Posted on 12/18/2017 7:02:41 AM PST by Enlightened1
Would you rather own 100% of Wal-Mart or every Bitcoin in existence? At one point such a question would have been completely absurd, but now things have changed. As I write this article, Wal-Mart has a market cap of 287.68 billion dollars. Wal-Mart is the king of the retail industry in America, and nobody else is even close. Bitcoin, on the other hand, is an entirely digital creation that did not even exist until 2009. No government or central bank in the entire world recognizes it as a legitimate currency, and there are very, very few retail establishments that are willing to accept Bitcoin as a form of payment. And yet at this moment, Bitcoin has a market cap of 310 billion dollars.
When the year began, Bitcoin had just crossed the $1,000 threshold, and now it is selling for more than $18,000. Of course other cryptocurrencies have been rising at an even faster pace. We have never seen anything quite like this before, and some are warning that this is a giant bubble that is about to burst…
Axel Weber, the board chairman of big bank UBS, has warned of a possible Bitcoin currency crash. With increasing numbers of small investors jumping on the cryptocurrency bandwagon, it is time for regulators to intervene, he says.
Bitcoin has surged from $1,000 (CHF990) at the start of the year to above $16,000.
The risks are due to a design fault, which leads to huge currency swings in both directions, Weber said in an interview with the NZZ am Sonntagexternal link.
(Excerpt) Read more at theeconomiccollapseblog.com ...
Sure it is. It's backed by the full faith and Credit of the US Federal Government.
Now, you may scoff at that, but what it really means is that the government in power in DC has the full ability to extract all debts owed from the populace it controls at the point of a gun. It will, ultimately extract debts from the people. The US federal government is the best in the world at this. As opposed to countries like Greece, where tax evasion is almost a civic duty.
Excellent points!
So, you're saying it's a conduit, a means to an end, much as paper is to dollar bills just more ephemeral, therefore easier to conceal.
Why would banks handle a transaction in bitcoin for free, by the way?
It’s backed by a hamster on a wheel that doesn’t generate electricity, it uses electricity.
dark money is 1/3rd of the global economy
bit coin has security issues.....that didnt exist when it was developed.
criminals run bcoin at this time.
the orig. developers left 3 yrs ago.
They started decred...its more secure....and everyone gets a vote.
The Infiniti dealer in Tampa will accept Bitcoin.
And I believe it’s KW (Keller Wil.) that is selling a home in S. Tampa for Bitcoin.
In the fwiw dept.
5.56mm
“If I own Wal-Mart, do I have to take the people too?”
I’m looking forward to the “Women of Bitcoin” photos...
What percentage of bitcoin actually gets used as currency? And what percentage is speculation?
It’s a brilliant scam.
Bitcoin is not a truck, it’s a series of very secure tubes that can transmit tremendous amounts of data.
It’s a vehicle for speculation.
Maybe you can answer the question I’ve been asking: What percentage of bitcoin total value gets used as currency and what percentage is purely greedy speculation?
16 million coins have been mined. 21 million max with the amount available to mine halving every four years.
It’s a scam, brilliant, but still a scam.
No it shows human greed. Read post 70.
Bitcoin transactions are minuscule in comparison to speculation. I don’t have percentages, and they’d be rapidly out of date if I did.
Or is Bitcoin the trial run to eventually adapt it as a global currency?
Yeah actual transactions as currency are tiny, it’s a scam.
This is a speculative mania regarding an encrypted means of transmitting data, but rather than speculating on the companies offering the encryption they’re speculating on the transmission itself. The whole thing is weird. Our currency is already largely electronic, just not terribly secure. Bitcoin is secure, but as far as I can tell it’s not currency, it’s a means of transmitting it.
But Blockchain technology is something that is going to be used for a lot of things in the future, even elections could be done via Blockchain.
I am sorry, your aren’t convincing. Try more details about how it is a scam please.
“Consumer Money”
You have to spend some real, fake-money fiat currency to get some fake, fake-money fiat currency.
Yes, well who holds the rights to blockchain, whether that’s due to closely held proprietary information, patent or other means of securing control? Invest in them if they’ll continue to derive an income stream from it. As it stands we’re experiencing a speculative mania in bits of blockchain that aren’t being used for anything but speculation, with rare exception. That’s like inventing the telephone and a speculative mania developing on the price of individual phone calls.
Did you read post 70? Then read 65. Then read 72.
If it’s not just a vehicle for speculation why limit the amount of coins mined?
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