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by DigitalSea 3209 days ago
>Why would they have a vested interest? If they felt it was a good way to make money they'd be all over it.

Because blockchain based currencies like Bitcoin cannot be controlled or manipulated by large entities who have ingrained themselves into the system like a traditional fiat banking system. You can't just create Bitcoin out of thin air and for financial mammoths like JP Morgan who contributed to the 2008 global financial crisis because of irresponsible lending/banking practices, it scares them.

I see BTC as being no different to trading stocks, some days you lose and some days you win.
1 comments
Nursie 3209 days ago
> You can't just create Bitcoin out of thin air

What do you think miners are doing? And with ICOs you can literally just print however many you want.

> I see BTC as being no different to trading stocks, some days you lose and some days you win.

Sure, but with stocks there's usually a company actually doing something.

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sandworm101 3209 days ago
Mines put in work. Jpm can/does create wealth by moving figures around on reports, or by betting one asset against another, without any physical limitation on its actions.
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ro_sharp 3208 days ago
"Moving figures around on a report" is capital allocation. The history of the 20th century suggests this is a valuable and non-trivial activity.
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Nursie 3209 days ago
> Mines put in work.

It's lost work though, and the amount of work is governed only by the level of competition with other miners, rather than the amount of effort involved insome external task.

> Jpm can/does create wealth by moving figures around on reports, or by betting one asset against another, without any physical limitation on its actions.

That's somewhat beside the point.

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eosophos 3208 days ago
> It's lost work though, and the amount of work is governed only by the level of competition with other miners, rather than the amount of effort involved insome external task

It's the cost of securing the network. It's not lost. Fees and rewards pay the miners for the cost of their computing cycles, to provide a secure, very difficult (near impossible) to attack network.

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Nursie 3208 days ago
It's the cost of competing for block rewards, which incidentally secures the consensus, yes. It's the price of decentralisation.

And it's still not an external task, it's a facet of running the currency rather than work that is independently useful.

And it's still conjuring money out of nothing.

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