> But bitcoin collapses not just every 30-100 years, it collapses every 0.5-5 years.
When someone says that a fiat currency collapsed, it means the value went to zero forever. Bitcoin hit a new all-time high price in USD just recently. Not the same usage of the word collapse.
> Bitcoin has already failed as a currency. It is subject to incredible moodiness and instability, which are the characteristics of a very poor currency indeed
>It is also deflating, i.e. one Bitcoin today is worth more than one Bitcoin yesterday.
But that's explicitly false, especially today (what with bitcoin being down 14% over the last 24 hours). And there was a period of bitcoin's history of about 3 years where the value of one bitcoin was dropping day after day. Does that mean bitcoin was inflationary during that time?
I just can't see that as being a useful definition.
>The outrageous swings of bitcoin hour by hour have the same issue.
Bitcoin loses, at worst, maybe 50% of its value over the course of a few weeks. The Zimbabwe dollar lost 99.99% of its value over the course of a few weeks.
Of course, on larger time scales, the volatility of Bitcoin has been in a distinctly upward direction. So yeah, I guess Bitcoin has kind of the opposite problem of the Zimbabwe Dollar (if you can call it a problem).
And then, of course, Bitcoin will probably stabilize over time. New currencies are not historically stable.
>Bitcoin is not a currency, it is a technology, a service and now a commodity for speculators which is crashing right now.
Agree on that it is not a currency (the word "currency" doesn't even appear on the Bitcoin client's website). However, please explain why you say it is "crashing"? 3 months ago the price was $130 on average. It's around $500 today. How is that a crash?
Bitcoin failed as a store of value, it's up some 20,000% since 2010 and basically infinty since the day of its first trade (back when the first bitcoin was traded for some trivial amount of electricity)
> With my theory of value, Bitcoin has to collapse.
There's absolutely no risk to a vague claim like that. It's unfalsifiable. Either we witness Bitcoin collapse, in which case you made an amazing prediction, or we don't witness Bitcoin collapse, and on your deathbed you can be proud that you haven't been proven wrong yet.
To make a meaningful prediction, name a time (preferably within most of our expected lifetimes) and a market price. Of course, if you could do that with any confidence, you should also trade with that same confidence.
Zero downtime since 2013. Visa has ten hour outages across entire continents.
> Bitcoin solves no actual problems
It's been moving billions of USD daily without fail for years. That's a non-trivial amount to anywhere on Earth. Try transferring money from say former Soviet bloc countries to Africa.
> The consensus among economists is that a deflationary currency is a terrible idea.
Bitcoin is inflationary until 2140 and then stops inflating. It's not a deflationary currency. Perhaps you meant to word this differently?
> And this periodically actually happens to real government-backed currencies in the world, especially during times of hyperinflation
Right, but that happens sometimes, and never with proper governance. (but what is "proper governance" you ask? It's a tautology that says that governments that never allow hyperinflation never suffer from hyperinflation)
ALL asset bubbles collapse. The magnitude of the collapse is determined by the non-monetary value of the asset. (e.g. tulip bulbs collapse harder than real-estate). Because the non-monetary value of Bitcoin is negative (you need to burn electricity to use Bitcoin), this implies the eventual collapse of Bitcoin will be absolute.
Yeah because the Dollar was perfectly stable when it was five years old and accessible to only a select percentage of the population (how many people are really able to use a wallet with the cryptic addresses? Not my parents at least).
Besides, when many people buy their house in Bitcoin the market cap would be much higher and the price would not fluctuate 25% in one day. Not without a fatal flaw in the algorithm or World War III anyway.
The only reason Bitcoin is unstable is because it's not used by that many. That's not a flaw from Bitcoin, that's the network effect. Like Facebook versus Google+, though that's a bad comparison because G+ has no game-changing advantages, at least none that Facebook couldn't replicate.
When someone says that a fiat currency collapsed, it means the value went to zero forever. Bitcoin hit a new all-time high price in USD just recently. Not the same usage of the word collapse.
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