Quote from: Ichthyo on June 19, 2013, 09:34:06 AM

Can you please be more explicit?

What are those miraculous "realities" and "rules of economics" you are alluding all the time?

WHY ARE YOU ALLUDING TO THINGS instead of just stating what you think are the facts.

Quote from: weisoq on June 19, 2013, 09:48:06 AM

I posted on that above, trying to engage in a substantive discussion, but I'll post it again if you'd like to explain where I'm wrong.

Do you really think a unfortunate statement becomes better by repeating it literally? ;-)

Quote from: weisoq on June 19, 2013, 09:48:06 AM

Otherwise do you have any actual opinion or basis for your faith beyond prayer and evangelism, or are you instead just going to keep repeating the same defensive nonsense such as the requirement to outine any view 'in a sentence'?

OK, so lets start with the basics of human communication.
If you foist "prayer", "evangelism", "nonsense" on your interlocutor this counts as insults and thus counts against the credibility of your argument. That means: you would not need to insult other people if you were able to win by plain flat argumentation.

That being said...

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You have two choices.

The first choice is to maintain the myths of Bitcoin for as long as possible

so again: what are the "myths of Bitcoin" dude??
Is it really so hard to "get" the fact that you to state what you mean in order to be understood by other people?

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continue wasting good intellectual and capital investment in zero-sum endeavours where one group of techies screws over another

this again is not argumentation, but defaming of other people.
You might be right, but you would have to show this is actually the case. You should make clear what you mean with "wasting". You should make clear what you mean with "screwing". And then the difficult part is to show that the whole endeavour is indeed zero-sum. This is indeed such a difficult challenge that it is just plain unjustified to state such an accusation as being "obvious"

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The second choice is to recognise that something has to change with Bitcoin because either:

1) Bitcoins are scarce in which case at some point those who do not already have any will rationally find something else to use instead of Bitcoin

2) Bitcoins are not scarce because they may be replicated (for all intents and purposes with just a name change), in which case what is the value of a replicable and replicated digital asset offering no advantage over others?

oh my god.
Don't you notice how broken this argument is?

First of, what makes you think there are just the two alternative scenarios you point out? Have you considered the possibility of an equilibrium state in-between (hint: in most free market-like constellations, a more or less fluctuating equilibrium is even the most likely state, while the clear "black" or "white" situation never happens).

Besides of that, the two "exclusive" alternatives you point out are both distorted and misconstrued:

1) is in contradiction to the very notion of supply and demand. If something is scarce, this means the demand surpasses the supply. In a market-like constellation, this causes the price to go up, until there is an equilibrium. This mechanism limits the possible scarcity, but it does not automatically destroy the usefulness of the scarce good.

2) is a merely theoretical construction and misleading, since you can't simply introduce a payment system in the blink of an eye. Have you ever considered what "network effect" means? Thus again, this presumably exclusive alternative can't even exist, but rather we get again the push towards an equilibrium (after a certain number of distinct payment networks have been created, the market for payment networks is saturated)

And, after this rather brilliant piece of argumentation, you draw your conclusions:

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Falling on either side of 1 or 2 without the existence of advantages or damn good reasons to prefer Bitcoin over alternatives therefore necessitates changes or precludes its demise beyond a blinkered niche. As to what changes are required, I will leave that to application of rationality and economics.

And the last sentence is the annoying part and the reason which derailed this whole discussion right from start: you have nothing to offer, but you hide that behind the allusion of everything being "self-evident".

It is in no way clear what "needs" to be changed, since you weren't able to come up with a clear account of what presumably is "broken" with Bitcoin. Worse, you didn't even try to come up with such.

And last but not least, you should note that "economics" is not some kind of a fixed substance; rather there are several highly controversial schools of economics, especially when it comes to macro economics. If getting monetary systems "right" would be just a matter of common sense, then the global finance wouldn't be in such a desperate situation.

While all of this discussion is certainly funny and entertaining, actually we should indeed discuss and scrutinise the very things you're avoiding with all your statements: we should actually pose the question: what properties do we want to require from a payment system?