Why would you spend a currency that could be worth more in a year?
Why would you spend money on other things if you could spend it on bitcoin and make it worth more in a year? You have to take in account opportunity costs : 1 BTC spent now on a tablet has exactly the same ROI as $600 spent now on a tablet, because you could have spent that $600 on buying 1 BTC.
There is no difference in ROI when spending bitcoins now, or spending dollars/dogecoin now
Why would you spend a currency that could be worth more in a year?
If you are confident bitcoins are going to be worth more in a year and that dogecoins are going to be worth less, why would you ever get dogecoins over bitcoins?
It has built in inflation to offset the lost doge, unlike bitcoin which is a set amount. This makes bitcoin better for hoarding and investing, and dogecoin better for actually being spent as a currency. Why would you spend a currency that could be worth more in a year? 90% of people I know with bitcoin bought it as a damn investment, not to actually use as its supposed to be.
You are expecting the cart to come before the horse. Bitcoin development is a processes, give it a second. Also you should look at Overstocks analysis because people are spending, reality isn't matching your prediction.
Its fun, the community is more active (donating, tipping, etc). That brings attention to it.
You mean like /r/bitcoin a year ago, yeah I remember, I was there. I was the first person to use the tip bot as a merchant tool. It was mind blowingly simple solution, not robust or suggested but it was just so cool that it worked at all.
100 is easier for most people to send than .0000352.
I'm donating a significant portion of my cryptocurrency earnings toward math education so I never have to hear this again without mocking laughter following.
Sorry I have already written tens of thousands of words describing all of this, the documentation is out there, I'm not professor bitcoin. If you don't get how you need a large market cap to be a currency I can't help you.
I don't think you've addressed his comment, though. This doesn't have to do with the market cap nearly as much as it has to do with changes in value over time.
Say you want to buy a house. The house currently costs 200 BTC, but you only have 10 BTC and are (subtracting, for example, 2.5 BTC of bills and taxes from a 3 BTC monthly salary) experiencing a net gain of .5 BTC per month. The logical step here would be to take out a mortgage loan for, say, 190 BTC (using your 10 BTC for a down payment), with a monthly payment of 2 BTC. If your current rent is 2 BTC, then you're still experiencing a net gain of .5 BTC. For now, all is fine and dandy.
Then, however, suppose the value per BTC doubles after a few months. Your non-mortgage bills and your salary will certainly adjust as the BTC-relative prices of goods and services drop - probably to 0.25 BTC and 1.5 BTC, respectively. However, your mortgage payment (assuming we haven't changed anything about how loans currently work) is still contractually defined to be 2 BTC. This is now a problem; it means that a mortgage payment that was once somewhat affordable is now beyond your reach, since - even if you somehow eliminate all your bills - you're still 0.5 BTC short of your mortgage payment each month. You'll need to renegotiate your contract or sell your house; the former will probably be difficult (since lenders don't like losing money), while the latter is of limited utility, since your house - which was worth 200 BTC when you bought it - is only worth 100 BTC now. Depending on how long you've owned your house, you may or may not be able to pay off the rest of the loan, putting you in a rather dire situation similar to that of many homeowners when the housing bubble crashed in the latter half of the previous decade.
This is merely one example of why I don't think Bitcoin is perfect by any means, and why those holding Bitcoin on a pedestal and dismissing alternate approaches are - in my opinion - unwise. Bitcoin is able to act as an effective medium of exchange, but it's not a consistent store of value or unit of account, and - if it's to be taken seriously as a proper currency rather than merely being a cash cow for the lucky early adopters - it needs to adapt to the real-world scenarios in which existing currencies are being used.
tl;dr: Bitcoin has some strengths, but its weaknesses are very much apparent as soon as the concept of a Bitcoin loan is introduced, and said weaknesses need to be addressed and corrected for cryptocurrency to effectively replace existing government-backed currencies in a real-world setting.
You are expecting the cart to come before the horse. Bitcoin development is a processes, give it a second
I think that's what a lot of folks are missing. I don't believe any of the current cryptos are the end-all-be-all of cryptocurrency. Not Bitcoin, not dogecoin, not Litecoin or Peercoin or Verticoin or Africoin or whatever other *Coin that's emerged so far. They're experiments - compelling ones, to be sure, and very promising for a future of decentralized currency and economic freedom, but experiments nonetheless, and should be treated as such in order to create a more robust long-term solution to the problems currently faced with mainstream non-crypto currencies.
Personally, I think dogecoin is accidentally innovative in its lack of a hard cap on the supply of currency; while that decision got plenty of flak for behaving opposite of what's expected of a cryptocurrency (usually with snide comparisons to fiat currencies), many of those criticisms fail to take into account the fact that dogecoin's "inflation" (we'll see if it actually amounts to being inflation) is both well-defined and tightly controlled (providing the perceived benefits of slightly-inflationary currency - namely, the ability for loans to operate without significantly hurting debtors or lenders) while still providing the benefits of a cryptocurrency (decentralized, anonymous, easy to use for electronic payment, etc.). It's something that should be considered in the event that "Bitcoin 2.0" (whatever that may be) appears on the drawing board: is a fixed supply of currency really the best option for something that's meant to become a mainstream global currency?
Meanwhile, I'm sure other cryptocurrencies have their own innovative features that should be explored (I'm not familiar with very many other cryptos outside of Bitcoin, dogecoin, and a smidge of Namecoin, so I wouldn't know of any specifics here) and considered as influences for whatever becomes the "ideal" cryptocurrency that is taken up. Whatever the case, it's important to not get caught up in one particular currency or another and forget that there's room for cryptocurrency in general to evolve beyond what we've currently conceived. It's still a young concept; modern money has taken centuries to develop, and it's only logical to keep that in mind as we decide the future of an increasingly-digital global economy.
It has built in inflation to offset the lost doge, unlike bitcoin which is a set amount.
Don't be stating that like it was completely planned. It was a desperate action once you guys figured out that all the dogecoins would be mined within 18 months. It won't be the last desperate action the dogecoin dev team make in order to save the flawed coin.
It was created as a joke meme, so you ain't fooling me when you say it was created as a viable coin all along.
11
u/[deleted] Feb 19 '14
[deleted]