Quote from: JorgeStolfi on March 05, 2014, 06:09:47 AM

Quote from: aminorex on March 05, 2014, 05:12:00 AM

Quote from: JorgeStolfi on March 04, 2014, 07:24:42 PM

* ... lottery ticket ...
* ... lottery ticket ...
* ... lottery ticket ...
* ... lottery ticket ...

You seem to be equating bitcoin with a lottery ticket. Of course it is not a lottery ticket by any stretch of the imagination. The value of bitcoin is not determined by chance. Thus it is difficult to see how this is relevant to your views on bitcoin, unless you have actually confused bitcoin with lottery tickets. It is not even remotely analogous. Does it not give you pause when you use an erroneous equation as the dominant plank in your platform?

Bitcoin is not exactly like a lottery ticket, it is a bit better in some sense, a bit worse in other senses.

Bitcoin is just like a lottery ticket in that its price is known (its current market price) but its payoff is not (its value N years from now).

Bitcoin is worse than a lottery ticket, because its expected value is not well defined. The odds and prizes of a lottery ticket are known, thus one can compute its expected value. Moreover most people who know a bit of mathematics will assign the same odds to those prizes, and therefore will agree on its expected value. For bitcoin, on the other hand, there is no logical way to assign probabilities to the possible outcomes (possible values N years from now). So, there is no consensual expected value.

If N is less than 3, say, "value" can only mean the market price at that time. One cannot predict the BTC price even 5 minutes ahead of time, much less N years from now.

If "N years from now" is taken to mean "after cryptos are in general use", then one needs to assign probabilities to "cryptocoins will eventually be in general use", "cryptocoins will be used in more than 1% of e-commerce transactions", "the same cryptocoin cannot be used more than N times per day", "X% of those cryptocoins will be bitcoins" and so on.

On the other hand, indeed Bitcoin is a bit better than a lottery ticket, in that it is not demonstrably a bad investment. The expected value of a lottery ticket is invariably less than its price, so it everybody will agree that it is a bad investment. Since the expected value of a bitcoin is not defined, one cannot prove mathematically that it is less than its current market price. But by the same token, one cannot prove that it is a good investment, either.

So, how can one honestly recommend investing into bitcoin as a hedge against a possible dollar collapse, as a way of becoming a millionaire, or whatever the "salesmen" are saying these days? It is like buying a ticket for a crazy lottery that does not tell its clients what are the odds and prizes, and may or may not be seeking to lose money.

How does fiat compare to a lottery ticket?