[jsun]

I'd like to hear a real economist's take on this but from my personal opinion Bitcoin will never take off as a transactional currency because of it's inherently limited nature, and here's the reasons contributing to it:

1. There's a finite amount of them that can ever be mined

2. There's no central governing body control the rate of inflation/deflation through monetary policy.

By definition this creates a deflationary currency. Meaning as a currency it gains value the more goods and services it can be redeemed for, and the more valuable it is the less likely it is that people will redeem it for goods or services.

Meaning if all of a sudden more merchants started accepting bitcoin then bitcoins will appreciate as it's underlying "value" grows, but people will stop spending bitcoin because that coffee you bought for 3 bucks today might be 30 bucks next year. In turn merchants will spend less money building infrastructure for bitcoins since no one uses it.

Does that make any sense?

[mvleming]

From my point of view, this is not too unlike what we have without Bitcoin. With USD or CAD, consumers still have to make a decision whether it is worth exchanging a number of dollars a point in time for something else when instead they can use that money to make more money and eventually have "30 bucks next year".

I can see how making more money with Bitcoin is different than with USD or CAD though, if I were to consider only what you've laid out. With the latter two currencies, I would have to learn about different investment strategies and figure out what would actually make me more money, things as a consumer I don't even know about. But with Bitcoin, I could just hold onto them and except to have more money in the future.

What I am trying to say is I don't think what you've laid out is something new, this incentive–to hold onto money so I can more the future–already exists with our currencies today, but Bitcoin happens to give a little spin to that incentivize–which is it'll easier to have more money in the future.

I would love to hear from a real economist too but I don't think it hurts to take our brains out on a little walk.

[jsun]

See point #2. Central monetary bodies specifically change monetary policy to prevent deflation, worse case they can just print more money to cause artificial inflating to combat deflation.

Bitcoin doesn't have this defense mechanism.

[jacalata]

Not an economist, but my understanding is that that is why central banks adjust interest rates - to encourage people to spend their cash now or even borrow more (decreasing rates) or to hang on to it (increasing rates).

[atmosx]

I'm not an economist, but economists are not good at speculating either, looking at the results: As a a team, economists failed to preview every single financial crisis. Only after the shit hits the fan, media goes back to the few who were able to predict the crisis. There are always solitary birds singing out of the chorus. The chorus never get it right though.

To your statements now:

1) That's true, but doesn't mean anything if you put it out of context and the context might very well change in a couple of years. Crypto-currencies are evolving now, new ones are created trying to tackle bitcoin's flaws. Now seems unlikely but in the future some might be more successful than bitcoin. It's a new sector.

2) There no central governing body, but an investor with a big amount of bitcoin (say 2% of the total) might easily drive the price up, down or side-ways. It's like a financial (assets) market really, a little bit of miss-information and a massive dump of bitcoins will turn the price down at once.

It doesn't make any sense for a merchant to accept bitcoin if:

1) He is not the guy holding a huge bitcoin portofolio or plants too. Say Starbucks as a corporation starts accepting bitcoin today, in 6 month does a massive investment in the bitcoin market. If the investment is big enough the price will go up (supposedly).

2) If they have some inside information which allows them to predict with an acceptable risk the future price of bitcoin.

Other than that - and I'd go for that theory - it doesn't make sense. It's just a marketing trick. They are not expecting big amounts, just very small amounts because as you said bitcoiners are basically short or long term hoarders. But I'm sure they are ready to absorb any bitcoin drop up to a point, but not further. So I'm positive they wouldn't accept 20% of their turn-over being on bitcoin (if they are not feeling suicidal).

[jsun]

Your point #2 doesn't really work. You can manipulate the market in the short-term but you can't control the inherent value of the currency. Fiat currencies issued by governments can do that because they can literally just print or destroy money through monetary policy.

And I'm talking purely about bitcoin. I'm a lot more bullish on the future of crypto-currencies in general, but bitcoin has a lot of flaws that are probably deal breakers at this point.

[atmosx]

Not really. If A. Shamir's paper is correct, that 98% of BTC belong to 2% of portfolios, then sure as damn they can manipulate the market short-long-for ever term...

[tveita]

> As a a team, economists failed to preview every single financial crisis.

That's a bit of a fallacy, because economists are not just passive observers of the economy. If there is broad agreement that something is wrong, they can recommend policies to fix or mitigate it.

It's like saying your system administrators failed to warn about every single unscheduled service outage. It's probably true, but that says nothing about how many outages they anticipated and prevented.

[atmosx]

> It's like saying your system administrators failed to warn about every single unscheduled service outage.

What you're saying is that 1933 and 2008 was an unscheduled service outage to you. I don't really think so.

Let's take another outage that happened this year to the Nobel Committee: This year's Nobel Prize for the economics went to three economists, Eugene Fama and Lars Peter Hansen from Chicago (I hope Friedman rings a bell) and a third guy called Robert Shiller from Yale.

The thing is that the first two are renowned neo-liberals. They took the Nobel prize for their theory called EHM[1], which states that the markets always now better and to make a long story short "all you have to know about a product, it's written on the price tag". Which is of course is not true. Fama was the guy who made the 2008 wall-street meltdown possible. A meltdown that tax-payers still pay and will pay for the years to come. So does really this guy who had a prominent role in loosing financial restrictions which led to the 2008 crisis really deserves a Nobel? Are his theories real? I believe the result is there for all of us to see: Hardly, if the state has to intervene to save the financial market then apparently, is not as efficient as Fama thought it would. It does not auto-adjust.

The third guy though is famous for stating the exact OPPOSITE from the first two! Which is that the market doesn't regulate NOTHING (otherwise moody's, S&P and many others would be out of business today, giving triple A's to Lehman's products till Lehman crashed). Robert Shiller has become famous in economic circles by consistently disproving professor's Fama's theory!!! It's insane!

So why did they gave a nobel to two guys who say something and a guy who became famous by disproving the first two??? I mean it must one or the other right?

Welcome to the beautiful world of economists (and not economics).

PS: I studied economics in Milan (Bocconi) from 1999 to 2003 but had to go home (change country) due to a health problems. Didn't like it much though...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis

[tveita]

I'm saying that it's invalid to measure mainstream economics by looking at major crises and asking "how many of these did they foresee". A meaningful analysis would have to consider whether they foresaw and prevented any crises.

I don't see how the Nobel Memorial Prize is relevant to that point. If I had to guess, I'd say they got it jointly because developing the theory and giving it a formal definition was an import precursor to testing it empirically, and that seeing whether or not it holds in a given market is useful for analysis. Remember that this is a prize for science.

[hpagey]

My gut feeling is that, bitcoin usage will take off in other use cases, maybe like digital transactions or restricting the use of money for certain things (like color coins).

[dotBen]

this is an example of where I'd love to see the new HN mods close off-topic threads. No offense the parent, but your general musing on the feasibility of Bitcoin - amount to thread jacking given the original topic above

[dang]

We don't close subthreads, but we do demote off-topic ones when we see them.