Are they a scam? they smell like a scam to me

Are they a scam? they smell like a scam to me


Serious intellectual Sup Forums discussion

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Fisk_(financier)
bitcoinrestaurants.net/
coinatmradar.com/state/21/bitcoin-atm-maryland/
99bitcoins.com/who-accepts-bitcoins-payment-companies-stores-take-bitcoins/
coinatmradar.com/city/102/bitcoin-atm-melbourne/
rosshill.com.au/spending
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Yes and no.
Long story short... the bubble is going to burst soon, if you havent already jumped on the bandwagon, dont. It's too late.

Your a nigger

buy IOTA NOW!

>your
Okay Tyrone.

The whole concept of the thing seems dodgy to me

Feels like few big whales hold the majority and they slowly selling breadcrumbs to joe 6 pack idiots then when the artificial price is high enough they will dumb and cash out on the back of all the average idiots that put money into it
Shit has no intrinsic value what so ever or anything to back the value

The only value is what others think its worth and buying in hopes of selling in the future is pyramid scheme 101


I know few ppl IRL who put large sums into this, ill lol when i see them lose all they life savings in the future

until i can go down to the supermarket and buy a loaf of bread with them, they are a scam.

/thread

You can buy pizza where i am.

"Real" money has no value either. What's your point?

name of the pizza place? name of the city?

i can buy food with "real money". i can pay for services like power, internet and car fuel with "real money". until your pretend dollarydoos can do that, they are counters in a stupid online game and nothing more.

You clearly don't know much about bitcoin because you can do all that depending on the wallet you have.
Look into how bitcoin is generated, that's how the value is determined, after taking the time and electricity used by your GPU.
It's a Billion dollar industry, if you can't figure out how it works or how to capitalize on it that's on you.

ITT retards who dont realize the potential of crypto and will be left on shore.

I could even try and explain how money laundering and political climates could single handedly pump btc to 100k

Yes. That's the case for now. Everyday living locally. Just try and think of the future implications of anonymous currency with next to nothing transfer rate and no exchange rate. I don't think you quite understand why these digital currencies are being created in the first place. Anyways, my money in the bank is direct deposited from my employers account, then I use my debit to pay for all my goods and services, all the while not using any tangible medium. All electronic transfers. This is no different really. The printed paper you carry may or may not have any backing value to it. False inflation created for printing too much of it with no backing. Making it illegal at one point to even carry and exchange gold/silver coins for goods. The current notes we use today are just that. Notes on paper. Too easy to control and manipulate when you're the one printing it right? Things take time to evolve.

>It's a Billion dollar industry, if you can't buy anything with it except more bitcoins that's on you.


fixed your post for you.

You know fuck all, literally lol

Say that to my 10k in ethereum that cost me 2k 5 months ago

>I don't think you quite understand why these digital currencies are being created in the first place.

yeah, yeah, i've read "Cryptonomicon", theoretically i have 12 billion ISK in a wallet in Eve:Online if i could be bothered trying to redeem it. i know why people SAY cryptocurrencies are being spawned at the rate of three every week, and why bitcoin forked, and i also know that the paper in my wallet "may" have no value to it, but the supermarket still accepts them and it doesn't accept bitcoins, dogecoins, dobbscoins, Pepecoins or lindenbucks. that's what it comes down to. have fun building mining rigs. have fun exchanging electrical power for Etherium before realizing you can't do anything with it except try to talk someone else into giving you money for it, money you can spend in the real world. enjoy watching the value of your imaginary money go up and down according to reports of exchanges being hacked.

I remember when they went up to $30 and people said the same thing. Then they went down to $2 and people literally killed themselves.

They are always going up in the long term.

That drop never happened

It fucking did. I mean not specifically but withing like $1

...

Eat shit

how much do you have in bitcoin, so that you are so passionately defending them here? do you imagine that convincing half a dozen Sup Forumstards that they aren't a scam will turn it around and you might get some of your money back one day?

i admire your optimism, but i can't share it. your money, in the words of Diamond Jim Fisk, "hath gone where the woodbine twineth."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Fisk_(financier)

people have been saying this for years.

it might burst, but nobody knows if or when or why.

it's basically gambling.

>you can't do anything with it except try to talk someone else into giving you money for it

your point might be more biting if exchanging bitcoin for "real" money wasn't so easy to do. i've cashed in $300,000 "real dollars" in the last five years on crypto. people think it's worth money, so it's worth money.

nigger u dumb

Oh I never said I owned any. I don't. Have no need for it. I understand your argument but I also understand the deeper effect crypto currencies can have on the banking system. It's not the currencies I'm interested in.

considering how much trouble has been caused by the short-pants boys speculating with investment futures - playing with money like it wasn't real - you'd think the bitcoin crowd might be cautious. instead, they fap to the notion that one day they might be able to anonymously buy pizza - by the way, still haven't heard back from this guy about that pizza place - it's gonna be a pyramid scheme.

if bitcoin ever becomes a thing, then i will guardedly buy some, but the constant cries of "you have to get in now or get left behind!" make it sound exactly like Quintex, and the Nugan-Hand banking scam. and every other pyramid marketing scheme ever.

what sort of money varies in value depending on when you got it? okay, yeah, Robert Anton Wilson once thought up a kind of depreciating not-exactly-currency called "trade aids", supposedly to be handed out by the government for basic living expenses, and THEY lost value over time, to discourage hoarding.

face it, bitcoin fans: you can't get something for nothing. it's nice to fantasize that the ten bucks worth of Etherium you bought might one day be worth ten dollars and fifteen cents, but that's the sort of stupid shit that causes financial crashes.

read up on the financial history of Albania. the entire country's economy was wiped out by a pyramid marketing scheme, and they never recovered.

>i've cashed in $300,000 "real dollars" in the last five years on crypto.

what was the name of the exchange where you did this? do you have any proof of your claim?

Initially I thought the same. Back when they were like a buck a piece. Now I regret not buying hundreds and being a rich cunt.

Honestly at this point I don't see their worth rising too much higher. Maybe they'll hit 10k a piece but that might be with inflation. If you have money to invest do it properly in multiple facets. Never put all of your eggs into one basket though.

Funny cause I always see the media claiming it would never break the $2000 mark not too long ago. It's funny to watch people play around with people's money and economies. Sad world we live in.

the technology itself and the currency using it are not a scam, but make no mistake there are plenty of scams built up around it and related concepts

Australia, Melbourne, numerous cafés and eateries accept bitcoin. We have bitcoin atms here where you can buy and exchange bitcoins too.

I think the fed are trying to destroy it for the obvious. If any scams around it it was created by them.

Everyone in this thread is dumb.

There are a bunch of cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin was originally designed to be a crypto "currency". It is no longer viable as currency. There was recently a fork that proved that the owners of BTC actually don't even care if it's ever used as currency. If they did, then the majority of the market cap of BTC would have likely moved into BCC. It did not.

Now, there are other, leading, crypto CURRENCIES. Eth, LTC, BCC(now that there was a fork could potentially be as such but we don't really know yet), etc. Honestly, you have to watch both how ETH and BTC move together to grasp.

The way that BTC moves and the way that ETH moves are essentially like watching the value of gold and the value of the US Dollar. BTC is so slow to trade it is more like a commodity. It's like a really really fast, super convenient, bar of gold. ETH or LTC is more like cash.

It's far more likely that something else will emerge as a replacement for USD/EUR (if that even happens) and BTC will continue to act as a commodity and move based upon the relational value of ETH/LTC/EUR/YUAN/USD/etc. These relationships drive the value of BTC, not some garbage that people in here are making up.

Yes, there is 'faith', yes there are crashes. But it will likely retain the majority of its value over the long term at this point because it's a very convenient commodity.

but when it comes to a country's currency it is given value by the government, bitcoin however has no organization to give it power, it's value is dependent on how many people buy into it, its basically a volatile stock.

it's not as funny when financial institutions take it seriously and then go out of business by playing monopoly with them, and those institutions were also supposed to be managing existing businesses that deal in real shit, and they go out of business and suddenly hundreds of thousands of people lose their pensions. none of you little children have ever lost a large amount of money due to banks playing tiddleywinks with other peoples' money. but, hey, go buy some bitcoin. you'll find out the hard way.

No it's not. A country's currency value is determined only by how much of it the country prints and how much someone is willing to give you for a printed piece of it. It's purely faith based.

The USD is just a piece of paper that says "I did $1 worth of work" or "I stole $1 worth of stuff". If no one will give you $1 for it, it's not worth anything.

BTC is the same thing. You did work, the pool proves that you did the work or stole the work. The only difference is that no one can arbitrarily print more of it.

the fact that cryptocurrencies keep forking because people keep finding faults - the blockchains got too big and it now takes three hours to process a transaction, they're vulnerable to hacking, they rely on trust in people who run the exchanges which aren't licensed or even insured in any way - all of that adds up to a sufficiently strong fishy smell so that smart people won't want to fuck with it.

so far, the only arguments i've seen in this thread FOR them are:

- you're dumb, everyone is doing it
- you could make a lot of money if you got in early

insufficiently compelling reasons. i'm also guessing a lot of you in here have never had a real job where you have to exert yourself at all, and you imagine that money is something magically handed out by your parents.

Dude...banks are retarded anyway.

Under FDIC, a US bank is allowed to loan out $90 for every $1 they have deposited into their bank. Please explain to me how the fuck unsecured loans in US dollars and poorly backed mortgages propped up by the government (which is paid for by the same people who are taking out the loan) is better than messing around with fucking BTC?

The derivatives market is a fucking shit show. You literally have no fucking clue what you're talking about.

>It's purely faith based.

but, as i said earlier, it's a faith shared by the rest of the financial world. i haven't seen any major financial institutions actually take on bitcoin or any of the variations. the stock exchange doesn't count, because they deal mostly in intangibles anyway. banks won't accept bitcoin, stores won't (still waiting to hear from pizza guy and mr i-exchanged-$300,000-worth).

Bitch, i live in Melbourne. name these cafes and eateries. name the locations of these bitcoin ATMS, and i'll drive around there right the fuck now, 11:30 saturday night, and i will piss on them.

>Dude...banks are retarded anyway.

banks are retarded, yes. i know. i have to deal with them on a regular basis. about the only two things they have going for them is that my employer trusts them sufficiently to deposit my pay with them, and that stores accept the card issued by that bank when i go to buy shit.

BTC was not forked because it was flawed. It was forked because some people disliked the slow transaction times.

As I said, the slow transaction times did not make BCC worth $5k and BTC worth $100. This is even MORE proof that BTC is stable.

You're just thinking about it like the money in your pocket and not like a gold coin.

The real reason to invest in BTC is because it gives you, the common man, easy access to a commodity that is backed by other common people from around the world, with a fixed size, and no government oversight. Your earnings are tax free (if you do it correctly) and there has very large earning potential. Also, if you have holdings of multiple currencies you can insulate yourself against foreign instability and valuation changes in foreign currency and trade policy.

That is why BTC goes up and that is why you should learn how the world economy works and get involved in it. It's not a 'scam' it's just the most pure form of free market capitalism that has ever existed (and probably will ever exist at this point).

People said shit about computerized bank transactions first now the majority of money is just a number on a banks server. if I crash that server there goes your money. if the server is EVERYWHERE is almost impossible to crash the system without crashing the Internet in which case we're all fucked anyway

are there even any websites that will accept bitcoin in exchange for services? i keep asking for proof, and the people who keep making these claims have been very quiet.

Paypal takes BTC.

Also, refer to my other post:
People buy gold coins like crazy but your bank won't take a gold coin. The pizza guy won't take a gold coin. You can't buy stock with a gold coin. It's an internationally traded commodity.

ETH or LTC is more like a currency. With the implementation of .NET support for ETH and TD ameritrade's currency to speed up the transactions and ETH having actual developers...something like that might become "cash".

You could see that be a "swipe your phone to pay with ETH" at the store or paypal taking it readily because ETH could do 10,000 transactions a second.

Now, BTC will still move up in value. BTC, will be gold, ETH will be cash. Cash doesn't change value. People don't fuck around with the value of cash. $1 is $1. A gold coin....I can wait. I'll wait a couple weeks to sell it to someone who really wants it and will give me a good price. Then you can trade that for the most ETH.

the difference there being that if a bank fucks up and loses your money, they are under a legal liability to make recompense. the Bolshoy Duraki Bitcoin Exchange in Archangelsk won't, because it's run by one guy out of his attic room.

Shitloads?

Paypal, Microsoft account...

You can literally buy xbox games with BTC through your live account.

You can send them to your PayPal so then...literally everything.

>You could see that be a "swipe your phone to pay with ETH"

and when that happens, i'll invest. until then, i will continue to heap scorn on the people who think there is a free ride here.

btc are an investment, just like investing in the stock market. cryptocurrencies have the advantage that theyre less susceptible to human error but since theyre less popular than stocks theyre more volatile. btc is pretty damn safe tho, id put like a couple hundred bucks in and just watch it grow. Monero is probably most secure and the most likely to grow very fast though, the price is just less stable than BTC.

shitloads? you mention paypal and microsoft.

"When you redeem Bitcoin to deposit funds into your Microsoft account, you can use it to purchase games, movies, and apps in the Windows and Xbox stores. You cannot use these funds to purchase items in the Microsoft online store."

"Money added to your Microsoft account using Bitcoin can't be refunded."

"You can't use money in your Microsoft account to buy gift cards."

"Support for adding money to a Microsoft account with Bitcoin is not available in all countries and regions."

they don't exactly look like they're jumping in with both feet. and i am willing to bet you a hundred million ISK that if you tried to redeem one bitcoin in paypal and then tried to extract it as cash, a lot of delays and mysterious barriers would pop up. i invite you to try it, and we'll just stand over here with our arms crossed, nodding.

Humble bundle and sites like that also accept. You keep asking for a who backs it/ensures a value yet ive not seen the most obvious argument in this thread yet. Drugs. Drugs will keep the cryptos running.

hello

earlier days my man

>cryptocurrencies have the advantage that theyre less susceptible to human error but since theyre less popular than stocks theyre more volatile.

they are much more susceptible to human maliciousness, however. i don't even need to exert myself to find half a dozen stories on slashdot about bitcoin exchanges being hacked, collapsing, refusing transactions, delaying currency exchanges and exactly the same kind of fuckery that you'd expect from, say, Russian teenagers.

Achtually....

Here's the fun part....

So, say you deposit a check into an FDIC insured bank. When you sign the back of the check, you have legally stated "I hearby accept responsibility for this check." The bank then takes the check, waits 24 hours, then extends you a CREDIT in the amount of the face value of the check and it goes off to their clearinghouse.

Now, you look at your bank balance and it says "Available $500" so you go spend $500. At this point, you don't actually have $500. You have a loan for $500.

At some point during the next 5-7 days the clearing house supposedly verifies that the check is good and then CLEARS the check with the other bank. This actually gives you the money. Then your loan has ended.

BUT! Under the Patriot Act! It is illegal for a bank to communicate with their own clearinghouse so there is no way for the consumer to find out if the check has been cleared and after 180 days all checks are invalid.

So, you can either wait 180 days before you ever spend any of the money, OR, you're working entirely on credit, OR you have to drive all over gods creation to cash checks on the bank that they were written on and get the cash in hand.

So, the implication is this:
If there's ever a run on the banks, all the have to do is go "we're sorry, you don't have any money".

>Drugs will keep the cryptos running.

on which version of the Silk Road do you buy drugs? the old one, which was taken over by the American Federal police, or the new one, which was also taken over by the American Federal police?

hang on a moment.

'k, just called my weed dealer. he doesn't accept bitcoin.

Whatever dude...I was just giving you some examples off the top of my head. I don't go around buying shit with BTC.

I see the logo all over. All those little square things that are in like every coffee shop take it if the person wants it.

There's a BTC ATM up the street by my house.

Lots of places take it. Quit being argumenative. You asked and I gave you an example of "yes, the largest multinational corporation in the country takes them" and you start quoting me fine print. Who gives a fuck.

it's called a bitcoin wallet not a bitcoin safe, if you dont wanna lose your cryptocurrency then you need to keep it safe. i gurantee you every single person who loses their bitcoins lost them because they didnt take the proper precautions when handling their money. the reason you dont have to do this with your debit card is because the bank does it for you, but you *cannot* put hundreds of dollars behind one single password and expect it not to get cracked, you gotta secure your keys better than that and you gotta make sure you trust who youre paying.

Sucks to be you. I accept coin. A couple of hookers local do too.

I like how you glazed over a legit site that accepts. Oh amd here you go lazy faggot bitcoinrestaurants.net/

lol you clearly have never bought dnm drugs, it's still very alive and well

also my weed dealer does accept btc and xmr you pussy bitch

>. I don't go around buying shit with BTC.

it's funny how many people are willing to claim you can buy real things with bitcoin, but they personally don't.

>There's a BTC ATM up the street by my house.

i suppose now you won't tell me the address of the ATM because you'll claim i might find out where you live.

>Lots of places take it.

yeah. paypal. and microsoft, who won't exchange anything except digital information for it. and that pizza place the guy mentioned earlier, except he never told us where it was. and those cafes and eateries in Melbourne, except that guy never told us the address of even one of them.


> Quit being argumentative.

do you even know where you are? do you want pictures of cats, since it's caturday? okay, in the spirit of where we actually are, here's a fucking picture of Mr Popo.

anyone want to play?

I get bored with you guys.

>just called my weed dealer. he doesn't accept bitcoin.
not counting the many venues that let you literally pay in bitcoin (and only accept bitcoin) to have drugs delivered to your front door, a smart dealer will gladly accept transactions in bitcoin

bitcoinrestaurants.net/ seems legit. Its almost like 30 seconds on google would show you information relevant to any query.

not the same guy, but there's also a btc atm in the gas station by my house. for fucks sake just google "bitcoin atm locations" you pretentious dickhead. also, if you did any research aside from stroking your penis on Sup Forums and just googled "businesses that accept bitcoin" youd realize that you're just plain wrong.

you're on the internet. use it.

>I like how you glazed over a legit site that accepts. Oh amd here you go lazy faggot bitcoinrestaurants.net/

that site only covers the US. it doesn't locate any of the "cafes and eateries" supposedly all over Melbourne.

let's check one. The El Castillo in New York. i went to their website and they didn't mention bitcoin at all. do you have any actual examples or are you going to continue muttering "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain"?

ask /biz/ not fucking Sup Forums you idiot

why are you such a cunt? oh yeah
>melbourne

in all seriousness though just because you cant go somewhere and physically use bitcoin and be literally handed the thing you just bought in your particular (incredibly geographically isolated) part of the world doesnt mean that nobody uses bitcoin. it just means ausfags are a bunch of retarded cavemen

>google "bitcoin atm locations" you pretentious dickhead.

okay! let's see. "Bitrocket" in St Kilda. they sell bitcoins. they don't exchange bitcoins for cash.

who else? "Bitrocket" in Kensington. same deal.

there is Gorilla Direct in Richmond. i'll be back later. road trip, and i have a full bladder.

>why are you such a cunt?

perhaps because i keep asking you questions you can't answer about your favorite imaginary currency.

> just because you cant go somewhere and physically use bitcoin and be literally handed the thing you just bought in your particular (incredibly geographically isolated) part of the world doesnt mean that nobody uses bitcoin. it just means ausfags are a bunch of retarded cavemen

enjoy washing dishes at El Castillo in New York, when you offer to pay in bitcoin and they laugh and say "fuck, no. cash, bitch, or wash dishes."

>itt guy is ass blasted he cant actually use btc.

nigga i live in cambridge, massachsetts. do you really think we don't have bitcoin here?
also can you stop rubbing your penis about your one example
>HURR DURR THEY DONT HAV BITCOIN ON WABSITE
just because one fucking place doesnt mention it doesnt mean that *nobody* uses it. it doesn't even mean *that particular place* doesn't use it, it just means they don't say it on their website. if you dont want to use bitcoin don't fucking use it, it seems like you just don't really get what it's for or how it works and that upsets you.
>case and point: if i cant buy food at a restaurant with it then it's useless

coinatmradar.com/state/21/bitcoin-atm-maryland/

99bitcoins.com/who-accepts-bitcoins-payment-companies-stores-take-bitcoins/

Fuck you're an asshole.

here's a heat map of the number of bitcoin atms around the world. looks like aus is just barely getting into it so thats probably why your dicks so hard about it

its a pyramid scheme

Bitcoin is the sole reason sanctions against NK is futile.

can someone quickly explain this shit to me? So you buy fucking expensive graphics cards to build a pc just to use it for solving math problems and somehow some magical force gives you bitcoins, which are worth like hundreds/thousands of dollars but almost nobody accepts them?

coinatmradar.com/city/102/bitcoin-atm-melbourne/

There you go. Lrntogoogle.

...

Also here. rosshill.com.au/spending

Fucking retard.

i could have gotten into bitcoin right from the beginning knowing of what it would become but i didnt

that was somewhat of a waste

Microsoft is a member of the "ENTERPRISE ETHEREUM ALLIANCE"
(entethalliance.org) which to me makes it seem much more likely that Ethereum will be the the first real widely used cryptocurrency - and kind of explains the lack of Bitcoin acceptance.
Fyi: Intel, J. P. Morgan and other very large companies is also a part of the alliance.

Ponzi scheme is the term you were looking for. You don't get any reward for sucking someone into Bitcoin.

I mined a decent amount using my old graphics cards in the early years then spent it all on coffee and drugs, I was kicking myself when it finally broke 10 USD, let alone 100 or 1000

You really shouldn't let things like that bother you. Hindsight is 20/20 and you can't expect yourself to pick winning lotto numbers.

Please explain

Explanation: he's pulling numbers out of his ass.

Where's why Bitcoin will likely continue to win:

The idea behind it is solid. Even if Bitcoin itself somehow failed, the idea of crypto-currencies will ensure that other coins replace it. Just imagine a prison where the guards literally ban cash and other goods - the prisoners end up finding a way to trade in cigarettes. The demand for currency is universal - and the system up until now has been one where major national governments FORCE their own currency on everyone, and more importantly governments and insiders throughout history have often purposefully inflated or messed with the currency to benefit themselves by stealing wealth from others - and the key is that when they do this, as Central Banks do today - everyone who actually works in the economy suffers because of it in a mostly imperceptible but real way.

Bitcoin has established itself, and just like no matter how rigorous or exhaustive a set of arguments you employ - you will never stop being people from being Christians or muslims, so in the same way - there are SO many people with a stake in Bitcoin that even if there were somehow major drops in the price, there are enough people involved that it will simply recover. Odds are that BTC itself will be replaced by other coins and better technologies, but the transfer of wealth likely won't be a sudden break, it'll be a steady shift of investment over time.

We're in the internet age now - the internet is everything. Think of the opening scenes of Ghost in the Shell. There are still billions of people yet to become fully 'online' in the sense that many of us are - and most want a way to transfer funds quickly across the globe and to make informal transactions. The circumvention of central bank inflation and the ability to hide funds from government are big factors.

The lack of a central authority is one of the main reasons why Bitcoin is garbage as an actual currency though. If Bitcoin were the unit of account in our economy, we would have had multiple market crashes in the past few years. There's no mechanism to adjust the supply to react to market conditions.

But the whole point is to avoid a central authority.

The issue with the price varying a lot at the moment is because of all these questions over whether it will continue to thrive, whether governments will somehow clamp down on it, whether there are flaws in the technology. But the 'stability' of national currencies is only achieved through massive coercion, force, waste, etc. It's likely as new coins emerge and as crypto becomes the new normal and starts to supercede national currencies, you'll have some coins that are designed to be more stable, as reserves of wealth. If Bitcoin were as universal as a national currency, there'd be so many people using it it's likely the value would be far more uniform. It's all about belief and investment and how widely accepted it is.

National governments are going to dissolve now that the internet makes them increasingly irrelevant.

>But the whole point is to avoid a central authority.
I know, and that point is fundamentally flawed when it comes to currency. The blockchain has a lot of good uses. Currency isn't one of them. It's at most a payment processor a la Paypal, where you go fiat --> BTC --> fiat.

It wouldn't matter if it became more widely accepted. The fundamental flaw would still be there. To achieve value stability in the long term, you sacrifice stability in the short term, and we live in the short term. Nobody is going to care that their Bitcoin is probably going to retain its value when they're out of work because the economy imploded.

I'm not even going to respond to your anarchist rant.

it's not just solving math problems. think of it like this: bitcoins come in "blocks", and every "block" has a certain amount of bitcoins in it. the only way to get bitcoins is to literally guess at the unique serial number of the block until you just happen to be right. if multiple people in the same "pool" are making these guesses, then the bitcoins in the block are split between the people in the pool depending on how much work each person did. BTC is mined with algorithms best suited to graphics cards, but there are CPU mined currencies like Monero that are becoming popular as well.

Bitcoins cannot be efficiently mined by graphics cards unless you have a *LOT* of them at this point. the best thing to do is to buy an ASIC miner, which usually manage to pay for themselves within a few months.

while some people accept BTC and some don't, you can still convert them to whatever currency you want, so what's really best about them IMO is that they're pretty damn fluid and you don't have to worry about taxes or anything

>the best thing to do is to buy an ASIC miner, which usually manage to pay for themselves within a few months.
Unless you take electricity costs into account.
>you don't have to worry about taxes or anything
Bitcoin is taxed as a commodity.

one of the main issues i take with your argument honestly is the implication that BTC should be used as the national currency of an entire country. it's definitely not suited to that, and i agree with you there, but that isn't the point of bitcoin. bitcoin is much more useful when moving between currencies, or making international transactions. i'm not advocating people keep all of their money in BTC; far from it, it's incredibly unstable. BUT it is a very good way to get around the hassle of converting directly from one fiat currency to another. it's honestly better described as a simulated "natural" resource than an analogue to the Dollar or Pound or Euro or whatever

>bitcoin is a taxed commodity
bitcoin yes, other cryptocurrencies not so much.
>electricity costs
yeah that's a fair point, theoretically an entire mining set up could be run on solar power though.

But when you talk of 'crashes' and people then being out of work, the reason things like that happened was because of a sudden loss of faith in the banking system and the economy in general in relation to that banking system. The great depression was basically at core a result of people suddenly seeing that the system was a deck of cards built on debt, where banks couldn't possibly give everyone their money back when everyone wanted it.

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies allow anyone to withdraw their investment practically immediately, and other people withdrawing their funds doesn't mean you won't be able to withdraw your own. If you have a wallet with 0.5 BTC and everyone withdraws their money at the same time, you will STILL have that 0.5 BTC, the only issue then will be the value that other people see in buying it off you - so everyone running on their BTC would slowly devalue it, but there would be nothing like the situation with the great depression where people lined up to take their money out at the bank only to be turned away! Anyone with large sums invested in BTC will have systems like stop-losses in place which convert their BTC to other coins in the event of some sort of catastrophic failure, so there would never be the massive sudden undermining of faith and loss.

So long as the internet continues to exist - crypto currencies are valuable and they will quickly become the norm. They will replace national currencies.

>bitcoin is much more useful when moving between currencies, or making international transactions
Like I said, a payment processor.