These "bitcoin = tulip maina = .com bubble" articles get a bit boring after a while especially if one is relatively deeply involved with the space. This has been discussed at very great depths thousands of times already.
What shows how superficial these articles are is that almost all of these articles (and most of the mainstream media articles) single out BTC, (which is less than 50% of total crypto market capitalization) without going into specifics of the given coin (like discussion of cons and pros of on-chain scalability solution vs. second layer scalability solutions, POW, POS, small/big block sizes etc...)
I think it would be a bit more interesting to speak about the price of a continously rebalanced, market-cap weighted index of the top 10 coins or something for mainstream purposes. This would prevent these articles focusing too much on the current state of BTC (which they cannot really focus on anyway without going much deeper), zoom out a bit more, and put the focus more on the possibilities in the whole evolving cryptocurrency space, which would be more interesting for a mainstream audience (they just don't know, because everybody tells them bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin).
The vision of the BTC community is that on-chain scalability for payment has no chance anyway (1MByte is capable of 5 orders of magniutde less tx/sec than VISA), so using second layer methods (like lighting network) to do payment is absolutely inevitable anyway. So they keep blocksize small enough that a regular guy with a regular PC can realistically sync-up the network and become a full node, because they think this is needed to be truly decentralized and secure.
This possible lighting network future, and also that BTC is the most battle tested, and most forked coin, and has by far the biggest network effect are all included in its price.
My portfolio contains other coins from the top ten so I hedge it with other solutions for scaling, but BTC's share in my portfolio is close to its share in the crypto market cap (a bit less, admittedly).
You've described how BTC can scale as a currency, but haven't addressed ardit33's first point, which is that not many people seem to want to use it as a currency in the first place.
I speculate that at first people want to use it as a store of value, but after a critical amount of holders, and having a lighting network, users and merchants could also adopt it as a currency.
A conservative scenario is that cryptocurrencies will not really become adopted other than store of value: I think even in this case BTC value can go up tremendously. It has benefits over gold: like easy and fast transport accross countries.
> I speculate that at first people want to use it as a store of value, but after a critical amount of holders, and having a lighting network, users and merchants could also adopt it as a currency.
Why would they? Why should I buy things with BTC instead of USD? The fact that I've yet to hear a convincing answer to this most fundamental question is the strongest indicator that BTC is a bubble.
the value of gold is in no strong way tied to its industrial uses, the concept of "intrinsic value" being what drives market value is silly. If gold had zero industrial usage it would still be almost as valuable as it is now.
After all how much of money's value is due to the fact that it has a decent BTU value per weight in a furnace?
Most money is as purely a "digital fiction" as bitcoin is these days.
That's incorrect. Gold became valuable in historic times because of its awesome properties as a metal: Doesn't rust, easy malleable, beautiful without much processing(i.e. compared to rough steel), high conductivity of electricity and heat... etc..
At some point, on some societies, things like rare sea shells, or big stones, were used as currency, but they didn't survive times for a good reason: No real use in real life.
Same with bitcoin, unless it starts having real use in real life, it wont survive. People buy it because they expect it will go up. It is like the Kim Kardashian of currencies, popular just because it is popular. But once that expectation is broken (i.e. of bitcoin always rising in value), than the downspiral starts.
It does. There's little point it debating which currency or index of currencies to analyze, when none of them are showing significant traction as a currency.
The parent comment says nothing about the validity of "it being a currency"..this is an argument the child brings up just to Bitcoin hate. And it's a 'beat the drum' comment, same as the "it's like tulips/.com" that the parent is tired of hearing.
And, it's not the point of every cryptocoin to be a currency, whatever may be your definition of a currency.
"So what now for bitcoin? It will crash and disappear like Pets.com, Leheman Brothers and Anglo Irish Bank, existing only in the memories of economists."
"There have been some slight recoveries which have given hope to bitcoinites. They cling to the hope that this is only a correction and that bitcoin will bounce back stronger than ever. They fail to realise that all crashes include a slight recovery followed by another crash."
I'm not saying the author is necessarily wrong, just highlighting the fact that no one knows what the hell they're talking about or what's going to happen.
I will say, as a Bitcoin "hater", Bitcoin is far more resilient than many things it might be compared to.
With Pets.com or Leheman Brothers, there was a corporate structure that could stop existing. It could go bankrupt, the C-executives could be arrested, something could happen beyond which it'd be fair to say it was over.
With Bitcoin, you could have all of the exchanges go defunct, you could have 99% of the miners close up shop, and as long as a few people kept the blockchain going, a few years later it could be back, the same as before.
In case of a massive and rapid reduction in the number of miners and therefore the network hashrate, it would take Bitcoin network difficulty too long to adjust to be useful in short term.
Pardon my very limited knowledge about those things, but one thing I wonder and find fascinating about bitcoin is this : I understand that a very limited number of people, probably the initial developers, hold a very hight percentage of available bitcoin. (disregard the rest in case i'm even completely mistaken in that assumption...)
Those people have an asset with an incredibly high face value. Of course, the market is probably far too shallow for them to cash out even a small part of this face value.
The question is this : for those people, assuming or not that they can coordinate, what is the optimal strategy? I'm thinking something like draw regularly, in order to build a war chest to "defend" the cryptocurrency against too violent crashes, such sustaining the confidence of the public. In a way controlling and fine tuning the influx of external money coming in from fools wanting in on the pyramid effect.
Is it realistic to think such strategy could be feasible, and if so, for how much time those people could/would want to sustain it?
Because there's no inherent value and it's just traders making up theories, I would conclude there's this set of game theory:
1. Buy bitcoins or release media PR to pump price
2. Buy future shorts
3. Sell a large enough order to trigger margin calls and stop losses
4. Profit twice from your BTC sale, and short sale
5. If you believe the price will return, buy back in cheaper
than you sold due to other panic sellers
Copied from an argument in another thread on the same thing:
Any currency that a:
1. strong entity circulates and
2. wants back
is fundamentally valuable.
> American dollars have value because the US Government taxes things, like land, and if you do not pay those taxes they will send you mean letters (trust me) before resorting to other means (trust Al Capone). You pay these taxes in US dollars. You just having dollars does not make them valuable. And dollars are not valuable because they are backed by gold or silver or sea shells. What makes dollars valuable is that the government wants them back.
Ways to destroy the US dollar value: Destroy the US tax collecting power, or have the US ask for taxes in a different currency. If the US started collecting taxes in Euros, the value of the US dollar would disappear instantly.
The US is a strong entity and has no incentive to ruin the value of the dollar. It will not start collecting taxes in Euros. Or Bitcoin. Why would it give all that power away? More likely is that Bitcoin gets made illegal or very difficult to use. At the end of the day, if you have US-protected assets, you will have to pay US dollars to the US gov and this will continue to give USD value.
Bitcoin has no such strong-entity backing, so it has no fundamental value. Bitcoin people are obsessed with the idea that mere possession is important. It's not. Ask people with loads of marks or Zimbabwe dollars.
Thanks for the response. If I understand the argument correctly, then the claim is that 1) a currency that fits the criteria - circulated by a strong entity who wants it returned - has value, 2) Bitcoin does not fit that criteria, therefore 3) Bitcoin has no value.
I don't know if you're supporting this argument or not, but it is flawed in a manner that is called "denying the antecedent". To borrow an example, the following argument is flawed: 1) If you're a logic instructor, then you have a job, 2) you are not a logic instructor, therefore 3) you do not have a job. This does not follow, and is not a valid argument. One can simply point out that there are other jobs than logic instructor.
This is the same form of argument as was made in your post. Surely, then I must be able to point to some other thing that has some value which is also not circulated by a strong entity. Rare-earth minerals come to mind. Sunken treasure. Works of art. Illegal drugs, certainly. Stolen goods, clearly, and I would think any illegal market has to be seen as coming from a weak actor. All these are examples of things that have value, but do not fit the given criteria.
It is unfortunate, but it appears that people who believe this argument are fooling themselves. I hope they do not fool others.
GP wrote "fundamentally valuable" and "fundamental value". You completely ignored the "fundamental" part.
> Surely, then I must be able to point to some other thing that has some value which is also not circulated by a strong entity. Rare-earth minerals come to mind. Sunken treasure. Works of art. Illegal drugs, certainly. Stolen goods, clearly, and I would think any illegal market has to be seen as coming from a weak actor.
Oh right, some lovely examples, if you could stop the comparison with gold (can already see it coming: "nowhere did I write that" yeah you did: "rare-earth minerals") that'd be great. Gold has been recognized as having value for centuries. Its a physical product. It has this value world-wide, in all layers of society. It has a track record, a reputation. It can be traded both ways. A disadvantage is that the person who verifies its purity also is the one buying or selling it. Not layman-friendly (Bitcoin is neither though as people have no clue how it works, how to safely store it, etc; I'd argue it is worse.).
Cut diamonds (such as e.g. in jewelry), on the other hand, is like gold's evil twin. It has practically no resale value. The moment you buy one, its nearly worthless (ie. worth a lot less) than it was already. Its because it can't be reused. That means diamonds are overvalued. But because they're so desired for specific occasions and what not, its a matter of finding a fool who wants to buy them.
> Sunken treasure. Works of art. Illegal drugs, certainly. Stolen goods
A lot of these suffer from the same problem as diamonds. Either they're owned by collectors who also own normal money like USD and EUR with which they pay for their errands (which you can't with BTC either). Or they're trying to get it converted to either unwashed or washed USD or EUR.
For me, Bitcoin has no value, because I cannot use it. Virtually no shop accepts it because these people know full well the disadvantage of a slow, expensive transaction and because they can't use it anywhere anyway.
Furthermore, the default currency and price quote in our societies is still USD, EUR, or what have you. Not BTC. So if its going less well in society (ie. major recession), the default currency is what's going to allow you to keep your chin above the water. Those are times where you'll be able to use a currency like USD and EUR but where people are going to want to sell their possessions such as gold, diamonds (good luck with that!), works of art, sunken treasures, and BTC. But who'd want BTC then? You cannot use it to buy groceries. The bakery doesn't accept it. The butcher doesn't accept it. The bank doesn't accept it. The insurance company doesn't accept it. The gas station doesn't accept it. Practically nobody on your current list of monthly and weekly expenses accepts it. That means that, at such point, since BTC is linked to USD and EUR, the demand for BTC is extremely low because people are going to need USD and EUR to pay for their living. At such a point, BTC will crash and will be useless. Same for the other cryptocurrencies. Nevermind a time of war where electricity is scarce, since we're so dependent on it.
Such is the difference between value and fundamental value. Bitcoin has no fundamental value. It is akin to like rare obscure random paintings what a bunch of loons decide they want to give for it. And they can't easily trade that, either.
Then I wonder what's worse: the regulated government being allowed to print money, or some dudes in China being able to use very cheap electricity and allowed to "print" money. Guess who's more aligned with the interests of the average EU and US citizen?
> It is unfortunate, but it appears that people who believe this argument are fooling themselves.
Ah, right, you remained civil, and then you resorted to this. How cute.
Unfortunate for whom? Is it unfortunate for someone to miss out on a ponzi or pyramid scheme? Depends on 1) their moral compass (if aware of scheme) 2) exactly when they made the choice to not join in. In essence, they're not losing out on anything since they're keeping their USD or EUR nice and safe (or for example invested in companies). So, nice projecting & nice straw man.
> I hope they do not fool others.
Let me guess: because you want confidence in BTC because you got involved in it? OK, crystal clear, just be opaque and say that. Either way, nice projecting & nice straw man.
Technically you don't even "possess" Bitcoin. The network possesses them for you. You just have a private key that authorizes you to send the Bitcoins that are held on the network for you.
Namely the codebase, history, delusional claims, and alternatives (other crypto-networks) that make Bitcoin obsolete.
See also the false equivalency to gold:
If you understand the computer science behind Bitcoin, you'll realize how ridiculous the false equivalency to gold is.
1. The claim of "rare" doesn't exactly hold true.
Consider the 10,000 BTC pizza - how did this happen? This was the direct result of Satoshi's economic policy, granting vast sums of BTC to mint out very quickly very early for a short duration to the very small pool of people who ran the software. Satoshi's algorithm produced BTC in plentiful quantities enabling the 10,000BTC pizza - thus it wasn't rare if you were Satoshi and the dozen other early whales hording as much as possible, until the algorithm begins cutting off the production and limiting later users from producing coins, starving the economy. Now there's a psychological game being played, where public relations and marketing must convince new users to buy in. Because the exchanges are unregulated, they can manipulate the spot price though wash trading and painting the tape [2] (where trades are falsified and you just sell the same item back and forth to your friend for a higher and higher price).
The supply was created by running a piece of software. It's not magic. Most of the supply was produced very early on and as much as 30% of all Bitcoins are owned by less than 100 people.
Best estimates are that there are about one million
holders of Bitcoin; 47 individuals hold about 30 percent,
another 900 hold a further 20 percent, the next 10,000
about 25% and another million about 20%, with 5% being
lost. So 1/10th of one percent represent about half the
holdings of Bitcoin and 1 percent close to 80 percent
(http://www.businessinsider.com/927-people-own-half-
of-the-bitcoins-2013-12). The concentration of Litecoin
ownership is similar
(http://litecoin-rich-list.blogspot.com).
Most of the big wallets have been in place from early on,
so sitting back and watching your capital grow has been a
very successful strategy.
The distribution of Bitcoin holdings looks much like the
distribution of wealth in North Korea and makes the
China’s and even the US’ wealth distribution look like
that of a workers’ paradise
3. Bitcoin network requires ASIC miners, largely centralized in China [3]. Assuming the inveitable surpassing of a more advanced cryptosytem making Bitcoin obsolete, as the market is informed there will be a decline in BTC's spot price and once this falls below the cost of OPEX for miners, the hardware goes offline and the network will cease to function. Maximalists will attempt to offer an emergency fork, in any attempt to save their "investment", just as they have developed the lightening network to create centeralized payment hubs, so "investors" can act as liquidity providors and take fees, instead of miners.
You sell a percentage of your (Bitcoin) for (cash) each time-period, and you buy (Bitcoin) with a percentage of your (cash) each time-period. You can put any two assets in the parentheses.
You end up having a balanced ratio of assets according to the relative ratios of those percentages and the current value of each asset, and it will be balanced at a rate according to the total percentage you're trading on (10% means it'd be averaged over 10 time-periods).
There is more formal analysis of this by people around optimal portfolio theory, math about how to balance your portfolio among a variety of assets to choose a risk level analytically, but this is the rule of thumb version AFAIK.
As I recall, back in the day, SoundForge was the lightest and fastest audio editor for Windows. (On the Mac there were of course many choices for simple editing, going all the way back to SoundEdit16.) It was a little sad to SoundForge sold to Sony. The author should be proud of that software. There was nothing else comparable for Windows back then, to my knowledge. Interesting that he became involved with something as different as Bitcoin.
SoundForge and Vegas used to be great software tools in the 1990s and early 2000s. Unfortunately you had to sell them. Thanks anyway for your story.
Recently Sony sold them to Magix from Germany. Unfortunately the software is lagging behind, basically stayed for decades in low maintenance mode, and Magix software is known to be a cobbled together buggy mess. Their other own video software Video Deluxe is still 32bit buggy unstable piece that relies on decade old dlls and can't be installed on up to date Windows 7/8/10 without deactivating security functions, changing registry settings by hand and renaming the Windows cert folder. Nowadays the open source Audacity is a great alternative to SoundForge, and Premiere/etc are better alternatives to Vegas/VideoDeluxe.
Still long on bitcoin, but also wouldn't be surprised if it lost 70% of its value in short term.
He does bring up some great points regarding transaction throughput and the team productivity.
It seems like lightning network is the tool to get a lot of cheap, fast transactions done via bitcoin and turn it into a really useful viable currency.
However, that has taken a long time just to get to test mode. Much of the fate of bitcoin is tied to that github repository and pull requests. There has never been another open source software project with this much money riding on it. Can this team continue to deliver value?
There are other concerns like deflationary spirals, volatility, etc., but my bet on bitcoin is largely a bet on the dev team and whether or not useful pull requests get created & merged and what that velocity is.
Me too. Ahh the good old days. We'd be coding and day trading back and forth all day. Take turns watching for the Boss to come towards our area, so we could all hide the trading window and get back to coding.
My co-worker dev lost 3K on PETS.COM's stock in 1 day.
I'd gotten in on 100 shares of AMZN Apr 2000 at $57-ish, ate a loss of about 30$ / share in Oct 2000, sold at $28-ish. All I have left now is war stories ...ending very badly lol. The rush of trading on volatility makes it 'not a complete loss' tho.
yea and AMZN was 110 in December 1999, an equivalent drop for BTC would be to roughly $1000. I've been a crypto bull for a long time, but I sold everything 2 weeks ago. I sold a little early, but better to add that addition to my house than lose 95%
Bitcoin as an investment option is pure gamble, unless someone has a better idea e.g. has put its value side-by-side to Gold, Silver, Oil, Adamantium ;) and has noticed a pattern. Perhaps there is pattern, and it is related to the "petyas" of this world (new malware that is massively cashin in/out).
50$ in fees per transaction, I never thought I'd see this day.
For the last 3 years, there has been a bitcoin civil war about how to scale bitcoin, as people have warned that the problems we are seeing now would happen.
And unfortunately for bitcoin, the side that wanted high transaction fees, and wanted to prevent all scaling won the war.
And now we are seeing those problems come home to roost, as segwit (which was marketed as an immediate fix) adoption has been minimal, and the mythical lightning network and layer 2 or 3 solutions that the core development team promises will that will solve everything is perpetually 2 years away from completion.
Things are going exactly as people had predicted.
Those of us who are fed up with these problems have moved on to other coins, such as Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash.
> Those of us who are fed up with these problems have moved on to other coins, such as Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash.
What do you use those for?
In the article above the author mentions you were able to pay for dinner, for various bits and pieces in BTC - even for pizzas, as we all know.
You can't do that with ETH, BCH, or any altcoin, and you can't use BTC for it any more either.
Stripe maintains a big list of prohibited businesses. Some of these are honest consumer protection. Others are there to try to instil Christian values into our money, for instance you may not use Stripe to sell sex toys.
If you ask Stripe, they'll tell you that these restrictions are there because of the requirements of Stripe's partners. And that is exactly the problem.
If we are heading towards a cashless society (and we are), then we need an electronic payment system that does not consult the Bible before deciding whether to allow your payment or not.
This! Has any coin shown any value outside of speculation yet? Ethereum seemed to have a lot of promise with "smart contracts" but has it provided any value to anyone yet?
Merchant adoption for bitcoin cash is increasing very quickly.
You can indeed pay for things with bitcoin cash, and as soon at bitpay adds it to their platform (Which they are working on and will do so very soon), the merchant adoption rate will actually be higher than the bitcoin adoption rate.
All within a couple months. And this isn't even including all the merchants to come when bitpays adds support in 2 months. It will be more than bitcoin once that happens.
I don't know munch about investing (I do), but 50$ on a 50k transaction that makes a 5k profit, is peanuts and never stopped anyone from investing. Investing is not a sport/hobby for teenagers that rely on the daily allowance.
The point is that Bitcoin is supposed to be a currency, and nobody is ever going to use a currency that costs you $50 to process every transaction regardless of whether it’s for $50k or 50 cents.
I haven't successfully used Bitcoin yet, but it was my impression that the $20 or $50 fee was for a reasonably fast transaction, and you could get slower performance for less. If I'm transferring a large amount of money between financial institutions then I expect to wait anywhere from 24 hours to 3 or more days for it to complete. So I'm wondering if a Bitcoin transaction would be significantly cheaper if you were perfectly happy to wait a day.
Space on the blockchain is essentially auctioned off. If you are willing to wait a day, the best you can do is wait until there is a block with little enough competition for you to run your transaction at your desired price. This is no cheaper then sending your transaction immidietly if you happen to do so when the price is cheep.
Bitcoin used to have a concept of "priority" transactions that would allow transactions to process regardless of fees if there inputs are old enough; however this is effectivly disabled in modern Bitcoin.
I really don't care about the wealthly wall street day traders who are throwing around hundreds of thousands of dollars. That "use case" is boring. "investment" is boring.
What I care about is the average person.
Bitcoin was originally supposed to be a peer to peer electronic cash system. As in, you buy things with it. It was not supposed to be a new wall steet.
But you can also pay $50 on a $5 transaction. LN existing on testnet has no bearing on the real world. Who wants to tie up $50 to open a channel and $50 to close it? Small blockers are kidding themselves.
The idea of LN is to reduce the demand for on chain transactions. If this happens, transaction fees will go down and opening a channel will not cost $50.
Fundamentally, Bitcoin needs some form of off-chain transaction. It is just not feasible to record every transaction in a permanent public ledger (let alone one that needs to be synced quickly enough to allow for ~10 minute block times)
> If this happens, transaction fees will go down and opening a channel will not cost $50
Bitcoin can process about ~3.5 tx's a second. The global population is about 7.6B. 1MB blocks are not sufficient..
Edit: For the record I think the obvious solution is both on and off chain scaling. Why it's even a debate I'm not really sure. I blame the illuminati.
But why would someone pay $50 for a $5 transaction? A criminal perhaps to stay under the radar. A sensible person would go for the cash option and pay $5 for $5.
If on the other hand someone was to launder money ;) then still the fee is tooo large to launder petty cash (pay 55 dirty to get 5 clean). An efficient money laundering rate is anything north of 50% (100 dirty --> 50-70 clean).
> An efficient money laundering rate is anything north of 50% (100 dirty --> 50-70 clean).
That's supported by what I read in "Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground" by Kevin Poulsen. Book's about Max Butler alias Iceman who ended up as in the higher echelon as vital gear of a carding gang. They'd have people who'd shop and resell the items instantly, as if new. The shoppers also need to get paid, obviously.
Blockchain's entirely public, so Bitcoin is terrible for money laundering. Not any better than USD.
Monero is apparently anonymous though. Though I take the term anonymous with a huge grain of salt since its always a relative term, not an absolute binary flag.
Money laundering is not the glorious vision that Satoshi sold to me or the world. I really don't care about that use case. If THAT is all that bitcoin is good for, then I hope it dies.
I got into bitcoin because I believed in a peer to peer electronic cash system.
My main problem with Bitcoin is that it’s a deflationary currency, that’s really why I hope it doesn’t have a future.
I have paid this months bills and rent, I have budgeted some money for groceries and fun, I have put 10% of my pay check in my pension fund.
Something is very wrong if you feel conflicted when you’ve invested money or spent money to get by because you missed out on your money being worth more.
It's not the small cabal of professionals that irks me. It's the method of increasing the money supply to generate inflation that bothers me. Central bank fiat systems use credit to increase money supply, so banks and people who consume large amounts credit (large capital projects) get the hot money first. Inflation does not apply evenly to everyone in the economy at once. As new money works its way into the economy, price levels rise. It's a rigged system for those close to the central bank.
So currently most money gets created when a back offers a loan, how and much is decided by the central bank. The thinking behind the current system is that easier access to credit will increase productive investments and grow the economy, hopefully to offset the inflation incurred by the increase in the money supply.
I agree its a quite blunt instrument, things like mortgages for houses doesn't really tend to grow the economy.
But its a hard problem, personally I would like to see some tinkering with helicopter drops
I haven't carried paper currency as a matter of course for something like 12 years. Most transaction since the Summer in our small UK business have been "contactless" (debit/credit card), though we still took 2 cheques IIRC.
Then the currency will be debit/credit with your bank which has Assets on Sol-3 and the consistent activity there guarantees a steady value on the value of USD, GBP, EUR, etc.
If things do come to pass and a significant carbon mass is shifted off Sol-3 (human population), then currencies will fluctuate since that is what drives steady value. This value will fluctuate as bitcoin is now doing "if" the abundance of rare-earths is transmitted back to the Origin planet.
Totally. My perceptics rundown indicates that the real thetans are moving things forward to clear the planet with heavy upstat bitcoin momentum. Mining coin helps me to audit my preclears and be a more on-source being.
Either that or I've been reading too much sci fi.
Not sure which. Xenu knows!! :D :D
"Soon" is a pretty hilarious term to use here, assuming you're talking about mass scale resource mining in space. We must have very different definitions of that term.
That's enough roller coaster for me. I'm out for good.
Here are my issues with Bitcoin:
1. Transaction times are insane, 30-45 minutes at peak hours. Bitcoin blockchain can only handle ~10TPS.
2. Fees, upwards of $30 / transaction a few weeks ago. This makes it not practical for any real purchasing or as a currency.
Both of those issues are solved by IOTA and the tangle, so that's where my money is going. I want to invest in a currency that has real world usability. Bitcoin doesn't have that at current scale.
Way to pimp your altcoin at the end there. IOTA isn’t even in the same league as bitcoin. It’s not decentralized and it’s not trustless. Just use SQL at that point...
IOTA uses the coordinator as a security measure right now (against 34% attacks) and will be removed once the coin is distributed enough to diminish probability of attacks. So saying it is not decentralized isn't honest. Without the coordinator it is decentralized.
Point two is also refuted once the coordinator is gone.
What shows how superficial these articles are is that almost all of these articles (and most of the mainstream media articles) single out BTC, (which is less than 50% of total crypto market capitalization) without going into specifics of the given coin (like discussion of cons and pros of on-chain scalability solution vs. second layer scalability solutions, POW, POS, small/big block sizes etc...)
I think it would be a bit more interesting to speak about the price of a continously rebalanced, market-cap weighted index of the top 10 coins or something for mainstream purposes. This would prevent these articles focusing too much on the current state of BTC (which they cannot really focus on anyway without going much deeper), zoom out a bit more, and put the focus more on the possibilities in the whole evolving cryptocurrency space, which would be more interesting for a mainstream audience (they just don't know, because everybody tells them bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin).