Quote from: lucasjkr on May 29, 2013, 06:38:41 PM

Quote from: franky1 on May 29, 2013, 01:53:56 AM

Quote from: Jaseph on May 29, 2013, 12:58:39 AM

Maybe these have already been addressed, but here they are.

1) Early adopters may have stashes of millions of bitcoin. If widely adopted a few super rich could have a huge influence over the whole bitcoin economy. Imagine owning 5% of all USD in circulation(with no fed to inflate).
and once they sell their 5% of BTC the buyers of that 5% then have the control.. look at gold.. initially the US owned most of it in fort knox. now you can buy it at vending machines in dubai...

2) The supply is fixed at 21 million, but bitcoins themselves are not permanent. People die all the time without wills. People die with btc on a computer/flashdrive that no one knows about, they're gone. People don't make backups, their computer crashes, they're gone. You might think this is great, because now your btc are more valuable. But for a currency, it's not such a good thing, to have the supply eroding over time. Theoreticly, the amount of btc could eventually go to zero.
think about all the gold in peoples teeth fillings and in motherboards, and jewellry which are now in coffins/landfill underground, lost forever. eventually one day in many decades someone may have a fast enough computer to unhash a private key from its public key, and redeem the lost coins.. anythings possible.. calm down getting to zero is something your grand kids wont even have to worry about

3) Speed of transactions. If btc becomes very widely adopted, can it handle billions of transactions a day without speed becoming an issue?
this is probably the first valid worry that would appear in your lifetime. but there are multiple solutions to it. such as using paperwallets as bearer bond certificates. handing them across to trusted parties away from the network. also off the chain exchanges such as mtgox use to do, swapping mtgox codes between users instead of transactions on the blockchain. plus many other solutions to grow in the future

Don't get me wrong. I love bitcoin and the whole concept behind it. These are just questions of someone looking to learn more.

Two points:

"lost" coins are indeed an issue, because it's impossible to have decent price discovery without knowing how many coins are actually in circulation, or available to be circulated.

We know how many coins have been mined and we know the total value of those coins, but we don't know the status of them. Therefore, we can only guess what the market cap of issued Bitcoins are. Quick: what is the total value of all Bitcoins available to be spent? We simply have no way of knowing.

If someone bought up 90% of the outstanding Bitcoins and destroyed their private key, the theory would be that the remaining BTC's would then be worth 10 times as much. But there is no way to demonstrably prove that those coins were actually destroyed, and really, no way to even suspect that they were unless someone announced it.

Second - off blockchain transactions. Seems like a complete non-starter. If someone's going to try to exchange their paper wallet for my goods or services, the FIRST thing I'm going to do is import that wallet into my own wallet. It'd be silly to simply accept the paper "bill", verify that the public key its displaying has the balance that was described and have that signal the end of the transaction - afterall, the person who traded the paper wallet could redeem its value long after we parted ways, and I might be none the wiser until i try to exchange the wallet with someone else who then alerts me that there are no coins remaining in it.

So bitcoins price structure is trading beavertails. Its price is purley speculative. And buyer will likely get scammed out of their money somehow.

Unless 1 satoshi has a stable value, this whole thing is crazy, based on your response above. There is absolutely no rational for making it money. Similar to how gold.... I am not sure i even understand money at all anymore. Does anyone? Its all guesswork based on crackhead math.