I'm John Nagle, the person behind
Downside. Over the last decade, we predicted, well in advance, the dot-com crash (company by company), the oil spike, and the mortgage crisis.
Make a list of all your major predictions that
didn't materialze in over the last decade, and a list of the ones that did materialize. Weigh them by how much money you personally put behind each prediction. Then tell us the ratio.
If the ratio of correct/incorrect predictions isn't higher than 0.5 you have no credibility IMO.
That just screams "bubble" to anyone who's seen one.
Logical fallacy:
Ponzi schemes exhibit exponential growth
Bitcoin exhibits exponential growth
Therefore Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme.
This is a zero-sum game.
No it's not. My bitcoins don't just have speculative value. They have value to me because they give me a low friction, low cost way to send money to any other bitcoin user in the world, without filling out paperwork or asking anyone for permission. That's a powerful tool.
"Digicash" and "Beenz", the two previous rounds of this idea, also tanked.
This statement shows that you are clueless about bitcoin and haven't properly researched the technology you are advising your investors not to invest in.
Third, the organizations in Bitcoin's ecology are very flaky. Mt. Gox is two guys in Tokyo who are in way over their heads. We don't know much about Tradehill, which is somewhere in Chile. Neither of these "exchanges" has a published business address, a Dun and Bradstreet rating, published audits, or regulation as a bank or money transfer firm. Yet they're acting as depository institutions for sizable funds belonging to others.
So they haven't encumbered themselves with endless red tape and unnecessary overhead. Boohoo.
When I use a service, all I care about is whether the business delivers. The rest is unimportant.
Mtgox has always delivered for me so far, and that's why I will keep using them. As an adult, I can judge for myself whether a business is trustworthy. I don't need a royal stamp of approval.
Obviously this is a very young economy and I can't expect bank-level security from a startup like mtgox. But I wouldn't keep more than $1000 USD on mtgox either.