Quote from: squatter on September 10, 2018, 08:15:19 AM

Quote from: tee-rex on September 03, 2018, 04:07:10 PM

First of all, they can't in any way contribute to real growth which is caused by genuine adoption. All they do is add up to volatility. Second, if their words were true, that would mean that more holding would lead to higher prices. In real life though, it means that a coin (in this case bitcoin) will get abandoned and lose all its value eventually.

Therefore, if we are to bravely face the harsh and unpleasant truth and call things their real names, these people who proudly call themselves hodlers are in fact hoping to get something out of nothing, to get a share of the common pie when they themselves didn't bring anything to the table in the first place. Sounds familiar? So who are they if not parasites?

Parasites derive sustenance at the host's expense. That doesn't really work in this case. Hodlers aren't hurting anyone. They seem more like free riders to me, since they benefit from common usage and transaction liquidity but they don't contribute to it. If everyone were a hodler (so no one was using BTC, only hoarding it), BTC would have no value. A network needs usage and liquidity in order to be useful for anything.

So, I agree with the sentiment here but if you think about it, they're just being rational. If you're not going to use BTC (for example, as a medium of exchange), but you think its price will rise, should you buy it or not?

I see what you mean here, but I can't agree that hodlers are just free riders or that free riders are not parasites in their own right (according to the Wiki article you linked). You seem to forget that selling massive amounts of coins at the end of the holding term has its negative effects on its own, and may actually undo the positive effects which were obtained by those who made this price possible in the first place through their hard efforts. Of course, you can claim that if these hodlers didn't thoroughly pursue their agenda, the prices wouldn't be so high, but then the fall wouldn't be that hard either. In fact, there wouldn't be any fall at all as there wouldn't be any hodlers, to begin with. So the overall effect still seems to be negative since, as I said earlier in the thread, hodlers contribute not so much to price itself as to its volatility.