Sundial, agreed. That actually is what those books are about, the authors are very good at using history, current trends to forecast the future, since most things repeat because as we know, very few people actually change.

Another good read is "The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind"
https://www.amazon.com/Crowd-Study-P...ZSVBCW4MM53TDG

and

"Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds"
https://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary...=9781566191692

I am more fond of more academic tomes like -- Capital in the 21st Century -- and overviews with an eye on cycles in history like -- The Third Wave --

Beyond me why anyone would trust a currency that anyone can create.

Well it seems the rumours of it's demise, let alone worthlessness, are at least premature if not utterly mistaken. Here's a very recent article from Atlantic -- What on Earth is Going on With Bitcoin? --

LOL!

How then would you classify the Central Banks, like the Federal Reserve, which is about as Federal as Federal Express. Printing money, de-valuing the money in circulation, which is nothing but paper, not backed by anything. At one time, it was backed by gold. But now the USA, is off the gold-standard, so the printing presses can run in overtime.

Cryptocurrencies, while new, offer hope, like the blockchain algorithm and smart contracts which are tied to Ethereum Cryptocurrency.

^ you nailed it...."Creature from Jekyll Island" is up your alley. ;)
https://www.amazon.com/Creature-Jeky.../dp/091298645X

Hmmmm I may have to retract my confidence in estimating longevity. In the past few days Steam stopped accepting Bitcoins with the reason given as "recent instability, fluctuation in value". They did say they are not ruling out returning to acceptance if and when it stabilizes, but that can hardly be a good sign.

That was the first red pill that I ever took...

That possibly could be that all crypto currencies are not subject to futures trading, which will cause another bubble.

I don't see how you can buy anything with a currency whose base unit is worth thousands of dollars. And I don't see how you can hold bitcoin as an investment when its price is liable to halve over night. What's the point of it?

AFAIK, it can be subdivived.

It can double over night too. High risk, high reward. Makes it pretty horrible as a currency though.

AFAIK there is no longer an Adam Smith type currency system where convenient money is tied to some substance of known long term intrinsic value like gold. It's all fiat currency. This is one of Richard Nixon's "accomplishments which has had a global effect (see Breton Woods vs/ Nixon Shock). There was substantial controversy then at least economically since it was a wild political success and soon copied everywhere. That controversy still exists. Here's a hindsight view from Nobel laureate Paul Krugman and though it wasn't stated with Bitcoin in mind, it applies.... just on a global scale.

One can worry about what is loosely referred to as The New World Order all we want but the simple physical fact is that we are One Planet, One People and it is only since transportation and communication has become rapid, even instantaneous in the case of communication, that it is beginning to be recognized for what it is. While there may be nothing officially named as The World Government there is little difference between National Representation and Global other than scale and diversity. Bitcoin may be one of the early attempts to create a Global Currency and one controlled by nobody except Supply and Demand. We are all likely to witness no doubt some interesting growing pains, but it is going to happen because conditions demand it.

In the end, Bitcoin is not "coin" at all: it is scrip. It is not illegal at all, but it has no value, except and to the extent that someone else is voluntarily willing to accept it.

And sometimes, scrip is valuable, even collectible. For instance, for many years Walt Disney Resorts would sell you a "Disney Dollar," complete with Scrooge McDuck's signature and two Tinkerbells. And, the company will redeem them at any time for $1.00. Of course, many of them are kept as souvenirs. There are avid collectors of these, and, although the company apparently stopped issuing them last year, there's a very strong call for the program to resume. Likewise, in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts, BerkShares are issued, giving a 10% discount at local businesses while also being a collector's item. Merchants and banks will both sell them and, if you wish, buy them back. There are also diligent collectors of these notes.

The notion that "legal tender" currency must be "backed" by some physical asset such as gold or silver kept some New York bankers gainfully employed in underground catacombs for many years, moving heavy carts of gold bars from one room to another in what was actually a completely-pointless exercise. (I don't know if the gold is still down there, or if they've sold it to electronics manufacturers where it could actually do some good.) A number on your cell-phone, or a magnetic strip (or integrated circuit) on a plastic card in your wallet, is money as long as it can be freely exchanged for any other type of money, which it can be. It isn't a concern how much of this "money" is in circulation at any given instant: the concern is instantaneous supply. "Liquidity."

(But there's also the consideration that most people do not have unlimited amounts of the stuff: they must work for it, so it represents the abstract consequence of their work. The paradox of inflation is, "if everyone were rich, everyone would be poor.")

And that problem of liquidity and supply, of course, is precisely the downfall of present-day Bitcoin concept: the tokens are rare because they are difficult to compute, and they are not reusable. If their cryptographic properties could be moved to a type of mathematical token that can be "printed" by the billions, then that would be an enormous "win."

Money, on the other hand, is infinitely reusable and changes hands constantly. The $5.00 bill you used to pay for your latté goes into the next guy's wallet in a matter of minutes, as change from his $20.00 bill. By law, "this currency-unit, in whatever form, is legal tender for all debts, public and private." No one within United States territory may refuse to accept a Dollar as settlement of a debt, whether the representation of that Dollar is physical or abstract.

But a "Bitcoin ATM," in my view, is simply a fraud: a machine that masquerades as a dispenser of legal tender, which in fact only converts digital tokens into hard cash for the owner of the machine. The machine does not work in the opposite direction. The user of the machine has no legal recourse if the tokens are not subsequently accepted, and "in the eyes of the law" it is simply caveat emptor. But, that's not what the user will rightly assume to be the case.

"Fraud," in a civil sense, is "the intentional misrepresentation or concealment of an important fact upon which the victim is meant to rely, and in fact does rely, to the harm of the victim." Bitcoin itself is not illegal, as scrip is not illegal, but the implicit representation of that scrip as legal tender, by virtue of placing it in what appears in every way to be "an ATM" and which in fact is labeled as such, to me, is at least a civil fraud, if not swindling. (A "swindler" is "a person practicing quackery, fraud, or a similar confidence trick in order to obtain money, property, or advantage by pretense.")

I think as long as there is a legal, and traceable, tie-in between the literal and figurative forms (1) it is less confusing to people, and (2) it is something which can be accounted for.

I too share the concern of the volatility of a bitcoin if they can apparently vary so very much overnight. However, if bitcoins (and I don't know that they aren't or exactly how they are treated), are traced on the currency exchanges much like other currency dollars, then one would assume that they'd see variations, and this would cause hits to their confidence if the technology were to be attacked or proven to be suspect. Meanwhile if the opposite of that were true and instead you'd see things like business stories where some person/company planned to create a new large bitcoin computing site, capable of "blah-blah-blah", translating to an estimate influx of some number of bitcoins, then this would give that market some form of speculation for the future as well as a continued basis for trading and estimating what the value of the coins are more consistently and with less amazing variations.

Which brings it back to some of the original premises of this discussion which interest me, and sorry if this is far off the current, or original topic.

Hearing that a bitcoin can vary in worth so fast, makes it a risky thing I'd avoid.
Not knowing that I can transact bitcoins and get real money for them, makes it a risky thing I'd avoid.

Related story which does work:
I previously was with a very large employer who had a persistent stock purchase program. I could purchase using a pre-selected amount from my pay. Since that amount never correlated to exactly what the cost of a share was, it "seemed" awkward at first. As part of that, you would sign up for an online account where they would trade for you, or issue the certificates if you wished to trade with your own resources. In looking at my account, since maybe an official share was $58.45, or $76.31 at any given point in time, the system knew that I had $4,452 invested in the plan at the time, so it divided my total dollars by the current cost of the share and then told me I owned 76.167 total shares, or some other number which made mathematical sense with my invested dollars and the cost of a share. Well, I actually could just "sell all at market", i.e. sell my 76.167 shares at the current market price. And then what happened? You'd say "I'd get a check". Well I "could", but instead I opted always for Direct Deposit. Yes, give me access to my liquid assets ASAP! It's actually cheaper than sending me a FedEx manual check.

To me that all ties in with my original thoughts here. My money is all debit card, credit card, direct deposit, online payments, with the rare occasion that I use actual cash. Many of us joke, "What the bleep is that?!?" when someone hands us actual currency. :)

I'd be perfectly happy to consider bitcoins if I were to be able to set up a server, obtain coins via computing, then trade my results similar to how I used to trade my company stock. Also it would be worth it to me to compute coins and have them, hold them to let them potentially appreciate in value, to sell them when they were higher in value. I'm sure some people would be happy to buy low and sell high, just like they do with ABC Corp stock certificates.

It all boils down to confidence.

LOL! This drivel reminds me of a stuffy economics college professor, like Bernard Bernanke, who has studied the theory of printing money all his adult life. All theory and no real knowledge.

Everyone is moving to Bitcoin and these cryptos because they got screwed by the central banks in 2008. They are trying to get some value out their savings, like countries of Greece, Japan (which has a negative savings rate) and Venezuela. Where the economy has been destroyed, by design, by Central Banks. These people want to preserve what is left of their wealth.

The US Dollar only has value, because we give it value. It has no precious metal backing. Tomorrow we could be using US Dollars to light stoves to keep us warm because it will eventually have no purchasing power. I lived in South Korea a few years ago and the US Dollar was worth less then the Korean Won, I was loosing money every time I converted between US Dollars to Won. The public is so dumbed down about this that they just accept it and/or don't question it.

All of the oil on the open market is traded in US Doolars, because OPEC put the screws to the US during the energy crisis and the US said if all oil is traded in US Dollars, we'll protect you with our big military. This caused demand for the US Dollar and the printing presses kicked into overtime, and we were able to trade our US Dollars for real goods/services that came in from overseas.

Except other countries, like China and Russia, have finally figured it out and are moving to currencies that are either gold or oil backed. It may not happen today or tommorrow...however it will happen.

Eventually the US Dollar will be rejected and refused, both inside and outside the United States. Who knows, we maybe reduced to barter here in the US once the next Depression kicks in.

As for Bitcoin, I like the idea behind it. I like Ethereum (blockchain and smart contracts) too.

Do I think its in a bubble? Hell yes.

Am I suspicious of who created it? Hell yes, as Gov't across the world want to ban physical cash (Look at what has happened in India and in the United States, they want to do away with the $100.00, in the name of fighting terrorism) so they can have greater control and oversight of transactions. Bitcoin maybe conditioning needed to move to a cryptocash.

As we saw the Economist Magazine from 1988 has a picture of a phoenix rising from a fire made up of burning currency.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/com...orld_currency/