Overselling non-news into massive victories is basically what the bitcoin community does. I could list 25 things that were going to bring Bitcoin mainstream over the past 2-3 years without even trying that have all failed to pan out.
Since failures fade away silently most of the time they are left wondering why these 'victories' aren't leading to increased prices and repeating the phrase "how can we have all this good news and no increase in price?".
Bitcoin has also died over 70 times- http://bitcoinobituaries.com so maybe it's not a bitcoin community problem but just journalists creating linkbait.
Have you ever read through that list? Most of them don't say it has died they say it is dying. Given the amount of investment, the number of new services, and the publicity it has received over the past 2 years the complete lack of interest from the general public says it probably is.
Will it disappear anytime soon? Not a chance.
Is it past its peak? Did it miss its chance at mainstream success? Quite possibly.
> Is it past its peak? Did it miss its chance at mainstream success? Quite possibly.
Quite possibly but it's too soon to tell. The fact is that price isn't always the best proxy for success. More people using it, more companies getting involved etc, can be more important.
When we look at price historically we can find strange things like the price being a fraction of a dollar (some 70 cents or so) in April in 2011. Only a few months later, in June 2011, the price was $30. And then it collapsed that very same year and the price dropped to $2, a few times more than it was earlier, but far from the peak.
It'd have been pretty myopic to then conclude that bitcoin was past its peak, even though in the short term it was, having lost more than 90% of its value at peak. It'd also have been wrong to say it missed its chance at mainstream success.
Today the price is an order of magnitude larger, and users, usage and involvement with mainstream (large) companies has grown even more.
So again, it's quite possible, but I think too soon to tell.
As for the lack of interest from the general public... I think bitcoin at its core is a utility, like you could say the internet is. The internet is extremely uninteresting to people, very few get it, nobody is excited about it. But the web is huge, as is emailing and skype and netflix. That's completely different from the Internet though, the boring platform/utility/infrastructure that supports it. I can't blame someone not being interested in bitcoin. But internet of things having digital wallets and doing payments, contracts, deeds etc on the bitcoin ledger, where all the consumer sees is that it 'just works', that's interesting. It's up to companies then to build ontop of bitcoin, and there is tons of interest from companies, both startups and traditional (tech) companies. Which means it's not very surprising to see companies and VCs get excited, but the general public not, in the same way that few got excited about the Internet, but Internet entrepreneurs did, who built companies like Amazon or Skype that people did get excited about. The fact that bitcoin couldn't start out like that and had to grow based on a small amount of fanatics looking to avoid the dollar/euro/etc and live on a new currency is probably a great source of distraction from the larger point of bitcoin as a platform, as it reduces bitcoin to being a currency used to shop online and not many feel like doing that, making it look as there is no interest from the general public and nobody will ever use it etc.
What I see in the bitcoin space is the participants constantly trying to find a reason for its use.
Payments - It isn't actually a better experience for customers so it is failing against the incumbents. The only play it is better is DNMs.
Store of Value - It is extremely risky so the only people pushing this are ones that are already bought in and figure hoarding is the only thing that will drive the prices back up
Sharing money between friends - Venmo and friends far and away destroy bitcoin in this use case.
Remittance - Has potential but all the companies so far are basically saving money by skirting money transfer laws and using other peoples services. That isn't sustainable. The expensive part of remittances has never been the movement of value. They are also all extremely secretive about their numbers which makes me suspicious since their reasons given are extremely week.
Micropayments - Bitcoin sucks for micropayments so every solution for this is basically an off chain system. Soon enough they will discover that all the other micropayments services shut down because the demand for micropayments is non-existent
Data Storage - We're seeing this one more and more. The problem is all the things people are trying to do still require third party validation and registration(shareholders and landholders need to be identifiable and someone needs to verify that information). I don't see this panning out in any big way.
Communications protocols - This is another big one. With the 21 announcement everyone and their dog is talking about how the blockchain will allow devices to communicate without needing to agree on a protocol. But they are ignoring the fact that in that use case the blockchain is a medium not a protocol so there would still need to be an agreed protocol on top and if you're going to do that might as well just centralize it or use private APIs.
Did I miss any?
Bitcoin people also love to compare it to the early internet but the existence of the internet itself makes that comparison weak since the internet has massively sped up the distribution of information and technologies. They then say that its different because it involves money but look at the early Paypal growth. It wasn't like getting people to use their credit cards online was easy in 2000.
im not sure that it will ever result in huge interest from the general public, I also dont think it needs to. Bitcoin/Blockchain has multiple potential uses for business, it is business adoption that will succeed and general public use will be indirect. In the same way that people dont care/realise/understand that the internet protocol allows them to shop online, bank online, watch mvoies etc, bitcoin will be able to underpin financial and contractual exchanges online. End users will not know how it ocurs just that the system works, the businesses behind it will be the ones interacting with the bitcoin.
The thing is there is almost no use case there where using the blockchain adds any improvement over the existing solutions and it comes with a large cost. Most companies/banks don't care/are comfortable with centralization so decentralization for the sake of it isn't a great sell.
There is a lot of room for improvement in traditional banking but bitcoin doesn't really solve those problems.
I think the only real advantage Bitcoin has is as a proxy currency for illegal online financial transactions - ones where you'd like to obtain some measure of anonymity. Of particular note, the darknet markets such as Silk Road and its ilk. Of course it requires the other side of Bitcoin, the hype and speculation, so users can easily convert to and from real money.
Tell that to Argentinians. Inflation led their currency to bankruptcy 3 times in 100 years. When government moves cash out of constituents pockets directly into those of politicians, bitcoin is a practical alternative. Which third world currency would YOU rather hold over bitcoin?
It seems to be increasing. Given that using BTC isn't useful unless someone else uses BTC (like email), the growth is impressive to me. I remember when the number of people I knew that had email addresses was very limited. It took about 10 years between me and my mother getting one.
There are many ways number of transactions can increase without adoption increasing. Changing use cases can increase the number of transactions per user.
Chain transactions can't be completely discounted but as of yet no one has come up with their actual purpose and they really don't make sense other that inflating the transaction count. Once you subtract the above 10k to popular addresses that leaves you with about 20-25k actual transactions per day.
It's very much akin to the 'Linux on the desktop' hype that was in such fervour about a decade ago.
Technology fundamentalism does no-one any favours, especially when there is nothing hugely wrong with the dominant players (Windows desktops, real money, and so on) that would lead to a natural upheaval. Compare the rise of Google, for example, which had a significantly better search engine than the incumbents.
Ugh, why the jab at bitcoin? Replace 'bitcoin community' with any community and you've got a true statement. The amount of garbage hype jobs I see in tech outside of bitcoin is huge, it's just a facet of a market in which companies want to act bigger than they are for various reasons, put out PR pieces, and forums, newspapers and tech websites repeat them largely, usually in particular in the title because they have as much to gain from clickbait hype as the company itself, in a world of social where you're hoping people click your link on facebook.
But it makes you wonder why anti-bitcoiners create discussion boards when they have no stake in bitcoin's failure, like the guy sanswork in whose comment tree we're posting, who is known to be an active member of 'buttcoin', a board which mostly serves to ridicule the bitcoin community, something in which he has participated in on numerous occasions for no financial gain.
It seems quite evident then that you don't need a financial stake to bring out the worst in either community.
(Unless of course they massively short bitcoin and believe their discussions on buttcoin make the price drop in any substantial way, but neither is very likely.)
I've been interested in bitcoin for years. It's an interesting community which involves math, cs and finance that leads to interesting conversations(both bit and butt). That is why I'm there.
I don't see a future for it but it doesn't mean it can't be entertaining in the short term.
Also you clearly know my history so you must know that very little of what I do involves ridicule. I'll be snarky for some truly out there comments, and I have to deal with a lot of undeserved hate, name calling, etc which can lead to less than great replies by myself but generally my conversations are balanced and friendly.
> But it makes you wonder why anti-bitcoiners create discussion boards when they have no stake in bitcoin's failure
It's actually pretty simple to explain. Buttcoin was the invention of the Something Awful community, which exists primarily to mock stuff on the Internet for comedy purposes. The fact of the matter is that the Bitcoin community is stuffed to the gills with all sorts of absurd and ill-informed beliefs which make it a rich source for mockery (and thus comedy). Given that this behavior is so common online, it's curious that the Bitcoin community doesn't seem to get why this is happening.
> Overselling non-news into massive victories is basically what the bitcoin community does.
Be that as it may, the title, "Nasdaq bets on bitcoin's blockchain as the future of finance," was written by the Guardian, not the Bitcoin community. So I'm not sure what one has to do with the other.
> why these 'victories' aren't leading to increased prices
Prices are incredibly increased, from the $0.0001 USD/BTC they used to be on the open markets.
Your statement shows that you completely misunderstand how markets work. Anything that can be predicted about the future, is already "priced in" -- (to the degree that it can be predicted by the best possible predictor and discounting risk. Also discounting any entity's willingness to burn substantial money to temporarily manipulate the market.)
In other words, things about the future that were easily predictable long ago would have changed the price long ago, not waiting until they happen.
And BTC's price did change long ago, incredibly!! More than 1000x change. And if it took you much longer than mid-2011 to predict all these things, then you're just incredibly too slow, and that's why you missed that big price increase.
actually that is incorrect, that was suggested in the inital fall out of mt gox collapse, however further research indicates that willy was not responsible for the rise or at leats not for all of the rise. There is a good review of the transactions associated with the willy bot and a decent analysis of wat they think it was doing.
>Willy bought a very large amount of bitcoin on MtGox during the period of September 27 – November 30 during 2013 (and later, though the leaked logs end on this date), a total of over 250,000 BTC. There is a very high probability that this had a large effect on the price of bitcoin, opening up the possibility that this may have been a plan to manipulate the market rather than (or in addition to) fraudulently acquiring bitcoins.
and
>There are even some suspicious incidents where Willy becomes absent and soon afterwards the market "corrects" itself to a lower price level.
I think with this low interest money--some wealthy individuals are more than happy to invest in bitcoin? Plus, I have a picture in my mind of some country, with a all powerful Dictator, demanding free electricity to power his Bitcoin farms? Just because it seems fun to specualte! I won't name the country because my ip is naked, and I am paranoid.
Efficient sophisticated markets -- which the BTC markets are quite close to being now with as they have derivatives, wide accessibility, years of maturity -- do not simply reflect present demand, but instead the current best prediction of cumulative total future value.
Adoption demand has overall followed a rather clear and steady trend, so it's a bit hard to say that there's anything very unpredictable going on here.
You take random posts on /r/bitcoin as serious predictions? Looks like I've found another problem.
RE sophisticated market - Yes, BTC is now far closer to a sophisticated market, which is mostly reflecting the consensus prediction of cumulative future value, instead of a totally unsophisticated market that fluctuates around purely based on present demand of people directly using the asset for non-investment purposes.
Well at least you're not trying to argue bitcoin is a sophisticated market anymore.
Where do you get your serious predictions about bitcoins future? /r/bitcoin|/r/bitcoinmarkets|bitcointalk cover the vast majority of users actually involved in bitcoin regularly.
>Adoption demand has overall followed a rather clear and steady trend
Given that price has been dropping for 18 months are you saying that the clear and obvious trend is towards failure? Since the future is priced in?
Since failures fade away silently most of the time they are left wondering why these 'victories' aren't leading to increased prices and repeating the phrase "how can we have all this good news and no increase in price?".