Quote from: CoinCube on June 03, 2017, 04:08:55 AM

Quote from: dinofelis on June 02, 2017, 03:11:31 PM

What you say doesn't contradict what I'm saying. You may claim that there is a hard core of "true believers" which ARE indeed a community. Most probably, yes, there is probably a hard core community of true believers. However, the questions are:
1) how much of the ecosystem do they make up at any given moment in time
2) what influence can they have on the ecosystem ?

The way bitcoin is designed to be, turns around antagonism: we all want to possess coins, and if you possess a coin, I don't and vice versa, which makes us de facto antagonists ; there is competition in proof of work mining and the gains that go with it ; and deep down, it turns around speculation (which is a zero sum game). There's nothing in bitcoin that is designed to be cooperative, apart from having to stick to the consensus protocol for reasons of greater loss if you don't.

1) How large is the community of "true believers"?

This is unknown but I suspect the "true believers" control a huge percentage of the bitcoins and this is a good thing.

You mean guys like MPex and Roger Ver and the Winklevoss twins ? No, they are in the game to get insanely rich on the back of the whole crowd of greater fool adopters. Of course, given their whale status, they will do everything they can to promote bitcoin adoption (not merchant adoption, but speculative adoption), until they cash out of course.

The idealists of the first hour have been pushed out of the eco system by the design flaws of bitcoin that was made to "get rich quickly" rather than to become a neutral freedom currency (by capping, not the value, but the number of coins), and that separated users from industrial block chain providers (miners) with the PoW consensus mechanism. Once you have an industrial "provider/customer" system (provider of industrial block chain vs user of transactions), in a highly speculative get-rich-quickly scheme, the system is such that there's too much money to be made to leave room for idealists, and you get a crabs bucket of sleazy players. That's what bitcoin became, and it is baked into its initial design.

You have early adopters, indeed, getting rich quickly on the back of greater fools: these may behave as if they are "true believers" but are of course motivated by the growth of their wealth ; you have greater fools, hoping to be in still early enough in the game to imitate the early adopters, and become "somewhat rich quickly" too ; they are the main pumpers of the speculative market price. All of these only want one thing: "More fresh flesh", but they call it "adoption", so that there's still enough influx of greater fools. There's not much "idealism" behind that. Hell, they are screaming for regulation and legal adoption, the opposite of what bitcoin was supposed to be, to be able to attract the funds of family fathers as greater fools to pump up the price and hence their wealth, and to keep out enough "freedom" by law so that these family fathers are not scared away from any anarchist thoughts.

Then you have the business around bitcoin: exchanges and industrial miners, that live off the "value leaks" in the system: they are the industrials living off the speculative hopes of family fathers making early adopters rich in the process: the more the gamblers play on the system they provide, the more they can leak off value from the players. There's not much idealism in that either.

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Bitcoin came on the scene as the obscure technical pet project of idealists, anarchist, open source advocates and libertarians who wanted to improve the world and reform the status quo.

Yup, and because of fundamental design errors, it became a shark's greater-fool game with an industry that lives off the players.

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These "true believers" will over time take on an altruistic role to stabilize and maintain the system. If you read my link on group selection above they are the functional equivalent of the fluorescens that maintain the polymer.

These "whales" will cash out at a certain point, dumping on all the greater fools "and thanks for all the fish", to go to more lucrative horizons when bitcoin's greater-fool adoption potential reaches a ceiling ; or use their coins to win political power by bribing deciders in anonymous ways.

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2) What influence will these true believers have on the ecosystem?

They will have an ever growing influence because true believers form a large percentage now and they stick around while those who erroneously think this is a zero-sum game are unlikely to enter or will come and go.

It is *obviously* a zero sum game ; well, it is a negative-sum game, because there's a net value flowing out to miners and exchanges. There is (almost) no value created by the system (the only value that is created is the business opportunities on dark markets and other means of payment that cannot be easily done in fiat, but that's on the few percent level of the market cap at best), so obviously, all value that flows out of bitcoin, has to be put in there by other users.

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Yes there is competition and speculation. These fuel interests and motivate people to enter and explore the ecosystem but they are ultimately secondary.

Nope. Bitcoin's market cap is ENTIRELY DOMINATED by speculation. Its "usage" as a currency is a negligible part of its market cap. If tomorrow, all merchants decide to stop accepting bitcoin, that wouldn't influence the market cap in the slightest bit, because bitcoin's value is essentially determined by gamblers on exchanges, not by the demand for coins because you want to buy something.

And it is no surprise, because it was designed that way, and advertised that way: "there will only be 21 million coins, so buy your coins now, and be rich in 15 years". That's the perfect invitation for a greater-fool game, and it is working as hell. Once big financial players will find their way, it will go even much much higher ; and in the end, the last layer of greater fools will have paid for everything.