Have personally met people looking at doing $20m+ international trade deals using BTC because banks won't service the transactions due to India being involved. This was when BTC was $120. Problem with that is the volatility introduces so much currency risk. Big business wants to use BTC.
just rewind back to 2007 (houses and stocks) and then to 2000 (dot com stocks) and then to 1987 etc etc etc.... We have seen this before. This time it is different this time it is not a bubble. This time there is real value this time there is real growth, not pumped up by money printing and speculation. When you take something with no value (0) and create a demand (Tulip) then we have a bubble. I don't know when this will blow but blow it will.
I can see this -not only because of regulation/ red tape conerning banks, but the risk/cost/logistics of moving around equivilent of PMs... Grounding a plane with "terrorist" gold on it - more frequent these days
Oh I am more than enough of a computer geek to understand it - I just don't get it Some see value in it and some don't Some just see a rising chart and jump on for the ride
Fair enough, but does this mean you don't see any value in bitcoin at all? Things like brain wallets? Being able to walk through any border with undetectable coins? You can't see why that would be desirable or useful or worth a lot of money to anyone? That is just one example.
I'm someone who has approx. 50 times more of their wealth in gold and silver than bitcoin (just to point out I'm not some wild BTC will take over the world fan-boy), but I can not understand this type of attitude towards bitcoin. Can you explain how it is like a Ponzi scheme? It may be a bubble (time will tell), and it might go to zero, but I can not in anyway see how someone can think it is a Ponzi scheme.
As described by wiki and attributed to Charles Ponzi A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to its investors from their own money or the money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from profit earned by the individual or organization running the operation. Operators of Ponzi schemes usually entice new investors by offering higher returns than other investments, in the form of short-term returns that are either abnormally high or unusually consistent. The perpetuation of the high returns requires an ever-increasing flow of money from new investors to sustain the scheme. Sounds like a lot of paper markets including Bitcoin
Ponzi /pnzi/ Show Spelled [pon-zee] Show IPA noun a swindle in which a quick return, made up of money from new investors, on an initial investment lures the victim into much bigger risks. adjective word used by many stackers to describe anything they don't wish to, or are unable to, understand or comprehend. (see man.ip.u.lation)
A bubble in a market is not a Ponzi scheme. Individual exchanges however may be running Ponzi schemes, where people cashing out are only being paid because of new inflows of deposits. I stopped holding anything on Mt.Gox recently - the losses they must have suffered from the Dwolla seizures could easily have resulted in such a scenario coming about.
this will get taken down by the manipulators that control the markets, they will see how damaging this can be to the elite, if you aint taken realised profit (that means converted into something else) by now you are a gooseberry
Short answer of why I choose to stay out: bitcoins might be a limited resource but crypto-currencies are an unlimited resource.
Again, I do not understand how anyone could read that and think it applies to bitcoin. You would either have to - 1. Twist the meaning of many/most of those words to make them unrecognisable or 2. Have absolutely no understanding of what bitcoin is to think that is how it works For starters it is not a investment operation and there are no investors. You are not at any point promised returns by anyone. There is no central body collecting money from newcomers and funnelling it off to existing ones. Like I said earlier bitcoin maybe (and probably is) a huge bubble, but it takes some special kind of "logic" to think its a Ponzi. If buying something then selling it for more than you paid is a Ponzi scheme, then Coles, Woolies and every other retail company in Australia is a Ponzi merchant.
Perhaps not a Ponzi scheme, bad choice of word, but certainly a scheme where the one's who were in first have a terribly significant advantage over everyone else. Besides, it's electronic and I am convinced that it is susceptible to lots of electronic fraud. While every investment type has its own risks, I believe that under the radar right now, there's a heap of fraud that's percolating and it's only a matter of time till we see a meltdown of BC to the point where most people won't have trust in the scheme. .
