(1) The asset not the product is the thing being marketed (i.e. live alpacas, not fiber)
(2) investors have unrealistic expectations (alpaca fiber would replace wool, despite the lack of infrastructure; and besides the fact that people don’t really wear that much wool)
(3) information is controlled through industry sources (most of the information the researchers were able to dig up was put out by breeding associations)
You and parent poster make for a wise conversation. The closing sentence — telltale signs of a speculative bubble — can be read for BTC, one to one. Brilliant!
It's forever part of Bitcoins orgin story that it begin as hyperinflationary and has since slowed the minting of more BTC.
The irony is the mythos of bitcoin being "deflationary" is not historically accurate and the supply is inflating every 10 minutes.
What Bitcoiners conveniently omit from explanation in Satoshis protocol is the initial "dump" of the supply to the first few users who ran the software. This is a malicious design decision intended to control the supply early.
Any user who joins the network must than attempt to psychologically exploit new users by selling their asset previously generated for less effort/work/watts as the protocol increases in difficulty to any new user.
Yes, but many believe Satoshi to be dead or to have lost the keys. I'm not arguing that the wealth distribution is good, I'm just saying it's a little ridiculous to assume that the choice was malicious.
Satoshi could have used a linear growth curve. Instead he used a log curve, giving himself and the smallest user group possible (first users to run the software within the limited timeframe where the hyperinflation took place) control of the majority of the supply for the least amount of work possible.
All users entering the system late beyond users before them are needlessly exploited.
If you find it exploitative, you are free to create and use your own crypto instrument without these properties that you take offense to. All of the code is available for you to modify as you see fit, as it is open source. If you believe it has value, all you need to do is to convince others of the superior nature of your implementation, and surely they will adopt your solution for their crypto needs.
? It is deflationary because it is known what the total number will be, and coins will be permanently lost over time.
> Any user who joins the network
They do this out of free choice do they not? No one is coerced into acquiring bitcoin. There isn't even a coordinating body, like a company, that controls the issuance or exchange of tokens. I would encourage any person that invests in anything to understand what they are investing in before they commit their funds to it. Bitcoin is extremely unforgiving if you don't manage your security well.
None of this has anything to do with your incorrect usage of words though. You can't just invent new definitions of words because you don't like something, and you think it would be nice to assign that word to it. You don't like it. Fair enough. Don't invest in it.
Bitcoin is inflationary until the year 2140, and assuming no fork changes that sooner.
If you actually understand Satoshis algorithm and history you'll take notice at how the supply was intended to benefit the first few users to run the software during the brief phase of hyperinflation and production for minimal work, while later users are punished merely for running the same protocol and offering the same computational work equivalent to prior users.
If you consider how easy a linear curve could have been chosen by Satoshi instead of the reverse log curve, you'll understand the manipulative nature of how Bitcoin exploits new users.
The supply inflates every 10 minutes, this by definition is inflation.
You presume that the future was predictable in 2009. Satoshi had no way of knowing whether the Bitcoin experiment would truly work or not. How many times have we thought, "Bitcoin is surely dead" due to some Mt Gox / Silk Road / China ban scandal? It's crazy to call the people who stuck it out and believed in the coin "exploitative" when they lost 90% of their value time and time again and still did not sell.
Production costs of 50BTC per every 10 minutes has historically been a fractions of or a few pennies. Only for later users has the cost gradually increased.
The way you and many others approach Bitcoin as a tool to horde and sell to other rubes is indicative of the manipulative design where unsuspecting new users don't understand the history.
Historically? 50BTC every 10 minutes for pennies? Those prices haven't been seen since 2012 or earlier.
If you don't like Bitcoin's model, choose another altcoin to back, there's dozens of them and some of them even have inflationary models. No one is forcing anyone to buy into anything.
> The supply inflates every 10 minutes, this by definition is inflation.
Well, it's inflation of the money supply, but (while certain fringe groups confuse the issue) that's not what “inflation” alone normally refers to, which is instead price inflation, which is approximately inflation in the ratio of money supply to the utility-weighted size of the market.
Satoshi designed the supply to rapidly mint the majority of coins to the smallest group of users for the least amount of effort/capital/work input.
It's designed to manipulate any user who joins the system after you.
Satoshi could easily have chosen a linear curve to align with time, user growth, and increase in work input yet instead the manipulative log curve was chosen.
Old users are now incentived to attempt to psychologically exploit new people by selling the asset for far more than the cost of production or acquisition.
You bring this up in every crypto thread. Do you have an alternative suggestion as to how it should work that could actually be implemented now in a new crypto?
A linear distribution curve that matches work/watt input. This modestly levels the playing field, although it simply allows existing capital to match the input/output. Satoshi style curves are both capital dependent and skewed disproportionately to the first to arrive within the tiny timeframe.
Anti-sybil attacks would be immensely beneficial. Encouragement of honest economic activity. Scaling of bandwidth and fees.
The ideal solution is a PoW that is computationally useful and desirable, BOINC, folding@home. Ethereum almost does this, but PoW algos as they exist now are anti-scale by design, where increasing computational power does not improve the network at all.
The foreseeable longevity of PoW is ungodly waste, when a world wide distributed computing network has potential far far beyond brute force hash puzzles.
Isn't it fundamentally a bootstrapping problem? A state can reasonably presume to sell a new currency in exchange for older (or foreign) currency— this is similar to issuing a bond or whatever else to raise money. And there's a guarantee of value in the sense that the state will accept the currency later on as your taxes.
The Bitcoin network/ecosystem has nothing to offer in this sense— there's no plausible reason for it to be "raising" money by direct sales, and no one owes it taxes. So the initial tokens were distributed based on the fact that they were mined by early adopters before the difficulty got to be too great. There is indeed a basic unfairness in this, but it's not obvious to me how to resolve it for future projects of this kind.
For such an extensive academic course it's interesting the economic model of Satoshis mining algorithm isn't explained.
Satoshi used a production model that produced the most amount of coins for the lowest amount of work/capital input, to reward the smallest user group.
Satoshi could just as easily have used a linear growth model knowing more users and more hash power should match the production output. Instead, Satoshis algorithm exploits new users.
Old users than have incentive to manipulate new users and psychologically propagate the myth of rarity when in fact the abundance of the supply was taken early easily and users are attempting to sell for more capital than it takes to acquire or produce, often simply by hording these low effort counts coins.
Satoshi's mining/minting algorithm is manipulative by design.
Less computational energy and the least amount if users produced the most coins (for minimal external capital input).
Satoshi could have used a linear curve anticipating network growth matching minting and computational increase, but instead choose to exploit late adopters.
Early adopters will attempt to psychologically exploit new users by selling their asset for more than the cost of production and acquisition.
This has directly created the situation where utility is not in use but in exploitation of passing the hot potato to greater fools.
Why bother attempting to patch on layers on top of BTC when it's already centralized with ASIC farms?
Start fresh.
Early adopters of BTC are trying to con new users into buying coins produced for minimal capital/computational work. The flaw in BTC is inherent to the malicious minting algorithm designed to harm new users.
There's other cryptocurrencies who are far out pacing the BTC core team.
Ethereum (which definitely has its own fair share of issues) recently hit its all time high in daily transactions, which incidentally is more transactions than all other existing decentralized blockchains put together--a set containing Bitcoin.
I agree: we need a faster settlement layer independent of how much the currency itself is worth; but let’s say we have have that network? How do taxes work? Everytime you transfer or pay for anything? That’s not going to work.
monereo, zcash, and eventually ethereum
the concept seems to make sense but I'd be curious how to audit such an obfuscated system