It's probably my own conservativism speaking. The way I justified spending a bit of money on Bitcoin when all of this hype started up a few weeks ago was to imagine Bitcoin taking over Western Union's role in the market (which is a no-brainer...it's already happening, and is very, very, very likely to be the first casualty of Bitcoin...Western Union has no reason to exist in a world with widespread Bitcoin adoption and availability). That one little aspect of the financial industry alone justifies a several hundred dollar Bitcoin valuation (I was doing this math when it was trading at $200, so that looked like a no-brainer investment to me).
Then, when you start looking further up the chain...PayPal, Visa and MasterCard, gold and silver for value store, and you try to figure out how PayPal could beat Bitcoin in a free market. I can't see any way for PayPal to win. There's nothing PayPal does better than Bitcoin. Literally nothing, and Bitcoin does it for less. So, if we assume Bitcoin subsumes Western Union and PayPal, it's actually looking undervalued by a lot. If we follow that line on out, it begins to look more and more undervalued.
So, I like the method, but disagree with stopping at silver and money transfers. Those are the low-hanging fruit. Those are the things that will first feel the wrath of their customers for being more expensive and less convenient and more intrusive than Bitcoin. But, those aren't the only things that will be disrupted by Bitcoin. It just takes a little imagination to see that the market cap for Bitcoin is potentially the same as the market cap for every currency in the world.
It's damned near impossible to predict how this is gonna play out, but if it succeeds, Bitcoin is gonna be huge.
One problem I have is that moving numbers (account balances) around is not very difficult in principle. I don't see how Bitcoin has an especially defensible position in that respect. And since the marginal cost of transfers is low so should be the value ascribed. So Bitcoin might kill Western Union and the money transfer oligopoly but not capture much value doing so.
As to the advantages of centralized entities they have the support of the state, are better organized and can act unilaterally among others.
I'd like to see a decentralized system win for once but history has shown that centralized services almost always do.
"One problem I have is that moving numbers (account balances) around is not very difficult in principle. I don't see how Bitcoin has an especially defensible position in that respect."
Perhaps I lack imagination or ambition. I think it is an incredibly hard problem and I think it is a pretty defensible position. My biggest concern, as someone holding a little bit of Bitcoin, is that a competing cryptocurrency will win out in the end. But there currently is no such competitor. Litecoin is the nearest second fiddle to Bitcoin and it's nowhere near the same league, and provides no benefits over Bitcoin (except to people that want to mine with GPUs rather than ASICs).
"And since the marginal cost of transfers is low so should be the value ascribed. So Bitcoin might kill Western Union and the money transfer oligopoly but not capture much value doing so."
Yes, that's entirely true. But, there has to be enough value in Bitcoin the coin for Bitcoin the protocol to work for money transfers. If there are a billion dollars worth of transfers in the queue, then there needs to be a billion dollars worth of Bitcons in existence to make those transfers work. Maybe they would instantly go to zero in value after those transfers...if everyone cashed back out.
The value doesn't have to be captured for Bitcoin to be a success. Bitcoin isn't a business. It just needs to be better for some classes of problems than what currently solves the problems. And, the more I learn about Bitcoin, the more I realize that it is better for nearly every class of money problem than what the banks, the federal reserve, the credit card vendors, etc. have to offer.
"As to the advantages of centralized entities they have the support of the state, are better organized and can act unilaterally among others."
If a centralized entity can make something that is as good for users as Bitcoin, that'd be a believable scenario. But, short of making Bitcoin illegal (which could still happen in some places), I am beginning to believe we are past the point of anything being able to derail Bitcoin's rise. It's just too good for so many purposes to lose out to something that is so expensive, so inconvenient, so intrusive, and so abusive to users (the traditional banking and finance world).
If Bitcoin were merely an ethically better money (and I do think a decentralized money is more ethical), I wouldn't hold out any hope for it. But, it's an ethically better money that is cheaper and more convenient.
Anyway, it's not that I believe Bitcoin can't fail. It certainly can. It can go wrong in all sorts of ways. But, I can also imagine a scenario where it changes the world, and I'm pulling for that scenario.
It depends on what you define to be a competitor. There are many money transfer services, many of which aren't cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin has to compete with each of them.
> But, there has to be enough value in Bitcoin the coin for Bitcoin the protocol to work for money transfers.
The argument was that the value is de minimis because BofA Paybuddy is willing to transfer money (change some numbers) for 0.5%
> The value doesn't have to be captured for Bitcoin to be a success. Bitcoin isn't a business.
It needs to be captured if you are considering it an investment.
"It needs to be captured if you are considering it an investment."
I'm considering it a currency and a revolution.
I want to make money by building things for the new Bitcoin economy. The price of Bitcoin going up is just a pleasant side effect of rising popularity. Bitcoin going up doesn't provide new value to the world...building a new kind of money and the infrastructure to use that new money does provide value. A tremendous amount of it.
As a software developer, I've always had the ability to have the Internet give me money for very little effort (relatively speaking). What's interesting here is the power to change the world.
