From my comments on various MarketWatch.com articles, I believe that only a minority of ordinary stock market investors have purchased bitcoins, and even fewer are true believers. And the ponzi scheme, pump and dump notions have been applied to bitcoin for four years by skeptics.
A true believer is one who believes that the Bitcoin economy will achieve future market domination.
I became a true believer in the 30 minutes that it took me to read Satoshi Nakamoto's paper back in 2010. I am a computer scientist with a degree in applied mathematics, who also has a great interest in business. I have lived long enough to witness full adoption of many disruptive technologies, e.g. TCP/IP, bank credit cards, ACH (US Automated Clearing House), bank check truncation, Automatic Teller Machines, emailed financial statements, hard disk drives, open source software, microcomputers, electronic word processing, digital spreadsheets, relational databases, algorithmic credit scoring, Virtual Private Networks, High Frequency Trading, etc. Back in 2010 I had recently worked with X.509 certificate trust chains and knew how digital signatures worked. I also understood how distributed peer-to-peer networks and clients worked at the developer level. Thus it was easy for me to understand how Satoshi's platform operated. I fully understood the problems with the current financial infrastructure, having programmed for a wide variety of bank software applications, and also as an ordinary banking customer.
Whether a particular Bitcoin company can build a moat around its core business to fend off competition, whether a particular Bitcoin company can endure and achieve market domination - is not my concern. Whether Bitcoin achieves future market domination as a payment mechanism, as a technology platform, and as a deflationary store of value - is my concern.
One of the reasons I came to this board is because my old retired father got a tip somewhere to invest in bitcoins because "its the future of curency", "its like digital gold", "designed deflationary - always go up in price", etc..
I got so sick of hearing this drivel and thinking how all these unsophisticated folks will get suckered into it and lose their money. It happens on Wall Street all the time w tech stock pumping. Before that it was mortgages. And before that it was internet stocks. The worst are penny stocks and small & micro cap. But at least w stocks we have fundamentals to use as price indicator.
I also have some background in economics and finance. So I understand the finance/ banking system
The simple economic reason bitcoin will fail as replacing fiat. It is not centrally controlled. The power to adjust the supply of money is extremely crucial in order to maintain liquidity in money markets. This didn't happen overnight it evolved to this stage through painful lessons of history. Without this aspect bitcoin is inefficient as money.
As a technology I think cryptocurrency has potential. The public ledger aspect of it is extremely intriguing. Bitcoins potential is in money transfer not as currency. This is what GS and Buffett said and I agree. I predict that in the future the banks will create some digital cash using public ledger idea. But its not a separate currency but based on dollars in your bank account. Thats what consumers want. Something like M Pesa or Ripple
Anyways, you seem like a smart guy. Smarter than most of the bitbugs I've encountered or "believers" if using your semantics
I suggest you look into a coursera.org course called "economics of banking" taught by prof Merhling of Columbia U. Theres no politics in this course. Just banking, how it functions, its history. I think you will understand money much more and how banking infrastructures weakness is not because Central Banking or fractional reserve banking. It has more to do w regulations surrounding derivatives, prop trading, shadow banking, etc. Things that can't be solved by inventing a new currency
https://class.coursera.org/money-001https://class.coursera.org/money2-001If more crypto developers understood how money works then maybe the next iteration won't be so held back by immature politics or designed to be abused by speculators.
If you want to design something useful, then design it to work on top of what we have not replace it. Why do you want millions of indiviual networked bankers? Can they provide financial services like loans or credit? Deal liquidity? Make markets? Or are they there just to support the network for blockchain? Why do you need a new curency when it has to be converted back to dollars? I just don't get what problems bitcoin is supposed to solve