I still question the early bag-holders of Bitcoin. Where are they and what do they do now? I think Litecoin came at a time when more people had an awareness of cryptocurrency, it's more democratized during the initial phases because of Scrypt and GPU's being the dominant mining tool at the time. ASICs shifted that balance again but I still have my doubts about who owns the majority of Bitcoin.
I would bet a lot of folks have been selling it over time. My wallet once held ~10 BTC for a few transactions back in the early days. I ended up with 5 btc left over that I rode the bull market with, selling half the position post bull run each time.
I kick myself for loosing the BTC my friend and I mined back in '09 on CPU time when it truly was worthless. But I was a dumb college student at the time and was simply playing around with it for a few days. I wonder how many BTC were permanently lost in this period.
Oh man, I'm right there with you. I had the Bitcoin wallet app on my LG G3 years ago... I found a backup USB stick with the wallet backed up to it. Tried to restore the wallet, realize I've forgotten the password. It didn't have much on it, maybe 23 mBTC or so, but that's about $700 nowadays.
If you mined it once you get a hash. When you say you lost those coins you lost the hash to the account? When you mined in 2009 was the hash smaller than today? Is brute forcing possible?
The underlying asset is utterly worthless, for all the reasons posited here in the article and more — that people are willing to pay you for it doesn’t change that.
I'm not sure we have any definition here :-) But claim that anything is economically wothless unless there are people willing to participate in exchanging it is in fact supported (not denied as you seem to imply) by any example of speculative bubble, including of course Tulipmania.
People are using bitcoins price to justify its value. Price is not value, certainly not on a short timescale. Consider that in the short term a market is a popularity content but in the long term, it weighs actual value. This is another way of saying that the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
If you actually attempt to assess fundamental value of Bitcoin based on anything comparable it’s value approaches zero. It’s pretty much worthless at anything it’s ever been positioned to achieve except crime and speculation.
No, Bitcoin provides no value because it's bad at everything it tries to be. It's a bad store of value (-86% swings 3x in the last few years), it's a bad currency (7tx/sec) and it's bad for the environment (as much power consumption as Chile).
The internet provides utility. Bitcoin provides speculation and crime.
"Magic beans" is something you can say about majority of payment tokens humanity has been using. However, once enough people agree they are good for exchange they become good for exchange.
