Peter Crisp wrote:What's going to happen to the value of bitcoin once they're all mined? I don't understand what's backing the actual value of the currency.
Is that even a sensible question or again am I missing someone really obvious?
To me it just seems like a made up currency (via some funky coding to make it look a bit complicated) that people have just for some reason decided is worth loads and when it all get's mined will become worthless once people realise it's all a pile of bollocks.
Please feel free to mock me if I am completely missing the point.
Is this another Poppy crash in the making?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
The intent is that the value would go up, as the supply decreases. This is done on purpose to be in contrast to currency today where governments can just print as much as they want and cause inflation, like what happened in Germany after WWI or more recently in Zimbabwe.
It is a made up currency, but all currency is basically just made up. Gold has no real value outside of jewellery and some engineering applications, our actual money is just paper.
At the end of the day, if someone is willing to exchange a product or labour for your currency it's legitimate. One of the best comparisons I can make is probably to poker chips. Let's say you were some Chinese politician who wanted to move a large amount of your totally not stolen money from China to a safer place, like the USA. You could go into an MGM casino in Macau, convert your millions which might take up a few briefcases into a few hand fulls of poker chips and then fly to Las Vegas walk into the MGM grand and exchange your chips there back to real currency. The chips themselves are worthless plastic, but they become valuable because they make it easy to move money around discretely, and because they can be converted back to real money easily. Same thing with bitcoins
Bitcoin and other crypto currencies were designed to get around a few issues that exist with modern currency and banking, but may not have actually solved these problems.
- Cost: Sending money from one place to another is very expensive if you are doing it with real money. In ye old times when you had to hire armed guards to prevent the likes of Jack Sparrow and other pirates from stealing your gold that made sense, not so much when it's just a bunch of code moving from one banks computer to another. Bitcoin was supposed to be cheaper, although now that there are so many people using it fees for transactions seem to be skyrocketing.
- Privacy: It's supposed to be like a virtual version of cash, preventing banks or other organizations being able to know every detail about how you spend your money, something that seemed more and more likely with the idea that currency would become digital only. This is both good and bad, because it, like cash, also makes bitcoins attractive to criminals and people who want to evade taxes or move large amounts of funds off shore.
- Manipulation: Because there is a fixed supply of the coins and more can't be created it means your coins should (in theory) never loose value like cash due to inflation.
Right now, bitcoin is hyper inflated, it started off as this ideal of having a currency you could use freely, and have trust in as it's free from manipulation, but it got taken up by criminals selling drugs and other crap, and is now being speculated on massively. It's been totally perverted from it's original intention, or at least the stated intention behind it.
In other news, I got another steam trading card, and thought I'd look through to see how much some of these are worth...
$2!
All my other ones are from $0.10 to $0.25, is this thing rare?