What a load of BULLSHIT

For some reason this article has made me angry, it feels like it's just one of those articles to gain popularity because it's something that's going against the curve: https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/nouriel-roubini-blockchain-has-broken-its-promises-20180126.

It made me mad enough to actually respond.

Now, compare this real and ongoing fintech revolution with the record of blockchain, which has existed for almost a decade, and still has only one application: cryptocurrencies. Blockchain’s boosters would argue that its early days resemble the early days of the internet, before it had commercial applications. But that comparison is simply false. Whereas the internet quickly gave rise to email, the world wide web, and millions of viable commercial ventures used by billions of people, cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin do not even fulfill their own stated purpose.

I'll firstly correct that by saying it currently has only one application: cryptocurrencies. This by no means validates that it's the only application that will ever be built ontop of blockchain technology. The reason the internet moved faster is because the development paradigm was not very much different compared to what existed before, people use to develop applications that communicated between machines, it was relatively the same concept.

Enter blockchain, now developers need to wrap their heads around Cryptography and decentralisation - this is a learning curve and it WILL take time, it will take more time than the internet did because it's so vastly different to write code that runs on ALL the servers, versus writing code that runs on a single server. The good news is - this is being improved, look at Ethereum, look at NEO and look at EOS, these all strive to simplify development. Hell, I'm posting this to another application: Steemit, does Nouriel Roubini even know about this? "The Front Page of the Internet" has a viable contender that literally pays you to generate content and it's not costing any one any money!

As a currency, bitcoin should be a serviceable unit of account, means of payments, and a stable store of value. It is none of those things. No one prices anything in bitcoin. Few retailers accept it. And it is a poor store of value, because its price can fluctuate by 20-30% in a single day.

There are sites that price items in Bitcoin, the darknet is full of them - there are also a few on the clearnet, there's even a marketplace on Cryptopia. The author simply looks at websites that stand to lose from Cryptocurrency adoption, obviously they will not implement it, or price it - because they are scared of it!

Few retails accept it - Man, I'm in South Africa - Payfast accepts Bitcoin as payment - which means that 33000 retailers in South Africa accepts it.

The price fluctuates because it's STILL low - compare the marketcap of cryptocurrencies with gold, and have a look at the difference, the volatility will dissappear when adoption reaches critical mass, one or two people won't be able to affect the price this easily when they sell.

Worse, cryptocurrencies in general are based on a false premise. According to its promoters, bitcoin has a steady-state supply of 21 million units, so it cannot be debased like fiat currencies. But that claim is clearly fraudulent, considering that it has already forked off into three branches: bitcoin cash, litecoin, and bitcoin gold.

Please, these forked coins have nothing to do with Bitcoin. It's not the same as inflation - a forked coin does not drop the value of the original - I guess the same argument could be made against FIAT currencies, right? I mean, what forked to create the YEN, or the USD. Oh nothing did, they just print new dollar notes whenever the hell they want to, even if new cryptos come out it doesn't affect BTC, have you noticed? The value keeps going up!? Zoom out on that graph, stop looking at the last week, or month, look at it from the beginning.

Besides, hundreds of other cryptocurrencies are invented every day, alongside scams known as “initial coin offerings,” which are mostly designed to skirt securities laws.

Before regulation the same shit happened with shares, have you seen the wolf of wallstreet?

As is typical of a financial bubble, investors are buying cryptocurrencies not to use in transactions, but because they expect them to increase in value.

This is true, a large majority of people do this - but I mean a large amount of people buy south african rand because they think the president will get kicked out and replaced with a new one, which will increase the value and make them millionaires, this is not cryptocurrency specific!

Indeed, if someone actually wanted to use bitcoin, they would have a hard time doing so. It is so energy-intensive (and thus environmentally toxic) to produce, and carries such high transaction costs, that even bitcoin conferences do not accept it as a valid form of payment.

Bitch please:

Erm, correction 1x BTC conference, not BTC confereneS - and it's all related to the high tx fees, their are two approaches to scale the network - the first is Lightning (it's running on the main-net), the other is increasing block size (see Bitcoin Cash), also live. This point is moot, it's being worked on and fixed!

Until now, bitcoin’s only real use has been to facilitate illegal activities such as drug transactions, tax evasion, avoidance of capital controls, or money laundering.

More bullshit: http://bitguru.co.uk/most-bitcoin-transactions-are-not-used-for-money-laundering/
Is your precious USD incapable of doing it?? How big a percentage of USD do you think is being used, a lot larger than 1% I'm sure, even if you discount the transactions that are paid in CASH.

Not surprisingly, G20 member states are now working together to regulate cryptocurrencies and eliminate the anonymity they supposedly afford, by requiring that all income- or capital-gains-generating transactions be reported.

Good luck getting around the Onion Routing Protocol, ZK-Snarks and Monero!

After a crackdown by Asian regulators this month, cryptocurrency values fell by 50% from their December peak. They would have collapsed much more had a vast scheme to prop up their price via outright manipulation not been rapidly implemented. But, like in the case of the sub-prime bubble, most US regulators are still asleep at the wheel.

Erm, turned out to be bullshit FUD anyway - 'member? Wow since December you say?? What happened since November, refresh my memory ? The crash was manipulation from some bad-acting koreans you dumbshit, not the "prop up".

Since the invention of money thousands of years ago, there has never been a monetary system with hundreds of different currencies operating alongside one another.

Yeah, since the invention of the calculator there has never been an electronic device that could communicate with another one over the air - but there is now, so what's your point?

The entire point of money is that it allows parties to transact without having to barter. But for money to have value, and to generate economies of scale, only so many currencies can operate at the same time.

I don't know man, I go to a market with cash and barter with people all day, it happens.
Only so many currencies can operate at the same time - How do you know this - has it ever been tested? and if so, who cares - some will goto zero, if they don't serve a purpose they won't be used, easy.

In the US, the reason we do not use euros or yen in addition to dollars is obvious: doing so would be pointless, and it would make the economy far less efficient. The idea that hundreds of cryptocurrencies could viably operate together not only contradicts the very concept of money; it is utterly idiotic.

Again - ridiculous, you do use it when you import from a different country.

But so, too, is the idea that even a single cryptocurrency could substitute for fiat money. Cryptocurrencies have no intrinsic value, whereas fiat currencies certainly do, because they can be used to pay taxes.

Really, that's what gives it value? You can pay the people who keep the people in power to print the money and that gives it value - so it has value because your bank says it does - BTC has value because we ALL say it does (excluding you, but you'll see it one day).

Fiat currencies are also protected from value debasement by central banks committed to price stability; and if a fiat currency loses credibility, as in some weak monetary systems with high inflation, it will be swapped out for more stable foreign fiat currencies or real assets.

Have you even seen what Inflation & quantitive easing does? Dude - have you even seen Zimbabwe - those people are paying 5x as much for milk as they used to - they stay in queues at the bank for 2 days to withdraw "some" of their salaries - sometimes they stand there for 2 days, get to the front and are sent home because theres nothing in the bank!

As it happens, bitcoin’s supposed advantage is also its Achilles’s heel, because even if it actually did have a steady-state supply of 21 million units, that would disqualify it as a viable currency. Unless the supply of a currency tracks potential nominal GDP, prices will undergo deflation.

Hey bro, if it doesn't work - then we'll fix it, it's opensource btw. I don't know if you know this, but you can push changes to the repo and if there's consensus and everyone agrees it will be fixed. Is that really so hard to imagine?

That means if a steady-state supply of bitcoin really did gradually replace a fiat currency, the price index of all goods and services would continuously fall. By extension, any nominal debt contract denominated in bitcoin would rise in real value over time, leading to the kind of debt deflation that economist Irving Fisher believed precipitated the Great Depression. At the same time, nominal wages in bitcoin would increase forever in real terms, regardless of productivity growth, adding further to the likelihood of an economic disaster.

Again, if shit don't work - we vote to fix it. You are applying rules that are meant for inflationary FIAT currency to decentralised non-inflationary crypto currencies, new money = new rules - don't drive a nail with a bowling pin, use a hammer.

Clearly, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies represent the mother of all bubbles, which explains why every human being I met between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 2017 asked me if they should buy them. Scammers, swindlers, charlatans, and carnival barkers (all conflicted insiders) have tapped into clueless retail investors’ FOMO (“fear of missing out”), and taken them for a ride.

Are you saying people DIDN'T talk about the internet, no one was so amazed by Google that they can get answers to almost anything immediately - word of mouth marketing is strong, it's annoying when you assume that everyone other than you is stupid. You know the hedgefunds etc. are starting to see the value, but you want to go against the grain.

As for the underlying blockchain technology, there are still massive obstacles standing in its way, even if it has more potential than cryptocurrencies. Chief among them is that it lacks the kind of basic common and universal protocols that made the internet universally accessible (TCP-IP, HTML, and so forth).

Dude, I don't know if you know this, but TCP-IP is a layer built on top - same as LN is a layer being built on top of BTC, again - different paradigm, new unheard of problems to be solved - it WILL take longer, but it's being done.

More fundamentally, its promise of decentralised transactions with no intermediary authority amounts to an untested, Utopian pipedream.

It's not untested, it's being tested right now. There is a intermediary authority - it's the software, it's the nodes, it's the miners - software consensus is the authority - and you can't cheat it, you can't censor it - and most of all you can't shut it up with your bullshit ramblings.

So, forget about blockchain, bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies, and start investing in fintech firms with actual business models, which are slogging away to revolutionise the financial-services industry. You won’t get rich overnight; but you’ll have made the smarter investment.

Yeah dude - keep telling people to invest in companies that will be replaced completely by the blockchain - I don't think they'll get mad and find you in public one day after you told them to lose everything.

What a load of FUD!

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