Deploy a fake Bitcoin wallet to save your own

Re: Bitcoin...

Mark .,

As I see it, the problem for Bitcoin is that it's currently driven by several competing interests. But it can't be all things to all men and succeed.

Some people want it as an easy way of making small payments online. For that it would be perfectly fine, without the current massive volatility that makes it basically useless for this. Also the transaction costs in and out of Bitcoin are no different than those of using the right (zero loaded for currency exchange) credit card. At least for those with cheap modern banking, the currency costs aren't that high for a quick bank transfer. I used to do it when I lived abroad, and it wasn't that bad. It was actually cheaper to move my cash from the UK to the Eurozone (including exchange rate) - than it was to transfer it between Belgian and German accounts.

Bitcoin probably works quite well as a micropayment method though, which I guess will never be worth it for the banks/card companies. However even this breaks down as soon as all the coins are mined. At this point, transactions are no longer being paid for with free money, but by the miners getting a small percentage of every transaction. That's also going to make Bitcoin compete far less well for any kind of payment processing.

Then you've got the "gold-bugs". The types who tell you that Bitcoin is an investment. Just hold onto those coins, and as the artificial constraints on supply kick in, you get rich. Hooray! Now I'm pretty sure I remember you posting this sort of comment a while ago. Although not recently. Sorry if that's a failure of my memory, I'm too lazy to read back through old posts to check. Anyway these guys are the block that stops making Bitcoin work for the others. As they cause volatility. And thus make Bitcoin unsuitable for normal transactions. The Winklevoss twins and their weird idea of the Bitcoin ETF...

Finally we've got the drug dealers and tax avoiders. They obviously cause problems with getting government acceptance. Also if you create a system to avoid government, then you lose the good things about government, like laws and police. They just want to process transactions, so should be the friends of the normal users. But like the scorpion and the frog, they need the other people to help them hide their transactions, but it's in the nature of the scorpion to sting the frog. And it's in the nature of the criminal to steal, and thus destroy the value of the Bitcoin system for other users, and then themselves.

The value of something is not a feature that can be set or controlled by the developers

They did though. They created Bitcoin to only allow a limited number to exist. Thus creating the conditions that they themselves then took advantage of, by getting the first cheaply mined bitcoin. That's what makes it a pyramid scheme. And in my view is the reason it'll eventually fail.

As an example, look at the recent $200 rise in price. Suddendly lots of coins have been bought. No more are being sold than before. That means that these coins are probably being held as investments. I say this, because no-one is paid in bitcoin. Therefore they need to sell some, to buy things like raw materials for the stuff they're selling. Obviously this is only an educated guess, as there are no proper figures collected to say what the actual bitcoin economy is doing. Another good thing that governments do that builds confidence. Every time the value goes up in a huge jump, it's because of huge flows of cash into the bitcoin economy, with no real change in the normal level of selling. That's from looking at the last 2-3 years records on Bitcoincharts. That makes it a bubble.

They "investors" are causing volatility, without actually growing the bitcoin economy. When these guys stop buying more, basically doubling-down on their existing holdings to maintain the value, then confidence will collapse. That will probably be the end of bitcoin. Of course, once they've buggered off, people could just use bitcoin for transactions. And slowly build back confidence. But the design problem is still there. So once the trust is painfully recovered, people will start hoarding them as an investment, and start the whole cycle again.