Quote from: JorgeStolfi on December 24, 2014, 10:06:07 PM

Quote from: JayJuanGee on December 24, 2014, 06:29:57 PM

after over a year of studying bitcoin and posting your various bitcoin analysis, you still somehow believe that bitcoin is a zero sum game? Roll Eyes

Trading bitcoin is a negative-sum game because of the bank and trading fees. Exchanges do not create any money or bitcoin, but they consume some of both when coins and dollars move through them or inside them.

Suppose that, since 2009, all the traders, current and past, put a total of X bitcoins and Y dollars into the exchanges (both net, deposits minus withdrawals). Because of the fees, all those people together now have less than X bitcoins and less than Y dollars left in their exchange accounts. So, as a group, they lost some bitcoins and lost some money. No matter how the deposits, withdrawals, and balances have been divided among those traders, and how you measure the gains and losses, every gain that a trader made is more than offset by the losses of other traders.

Jorge: You may be coming along a little bit, and at least you seem to be considering the bitcoin economy from 2009, rather than focusing on it since November 2013, which seems to had been your previous practice.

As you may know, there is a lot more to any economy rather than some exchange activiities, and the narrow bitcoin world that you attempt to be outlining from your asserted neutral academic perspective. In any investment, there are a large variety of transactional costs and economic activities that have a variety of rippling effects (positive and negative) upon other aspects of the economy.

We should NOT be attempting to describe any economy in isolation and by merely focusing on a few selective factors and then suggest that instead of having a zero sum game the whole of the contributions add up to a negative sum game because there happens to be transaction costs involved. Your outline and description of bitcoin contributions seems to be selectively biased and inadequate.

You surely seem to spend a lot of time on a topic to attempt to negatively describe it and to project its demise and to fail to see the many positive attributes in which various cryptos, including bitcoin creates positive economic activity in the short and medium term and even if aspects do NOT survive in the long term remain socially / economically beneficial contributory forces.