Chris Barry
Aug 28, 2017 · 2 min read

“Surely the absolute opposite is true — _everyone_ can see all your transactions, accounts and so on, as scammers trying to use bitcoin to get payment for scams are discovering. It’s fairly easy to look at the transactions for an account and try to work out who it belongs to — especially as you have to use exchanges to turn it into actual money you can (realistically) spend.”

True for bitcoin — not true for other cryptos.

“These currencies are the ultimate fiat currency — except without any sort of implicit backing (in the case of the US dollar, in effect the backing of the ability to tax the work of 300 million odd reasonably productive people).”

The value of a fiat currency vs a cryptocurrency is simply different. The fiat system has pros and cons. The crypto system has pros and cons. Whether the value of cryptos is something that grows over time or not is yet to be seen.

“Since there’s an awful lot of trading, and hardly any actual spending in these currencies, plus at the moment enormous centralisation with some early miners having huge stocks of “wealth”, it would take very little for the whole thing to collapse.”

I agree with this. However because individual cryptocurrencies might go to zero does not mean the concept or system is flawed. The internet bubble is a good analogy. The bubble happened on speculation that couldn’t be realised at the time. 20 years later, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon are the world’s top four largest public companies by market cap (Facebook is also in the top ten). Ten years ago only Microsoft was in the top ten. The value of the internet is now being realised.

I think the ideas presented by James Altucher are reasonable and consistent. Time will tell and speculation is speculation.

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    Chris Barry

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