eufo wrote:dualstow wrote:
Interesting read. Damn that board looks young!
That's a really sad read. Pump and dump early adopters are the real winners here. Greedy fools will be the losers. I suppose that's the way with most things.
Everyone is trying to get the most happiness they can given their limited resources in life. So to me it is less about the greed being the differentiating attribute of winners and losers. We are all being greedy. So since greed isnt explanatory here, lets move on to your other points...
Re "pump and dump": For certain there are some individuals that are trying to pump the USD price of bitcoin up up up. And some of those are pumping for purposes of selling. But
so what? Isnt that the case for any stock, bond, gold, business, restaurant, asset, book publisher, etc?
Re "early adopters are the real winners here": Early adopters are
always the winners in a venture that is successful. But they are also the ones that took on the risk before there was any momentum around that venture. Microsoft investors in the early days? Harry Browne in his gold call in the 70s? Early adopters of ideas and investments reap the benefits of their risky call when it pays off.
I assume your argument to that point would be that early adopters will cash out at some point during a peak perhaps. Again, how is this different than anything else? Harry sold his gold after it went up dramatically (and thus how the PP came to be). People sell MSFT stock at peaks. That these early adopters are profiting from selling at peaks doesnt mean that gold or MSFT doesnt have value in the future.
These points do not have explanatory power. So we are left with the real question when determining the value of bitcoin or anything else:
To what degree will people perceive value/utility from this in the future?
This question can be used to explain why I perceive current (and future) value in gold, stocks and bitcoin. It also explains why I believe future value of many (all?) of the ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) and altcoins are likely to trend to zero.
Since all value and predictions in the future are subjective I could be wrong. But Ill be wrong because of incorrect predictions of utility and not because I used the irrelevant factors of greed, whether someone was pumping it or whether early adopters profited as determining factors.