[grey-area]

Here are some possibilities for malpractice with Bitcoin: Exchanges lying about transactions, pricing, Exchanges refusing to allow or unable to allow extracting wealth stored in bitcoin, Exchanges front-running, Exchanges stealing money, 51% attack by miners, Governments expropriating wealth 10 years later claiming back taxes for undeclared earnings, Developers changing the rules of the currency (which are encoded in the client) and persuading enough to go along with it, Currencies which the price of Bitcoin is closely tethered to lying about their reserves... I could go on, but the entire edifice is built on confidence, and once that confidence evaporates for a second time, it's going to be very hard to recover.

There is a lot of risk investing in bitcoin, it is nothing like commodities, that's just the latest identity have dreamed up for it after it completely failed to live up to the hype of the previous identities first as a currency outwith government control, then as a distributed trust-free database, then as a foundational layer for myriad apps, and finally as a 'commodity' which nobody actually uses (unlike other speculative commodities like oil or corn which usually have a use value which the current value fluctuates around).

You do in fact have lots of protection when you buy other commodities, in the form of rules against cornering the market, rules against fraud, insurance, regulators etc. Look up the silver corner or similar episodes for what happens when markets in commodities are completely unregulated, as we see in the Bitcoin market at the moment.

[trident5000]

Theres a lot of inaccuracies in here and it just kind of looks like things being thrown at a wall and hoping they stick. For instance front running is done by HFT in the equity markets so I see a double standard there. "exchanges lying about transactions" - what? 51% attack by miners, do you actually know what that is? What the impact is and how much it would cost to carry and sustain that?

Nursie: Oh sure, I thought he was talking about like your trades on the exchanges being misrepresented or something. Weve known about the wash trading for probably 6 years now. Theres aggregators that eliminate the wash trading volumes. Its mostly asian exchanges that are competing for business. theres still a lot of organic volume. Yup theres going to be bad actors that occurs all over finance.

[grey-area]

While you could argue with some specific points I'm sure, this was just a laundry list off the top of my head of reasons why btc is not some inert commodity which can't possibly allow malpractice - the bitcoin ecosystem is overflowing with bad actors and shady companies all trying to profit from the goldrush, from mtgox in the past to bitfinex now.

I agree there are bad actors all over finance, which is precisely why finance and banking is so heavily regulated, in a way that btc is not, and that lack of proper auditing and controls is what makes btc incredibly risky as some sort of investment IMO and utterly unlike commodities like oil or corn as an asset.

Bitcoin is neither a useful currency, nor a reliable store of value, nor a good way to share data, nor a foundational layer for an app ecosystem, nor a commodity. It has been sold as all those things and more, but it has succeeded at none of them and I fear in this latest mania a lot of people will lose much of their money.

[trident5000]

All Im going to say is that quite a few heavyweights disagree with you both on the tech and investing front. I disagree with you as well. I think btc is a store of value. At the end of the day its going to be up to the individual.

[Nursie]

> "exchanges lying about transactions" - what?

The volumes on many exchanges (particularly the less reputable ones) have been faked a lot. Also exchanges have several times been found not to have the reserves to actually cover the customer accounts (i.e quadriga).

[thegreatpeter]

Volumes are constantly faked on exchanges in an effort to make it look like there's demand for a higher price.

[trident5000]

Depends what exchanges. Most fake volume occurs outside the 10 largest exchanges by userbase. Coinbase, Gemini, Bitstamp, Binance, etc are unlikely reporting inaccurate volume. Volume aggregators like CMC, Coingeko, and Messari have mostly kicked out suspects.