MilHammer wrote:sidney lanier wrote:Nobel economist Paul Krugman with 
a strong Bitcoin stop sign in today's New York Times. Excerpt:
So Bitcoins aren’t really digital cash. What they are, sort of, is the digital equivalent of $100 bills.
Like Bitcoins, $100 bills aren’t much use for ordinary transactions: Most shops won’t accept them. But “Benjamins” are popular with thieves, drug dealers and tax evaders. And while most of us can go years without seeing a $100 bill, there are a lot of those bills out there — more than a trillion dollars’ worth, accounting for 78 percent of the value of U.S. currency in circulation.
So are Bitcoins a superior alternative to $100 bills, allowing you to make secret transactions without lugging around suitcases full of cash? Not really, because they lack one crucial feature: a tether to reality.
Although the modern dollar is a “fiat” currency, not backed by any other asset, like gold, its value is ultimately backed by the fact that the U.S. government will accept it, in fact demands it, in payment for taxes. Its purchasing power is also stabilized by the Federal Reserve, which will reduce the outstanding supply of dollars if inflation runs too high, increase that supply to prevent deflation. And a $100 bill is, of course, worth 100 of these broadly stable dollars.
Bitcoin, by contrast, has no intrinsic value at all. Combine that lack of a tether to reality with the very limited extent to which Bitcoin is used for anything, and you have an asset whose price is almost purely speculative, and hence incredibly volatile. Bitcoins lost about 40 percent of their value over the past six weeks; if Bitcoin were an actual currency, that would be the equivalent of a roughly 8,000 percent annual inflation rate.
Most here will think he doesn't get it. Read the whole thing and see whether you think he does.
 
Interesting article, thanks for sharing. I've lost respect for Krugman over the years but nothing he says here is wrong per se. 
He's right that what Bitcoin and any other crypto lack at this point is a tether to reality. You can't buy your groceries off Amazon with Bitcoin and frankly you don't want to. Tomorrow your .05 in Bitcoin could appreciate exponentially in value or tank. People in Bitcoin right now are either speculating hardcore trying to turn a profit or they are using it to store ridiculous amounts of cash and they don't care about losing 20-30% of it. The digital equivalent of taping a couple thousand hundred bills to you.
Imo, Bitcoin is like the Ford T Model. It's first to market and its relatively good at what it does, but only the beginning of what's to come.
The blockchain tech itself is already being adopted by IBM, Microsoft, and most major financial institutions. Independent projects like VeChain have partnered with major auditing companies like DNV-GL.
Now the US, South Korea, etc have floated the idea of supporting their own crypto, which would tie coins to the their respective central banks. I'm not entirely convinced about cryptos as currency for everyday transactions, but I do think they'll stick around as stocks essentially, with a currency component that allows you to invest/trade with applications built on these big blockchain platforms.
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Ok, Sid. You're on. I've read the entire thing and thanks for sharing. This is akin to the emails I receive from my father and his conventional investing friends on the regular. "Don't catch the Bitcoin knife!" "There's no intrinsic value!" AND, as always, I appreciate them for handing me the Fox News regulars on what will happen with Bitcoin. And, as per my own personal mantras, I happen to think reality lies somewhere in the middle of all of the opinions. The only issue I ever really encounter in this conversation is most often the advice or well-wishing or pedagogy comes from a place of never having been in the crypto-marketplace. AND, I don't imagine this author has invested or partaken. And, I don't imagine you have. But, I hear the concerns. And, who knows, the BTC market may entirely collapse (I 
highlyhighly doubt this - personally, I think it will mature in roughly 5 year's time and that first/2nd/3rd gen crypto cream will rise to the top - BUT, it certainly is a possibility.) I actually think I'm a good person to talk to about this as I still use the USD as my pivot in the cryptomarketplace. The more advanced fundamentalists will only use the satoshi as the central axis as it is more relevant globally. Well, I'm still entrenched locally in the US so it makes sense to me.
Firstly:
And your ownership isn’t verified by proving (and hence revealing) your identity. Instead, ownership of a Bitcoin is verified by possession of a secret password, which — using techniques derived from cryptography, the art of writing or solving codes — lets you access that virtual coin without revealing any information you don’t choose to.
Already demonstrating a patent misunderstanding of where BTC is today vs. where it was. BTC, at best for the common user, is pseudo-anonymous. It's only capable of becoming anonymous with some real rigorous and keen understanding of how to distribute BTC transfers etc. over many separate packet transactions. If an American wants to have access to 'cashing out', for instance they absolutely must verify their identity (license or passport) via an outfit like Coinbase. Hence, if the IRS wants to (as this conventional economist worries so adamantly - not to mention his overt trust the Feds will regulate inflation for our benefit. Hilarious. What's the oh so mighty US dollar done since 1913? Inflated by 95%. Good practices, indeed) they can track your every move. 
In principle, you can use Bitcoin to pay for things electronically. But you can use debit cards, PayPal, Venmo, etc. to do that, too — and Bitcoin turns out to be a clunky, slow, costly means of payment. In fact, even Bitcoin conferences sometimes refuse to accept Bitcoins from attendees. There’s really no reason to use Bitcoin in transactions — unless you don’t want anyone to see either what you’re buying or what you’re selling, which is why much actual Bitcoin use seems to involve drugs, sex and other black-market goods.
He's right here on one thing: BTC is currently way too slow to process standard transactions. I've talked about this before. BUT, again, this is information arriving from a dinosaur during the Neolithic revolution. The BTC community is very very aware of this. And, obviously, competition in the marketplace will be fierce to meet this need as crypto inevitably becomes interoperable and functional in the actual global consumer marketplace (hence, why I always point to Enterprise Solution crypto candidates as your first entry into this field as this is the most pressing initial need and most competitive - i.e. producing the best options - sector). Now, BTC is working very diligently with the Lightning Network people to vastly increased transaction times. (
EDIT: I should also add, BTC becoming fairly impractical at the small transaction is a sign that BTC needs innovation - i.e. not really aligned w/ one of most prominent stated goals in White Paper. Anyhow, see this snippet for a very brief discourse from 
within the crypto-media sphere: 
https://cointelegraph.com/news/can-bitcoin-claw-its-way-back-to-being-a-payment-system)The question is: Will it be fast enough to be relevant with their competition? I don't personally think so 
but it will do enough to entrench the BTC brand. And, it will do enough to support another significant Bull run. And, this moral compass nonsense from these economic elites is laughable to me. It is now widely known laundering or other nefarious activities accounts for less than 1% of BTC's transactions. And, man, I've certainly never heard of criminal rings laundering US Dollars. That would be something! (I know he gets into that in the next paragraph...but, one can't simply dismiss the placing the dollar in a superior light. His point is roughly: Only criminals have large amounts of $100 bills. What he is failing to overlook here is what that opinion demonstrates about the inherent economic inequality in the USD dominated economy - not to mention such a telling opinion from a man who clearly views himself as an economic elite. Everyone should have opportunities to hold large amounts of $100 bills. I digress.) More to the point, as well, I think a better and more mature question from within the crypto-sphere is: Do soft forks and hard forks present problems for gen 1 blockchain legacies and/or adoptees? OR do they solidify their standing (Think BTC Gold, BTC Cash, Ethereum Classic) Is the Smart Contract, POS, and integrated hybridized and evolving systems more keen on gaining signficant marketshare? If so, and/or if it is possible, how will this impact BTC and its legacy? OR, are we going to see an entire derivative field - i.e. the Tangle (Iota) or Hashgraph - become the new highway and new market? Nobody knows the answers to these questions. We'll have to wait and see.
Bitcoin, by contrast, has no intrinsic value at all. Combine that lack of a tether to reality with the very limited extent to which Bitcoin is used for anything, and you have an asset whose price is almost purely speculative, and hence incredibly volatile. Bitcoins lost about 40 percent of their value over the past six weeks; if Bitcoin were an actual currency, that would be the equivalent of a roughly 8,000 percent annual inflation rate.
Except, it absolutely does. How can supposedly smart people continually misrepresent this with definitiveness and arrogance?!? Not to mention the overt and negligent arrogance of '...to the limited extent to which Bitcoin is used for anything...' The core principle of helping millions of people across the globe enter and actually partake in a global economy is most definitely being lived daily. The ramifications of this can not be overlooked and a GDP/GNP economist isn't necessarily the one to help us see this.
Market Cap: $177,173,193,097USD
Market Share: 33.4%
Crypto Total Market Cap: $529,941,664,588USD
We really don't need the almighty Fed, the US Government, and the global banking cartel to secure our understanding of an acceptable reality. I completely understand people have a more solidified grounding when their government is backing their reality. And, there's definitely room for ideological and ontological differences here. But, how can this author say with one breath the US dollar isn't backed by anything other than a centralized and corruptible US government and has 'value' and BTC, whose technological backbone is already widely being used in mainstream society and has a ginormous marketcap and crypto marketshare 'has no intrinsic value'? There's a disconnect here. NOW, the cryptomarketplace is entirely juvenile and young and is utterly prone to wild swings - it is most definitely not your NYSE. BUT, until regulations become more instituted (and this will happen), that is the nature of the game. Oddly enough, it's entirely more approachable to the layperson because of this. 
When it comes to cryptocurrencies there’s an additional factor: It’s a bubble, but it’s also something of a cult, whose initiates are given to paranoid fantasies about evil governments stealing all their money (as opposed to private hackers, who have stolen a remarkably high proportion of extant cryptocurrency tokens). Journalists who write skeptically about Bitcoin tell me that no other subject generates as much hate mail.
This is a two-way street. To me, the most important nugget in the article: there is a divide in the human realm. The quicker we resolve this or simply accept it the better. AND, the hostilities most likely come from being told what is right, what is going to happen, and injecting what the marketplace calls 'FUD' on the regular. There's a better way to have the conversation. There's definitely wisdom in approaching with deft caution. And, if you're a Zen Buddhist of certain traditions, you may just say there's wisdom in believing none of it. Either way, I highly highly doubt any of what he proposes will happen in a manner he seems to desire. Time will tell.