you have to implicitly and wholly trust the author of the product (like most users trust Microsoft and Google), and trust their products have been tested and reviewed before publication.

“this country back to the 1800s … Good luck using those bitcoins then”

Or accessing your stocks, IRA, 401K, savings account, or checking account. If what ever happens takes out the federal government, that would also remove the value of the “promise” that makes our US dollars legitimate and the medium of exchange becomes addictive substances (beer and cigarettes) and clean water. Gold hasn’t been used in as an exchange medium in a collapsed society since the end of the roman empire. When disaster strickes people trade in what they need. If I were a preper, I’d stock my garage full of beer, bottled water and cigerettes, dispite not drinking or smoking. Luckly, I’m not a preper, so I park my car there instead.

“Comparing bitcoins to US dollars and yen makes no sense. They are backed by the full faith and credit of actual governments”

Like the money in Greece was backed by the full faith and credit of actual governments? The US dollar is backed by a promise that money is there, despite having 16.7 trillion dollars in debt, and $144 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities, and a GDP of only $15.7 trillion? If I were using currency as an investment, I’d bet on bitcoin to make money over the constantly devalusing US dollar; but, I’m not investing in currency because that is always too risky a venture.

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LaughingToTheBank July 15, 2013 at 4:49 pm

“On April 9, a bitcoin touched $240. Today it’s about half that. Great investment”

…Yeah, it really is! Especially if you got them for under $1 like me.

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Evan April 22, 2013 at 3:11 pm

I don’t understand mining…Why couldn’t google, amazon, msft, ibm, lenevo, dell ETC – turn their massive super computers on the problem and amass the rest of the bitcoins in a matter of a couple days?

As for the rest of the Darwin’s points – I begrudgingly agree. I would love if the market had a pure currency like bitcoin, but this isn’t going to be it. How long do you think until the US Gov’t regulates it? How could they? Just like the way the regulate US Citizens with Swiss Bank accounts…the threat of jail if they find out you are lying about your account, subpoena ISP records, etc.

It really reminds me of the gold rush in San Fran in the mid 1800’s. Doesn’t it seem like you can profit by investing in the ones providing the tools to mine?

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Jeremy Streich July 12, 2013 at 5:40 pm

Speculation to the 10th Degree – Agreed. Investing in BitCoin is stupid, but so is investing in Yen or Euros. These are mediums of exhange, or meant to be, not investment vehicles. What we are seeing now is a bad idea.

No Real-World Utility – Neither does Yen, Dollars or Euros, they exist solely as a value storeage and medium of exchange. The problem is that they aren’t being exchanged, you have people cashing in, and then holding. It’s like if everyone stuck every dollar they earned under their matrices.

Even Worse Than Gold – Yup.

Hackable – Not so much. The code to generate bit coins and have them signed is opensource, and some really smart people from all over the world are looking at it. The basic technology is sound, and is the same technology that is used to encrypt your web session with the bank. It is also based on the same encryption schemes the NSA has adopted. It’s all based on RSA and SHA1. Now, that doesn’t prevent you from getting your computer hacked and someone remotely using the software to steal your bit coins, but the same is true for anyother program or file on your computer. Have an SSN or credit card number stored somewhere on your computer? I’ll bet you do.

Making a Statement – “But to invest in something as random and speculative as bitcoins? Come on. If you want to make a statement, go out and vote libertarian or write your local Congressman.”
Then is it also fool hardy to donate money to political campagins? Or to spend money on unlikely emergency senarios? Personal finance is personal, and I’d argue if you aren’t for want, have your ducks in row, go ahead and invest in something that you care about, but don’t make it a serious investment planning on making money. I voted for Gary Johnson, by the way. 😉

“Don’t piss away your hard earned money on an internet hoax.”
The technology is sound, but it isn’t being used for what it was designed for. I doubt it is a hoax, but it is definitely a bubble. I’m sure it will fade into a “remember napster” type situation on the tech side, just a problem because a lot of people are going to be hurt when it does.

Evan – They could I suppose, but what would it get them? It wouldn’t get them anything but the transaction fees in bit coins, and then when they cash out they would crush the market and kill bit coin. If Google wants bit coin to succeed, and I don’t know if they do or not, they wouldn’t do it. Moreover, the SEC might take notice if a large company amassed millions of bit coins and dumped them on the market destroying the current “investors.”

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PA July 17, 2013 at 10:54 pm

Geez, I don’t know where to start.

– First off, drug cartels and terrorists launder money through HSBC bank, not bitcoin. Read about it in the NY times. Their fine ($2B) was over double the market cap of bitcoin, but this was just a slap to the wrist to HSBC compared to the huge profits this too-big-to fail bank (and their criminal customers) made. In other words, bitcoin is too small for the real criminals!

– Second, the whole point of the innovation with bitcoin is that they are nearly free to transmit and nearly impossible to forge. Your transactions are held in a public global ledger (also making it a bad idea for serious criminals) and your coins (private keys you hold verifying your transactions on the ledger) are your ‘physical possession’. If you don’t get it, start thinking about the value of mp3 files, iTunes, and take it from there. Sure, your neighbor might be buying an ounce of pot on Silk Road, but that’s only because legitimate companies are still setting up shop. Serious venture funding for the technology has only been available recently, and the ‘circus’ you describe will evolve into the town market.

Third, volatility. Yes they are volatile. Gasoline volatile. You were around for the dot com boon back in ’96 to ‘2000’? Remember all the crazy dotcom stocks, volatility, brazen foolishness, etc.? Of course you do. You can search for articles about it with Google, on your Android phone, over wireless internet. In other words, out of that chaos and volatility some of the largest companies and most successful companies today were born.

I don’t know if you are serious in the article, or some kind of curmudgeonly troll working people up for page views, but it has been fun reading your opinions.

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