So it's better to be screwed by market forces? Right now bitcoin is riding high, but I remember a few years ago it suddenly lost half its value overnight. People who want to preserve their wealth buy gold.
But precious metal has no real value either. I wish someone could explain to me why gold holds its purely notional value so firmly when it's actually no more useful than paper.
I don't like the idea of any purely electronic currency whether it's bitcoin or smartcards. Electronic currency can't be physically removed from the bank if the bank is going bust. And with most electronic currencies, the government can track your purchases (though I gather that that they can't with bitcoin). Worse still, they can cut you off. Remember the Handmaid's Tale? With no physical money, women who tried to flee from the new slavery suddenly found that their credit cards didn't work any more.

Banks can't "go bust." The government will simply "borrow from itself" as it always does, and pay you back. "Money" is actually a purely abstract concept, not linked to pretty pieces of paper – or, to gold.

There is not nearly enough gold in this world – that we can profitably get to, anyway – to "back" (sic) the number of currency-units that are in circulation at any time. Your ability to buy morning coffee does not depend on the activities of a miner, and the government isn't going to hand you 1/32 of an ounce of gold in exchange for the Apple Pay app on your iPhone.

To me, BitCoin is nothing more than a confidence game: an elaborate swindle with a novel form of scrip-unit. Because you might have spent a long time running a very expensive computing device – which you paid for, please note, in Dollars – to produce it, you suppose that it is "rare" and therefore "valuable." Likewise, if you paid money for it in "an ATM," and because its name includes the word, "Coin," you suppose that it is money. The scam can go on for quite a long time as long as the hands of the proper public officials are properly greased – with dollars – but eventually it will implode, as each and every swindle does. A Fool and his Money ...™

(No Fool ever thinks that it can happen to him.)

Bitcoin is quickly growing toward an energy usage limit.

Quote from https://www.wired.com/story/bitcoin-...keeps-growing/:

The total energy use of this web of hardware is huge—an estimated 31 terawatt-hours per year. More than 150 individual countries in the world consume less energy annually. And that power-hungry network is currently increasing its energy use every day by about 450 gigawatt-hours, roughly the same amount of electricity the entire country of Haiti uses in a year.
...
In just a few months from now, at bitcoin’s current growth rate, the electricity demanded by the cryptocurrency network will start to outstrip what’s available, ... By July 2019, the bitcoin network will require more electricity than the entire United States currently uses. By February 2020, it will use as much electricity as the entire world does today.

This is an unsustainable trajectory. It simply can’t continue.

People had trouble withdrawing physical cash during the Greek financial crisis as well, if I recall correctly.

Are you unaware of the fact that banks are not the government?

And government-backed fiat currencies can effectively "go bust" also. Look at post WW-I Germany, or today's Venezuela. You'd still have your money, but you wouldn't be able to buy much with it. The German government was able to pay back all its wartime debts to the pfennig -- using currency that was virtually worthless.

LOL Again!

The Gov't doesn't create money, nor does it borrow from itself. All of this is done by a privately, owned Central Bank, which then loans it to the US Gov't, at interest.

The bankers know this, so that is why the wanted the US off of the gold standard in 1971. That way the could fire up the printing press and flood the world with US Dollars. It benefits those in power, like the critters in Congress and US Foreign Aid. Other countries, like those running Mozambique, know this too.

Banks go "bust" when people lose confidence in them, like 2008 and like the Great Depression. Why do you think Grandpa stuffed his mattress with US Dollars Vs putting them into a Bank. The FDIC encourages recklessness because the banks know they will get bailed out by the US Gov't. However there may not be a next time.

[QUOTE=JockVSJock;5790909]
The Gov't doesn't create money, nor does it borrow from itself. All of this is done by a privately, owned Central Bank, which then loans it to the US Gov't, at interest.
[quote]

Tantamount to the exact same thing, of course. The "central bank" never refuses more "loans" from its only "customer." However ... the system works.

The Glass-Steagall Act kept "banks," "finance," and "insurance" separate, thus creating a "three-legged stool" that can't fall over. The Dodd-Frank laws repealed this, creating a financially-unstable institution that knows it can simply stuff its losses into its "Banking" arm and receive a full government bail-out on those losses, while simultaneously booking great profits in its other octopus-arms ... which is precisely what these institutions did last time, and will continue to do until Dodd-Frank is repealed and Glass-Steagall is reinstated ... which could be a very long time from now. But the underlying financial system will never starve for liquidity: there won't be another "run on banks."

The biggest future impact that I see is America's tremendous imbalance in world trade: "the USA stopped producing." (And, insofar as possible, it stopped employing its own people.) The financial world is by-definition international, and countries such as China are less-and-less willing to send out ships loaded with goods and to receive ships loaded with ballast. "The USA" will more-and-more become "the only place in the world where a Dollar's worth One Dollar," and yet, due to the momentarily-mothballed capability that it still possesses(!), in the end that will be enough.

The momentum for "<<my_country First!" – still-nascent in the USA but also present in England's decision to withdraw from the EU – is actually a brilliant expression of an international-trade policy, once the ball finally gets rolling. (Trading partners will be pulling against each other in each negotiation, just as they should be. Negotiations will be uglier, but the treaties that come out of them will be much, much better.) Until then, the USA in-particular will continue to suffer ... at its own hands, just like the Prodigal Son.

For Central Banks only, remember the name of the game is bailout.

Bitcoin, WOMAN, SYSTEMD are those things I claim I don't understand.

Bitcoin ss like some fishing reel for the usual idiot you find around the corner. Make it as tempting so they spend their cash. The Business term return on invest could be very funny indeed.

The energy wasted for crypto currency is not recoverable. The price hike on hardware shows also how the usual human being behaves and thinks.

So explain me why guys are such hostile against unemployed people?
Why do we feed the government and finance industry?
Why do we work until we die?

All guys live in a bubble with their fancy APPLE hardware, handbags which are claimed to be expensive and such. When guys would realise that and stop, using their stuff longer and work less we would have more spare time, less pollution and less modern slavery.

I also do not get the concept of religion. But discussing that is like asking for some jail time in my area.

Is humanity stupid was a famous question. And the answer is definitely yes.

Just "stay far away from Bitcoin right now," and likewise other so-called "cyber-currencies," because: "the scam is afoot."

Whoever's behind this thing has started installing "ATMs" with which to cash-out their position, and they're suddenly putting most-improbable stories into national and international news feeds. (Such as: that countries are going to use them to buy and sell oil, when every fool knows that they can, and would, simply use their own legal-tender currency if they chose. And as China, in fact, is in the final preparations to do.)

Likewise, various exchanges are making talk of "trading" these phantom numbers. All of which is intended to bolster the notion that they have some kind of intrinsic, "legal tender" value. They know that there is money to be made, at least for a short while.

It will play out much as "dot-bomb" did, only, in the end, much worse. You can't prevent it, but you certainly can avoid it.

As a followup to that:

In all of these, Bitcoin has failed. The failures weren't inevitable; there are solutions to these problems in the acdemic literature. But Bitcoin was deployed by enthusiasts who in essence let experimental code escape from a lab to the world, without thinking about the engineering issues—and now they're stuck with it. Perhaps another, better cryptocurrency can displace it, but it's always much harder to displace something that exists than to fill a vacuum.
https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blo...017-12-30.html

Unfortunately, the fundamental concept of "crypto-currencies" is flawed, and it defeats the usefulness of all of them.

The "perps" of this scam have deep pockets and the ability to – for example – put "Bitcoin ATMs" in convenience stores or to run "stories" in national and international news-outlets promoting the idea that these scrim tokens are already "a foregone conclusion."

Con-artists know that people who fear that they have everything to lose, are the ones most likely to lose everything.

The "Big Four" made their first fortune, not from transcontinental US railroads, but from hardware stores, where they sold supplies to gullible miners who wanted to get rich quick.

sundial could you explain why you think the very concept of crypto-currency is flawed? There is a juggling act between "The Wild West" and Regulation but where is the fundamental flaw?

I realize that some people and countries try to print forged currency. It usually gets detected at some point.

What I don't get is that people are OK with the fact that one can "print" bitcoins and no one cares. Further that the entire security of it depends on flawed programming.

I understand that most stocks have no or little value but many offer dividends to compensate for the blue sky.

You'd have to be a complete fool to invest in bitcoins would be my opinion but everyone is welcome to spend their time at any investment they like. Lotto, park fountain ....