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Between gambling and investing there is speculating.

I believe there are ways to have an edge in cryptocoin speculating - it is unfair to say that it is all gambling. I cannot say I am very good in this game, there are people at the chats who are way less nervous and emotional and who must have made fortunes, but I have quit my programming job and now live from it.

> It's different from the sort of value that a startup creates: at least a startup is trying to affect the world in a tangible way that can usually be explained in a couple of sentences.

I agree that it is different. Arguably, though, if Bitcoin gains enough traction, it would affect the world too.

I put in an edit to clarify some thoughts on investing in coins. Basically, if you put in money and then don't touch the coins for years, that's investing. It's just so hard to have that mindset in this particular medium.

>Arguably, though, if Bitcoin gains enough traction, it would affect the world too.

But even then, the ways in which it would affect the world is unpredictable and any predictions are pure speculation.

In 2011 people where thinking that when 1BTC reaches $1000 in value, there would be mass adoption and it will be used as a currency for mundane everyday purchases. Well that didn't happen and it doesn't seem like Bitcoin will ever be use in that way.

I bought OJ, milk, eggs, veggies yesterday with BTC via my Shift Card.

This hasn't caught on mainstream yet but the infrastructure is there, and it's growing.

https://www.shiftpayments.com/card

The fees are quite high for that card.

And you are not paying with BTC. If it's a debit card then you have to have fiat in a bank account. I guess they exchange BTC to USD when you top up your shift card.

Can you please elaborate on what fees are high?

I paid $10 for the card. $0.00 annual fee $0.00 Domestic transactions

BTC is converted to fiat at the time of purchase, also with no fee, no need to "top up" the shift card..

>BTC is converted to fiat at the time of purchase, also with no fee

Shift appears to use Coinbase for its BTC->Fiat needs. Coinbase charges exchange fees [0]. Or am I not understanding how the card works?

[0]https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/210959...

International fees are high.

But also conversion from BTC to USD is not for free. Whoever is doing the conversion is charging a fee.

Probably as part of exchange rate where they add a markup. So you don't see an explicit fee in your statement but they use little worse exchange rate and that is their cut.

Also whoever is their payment processor (whoever they partnered with to print those debit cards as they don't have license to do it themselves) is charging some fees.

I could be wrong, but I haven't seen any evidence of these fees.

Coinbase charges a 1.49% fee when transferring to/from my Bank changing between USD and BTC.

GDAX, which is owned by Coinbase, does not appear to charge me this fee.

I don't see evidence of the Shift card charging it either.

Did the merchant receive payment in BTC? If not, how does that count as infrastructure? If it looks like a debit card using USD over Visa's network for the real transaction, the Bitcoin part could be replaced at any time and none of the blockchain selling points would appear to be relevant.

Mass adoption can never happen because bitcoin was never designed to be a payment system for mass adoption.

Look at the history: circa 2000 E-Gold was the go-to currency for illegal activity online. In 2008 E-Gold got shut down.

A few months later the bitcoin proposal surfaces and coincidentally solves the "problems" with E-Gold by making it impossible to shut down, impossible to indict the owners, and easier to hide money flows if you are sophisticated enough to write programs to move your money through webs of anonymous proxy accounts.

Bitcoin was designed from the beginning to be ideal for illegal activity and the features that make it good for illegal activity also make it expensive, inefficient, and poorly suited to legitimate commerce (non-repudiation is basically a deal breaker).

Throw in the risk created by price fluctuations and the whole thing is just totally impractical for real world use at scale.

But hey, I was saying the same thing back then too, and I could be a millionaire now, so you probably shouldn't take my advice.

>If anyone is saying the word "investment" while talking about a cryptocoin, smile and nod while slowly receding in the other direction.

>EDIT: I think it's possible to invest in cryptocoin

smiles about 1000% gains and walks away

Heh. Have I told you about my Sillycoin ICO? Wait, don't go...

I realized that pg has some bitcoins, so it's a stretch to say he's just gambling and not investing. But Bitcoin and Ethereum seem to attract huge numbers of get-rich-quick people that try to convince others the flip is real investing.

It's like encouraging people to play the lottery because you won the big prize once. It's an very risky investment and I think it's incredibly irresponsible to encourage people to dump money in it if they don't understand fully what it's about. The "to the moon" memes aren't funny anymore when gullible people start buying bitcoins with money they can't afford to lose.

Bitcoins will have to overcome massive challenges if it's to become something more than a vessel for speculation and black market purchases. It needs to scale to several orders of magnitude more transactions (none of the proposed scaling methods so far come even close). Then you need to convince the broad public to switch to an unregulated currency (not everybody is a crypto-anarchist/libertarian).

Maybe it'll make it, maybe it won't. And if it does we'll be left to wonder if it's fair that a small share of early adopters end up owning a significant share of the world's money (the new 0.1%). At any rate I'd strongly encourage you to diversify your 1000% gains if you haven't done so already...

> none of the proposed scaling methods so far come even close

you sure? what happened to the estimates related to payment channel proposals: http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/hong-kong/o...

It'll help but it's really untested and nobody knows for sure how the network will react when you change the topology and incentives like this.

In general it's a pretty complex technology that introduces a big number of new variables in the mix.

Look at the example in your paper:

>You're probably buying a coffee only once, right? Well, maybe the coffee is $5, and you put $50 into the channel and leave it open. Then someone else comes to the coffee shop and she does the same thing. But she has a channel with the grocery store. There's me, coffee shop, Alice, grocery store, they all have channels. When I go to the grocery store next time, I don't have to open a channel. Payments are routed.

[...]

>I am guessing the mean is going to be 3, but it will probably be an exponential distribution. Most people will probably have 1 channel, and then some might have 100s of channels open.

Note the use of "I am guessing". And what happens if I'm not willing to put $50 in the channel to leave it open because it's a one time thing and there's no point for me to do that? I'd say that most of ebay and other "peer to peer" purchases are like this. Would you put 10 times the amount of the transaction in a channel to some alibaba seller just for the sake of being a good bitcoin-izen?

In general I find the idea of people opening only 3 channels a year to be a tad optimistic if bitcoin is to replace Visa.

So it remains to be seen how well it'll work in practice. Maybe it'll work great, but maybe it'll be a huge mess. At any rate I wouldn't say that bitcoin scaling is a solved problem.

a lottery is an absolutely horrible metaphor abuse.

If you put $2 into buying a powerball ticket, you have a ~1:290 million chance at becoming a millionaire and a ~1:50 chance at breaking even.

If you put $2 into bitcoin at any point in history and held for 2 years, you have a 0% chance at becoming a millionaire and a 100% chance at breaking even.

If you left $2 sitting in your wallet for 2 years, you lost $0.05-0.10 depending upon who you believe

>If you put $2 into bitcoin at any point in history and held for 2 years, you have a 0% chance at becoming a millionaire and a 100% chance at breaking even.

That does not compute. What do you mean here exactly? Clearly if you invest $2 in BTC and the value of bitcoins increases 500,000% you're a millionaire. Conversely if it crashes and becomes worthless you've lost everything.

But more generally I wasn't arguing statistics, just pointing out that it's just a big gamble, like the lottery. It's extremely difficult to predict the future of bitcoin so investing in it is not entirely unlike playing the lottery.

I believe he is referring to the past. The history so far is such that there haven't been many losing 2 year stretches. So far, it also hasn't gone up 500,000% in two years either. So, not nearly as risky as a lottery, and not quite the same upside either.

The risk is yourself, not the market. Losing your coins is equivalent to the market crashing to 0. And it's shockingly easy to completely lose your coins, even if you're not incompetent.

I can imagine a future where bitcoin plays a role similar to what gold does now. This would not require much scaling - it would be about few, but high value transactions. But yeah - more probably it will be replaced by something else that would have less costs (i.e. POS, https://medium.com/@zby/proof-of-work-8d8265def194 ), and/or scale. This is the gamble in cryptos investing now - it is conceivable that in the long run some crypto will be worth much - but you don't know which one. Maybe Etherium, which showed it can change rapidly, will do this, but most probably this will be something new. Maybe EOS or Tezos - but they are too much hype machines - this does not fit good development.