| - | This will happen again, as you know. Of coruse it will. It's not meant to be used as an investment vehicle and the greedy will get burned. Some lucky people will get rich. Some scammers too. It doesn't matter, unless you are one of them. None of this stops merchants from using it right now, who can limit their risk by using dynamic pricing using exchange APIs and automatically trading as soon as the sale is concluded. Large accounts can probably work out better deals for guaranteed prices on the exchange. Merchants will actually save money because the exchanges have a very low markup (e.g. 0.25-0.75%) compared to other means of payment like CC, there is no possibility for chargeback or fraudulent payments, no Paypal like always believe buyer regardless of sellers reputation' protection, the system being nearly instant worldwide etc. The same goes for buyers, no or very low transfer fees, instant payment, no hassle with middleman anywhere in the world. A market driven by greed will only peg them higher each day, until the fear hits, then it all comes crashing down as we saw this past weekend. So how is that different from any stock, bond, precious metals etc. market? All classical exchanges are driven by greed. Have they never come crashing down? You know they will keep doing that too. Sometimes it's called capitalism, sometimes it's theft on a massive scale blanketed in nebulous concepts like Quantitative Easing.Bitcoins definitely do have value. Their true value is the size of the economy using them. This is currently quite small, so the price on the exchanges is way overvalued, mostly because of speculation.At which point these two will reach parity I cannot say, but the concept is sound.The Bitcoin system has value if you are able to look beyond the hype, attacks, price movements, even current specific implementation. It's not just valuable as a tool for stability in the long run, the cutting of the middlemen and undesirable government meddling, but also as a proof of concept. We now know that this can be done and that there are a lot of people very interested in it, not just for the potential short term gains.If the current implementation turns out to be inadequate, or the deflationary model needs to be tuned or whatever, noone stops you from forking the code, it's open source. Multiple versions serving multiple markets could coexist. It also isn't necessarily aimed at replacing all classical fiat money, gold, whatever. It only needs enough merchants using it to be a valuable alternative. Even if the mail you quote is legit, which I highly doubt, at some point enough exchanges will exist to keep eachother honest. There are enough statisticians watching to notice anomalies. At some further point exchanges will no longer be strictly necessary because of market size.
| + | If only there were more clveer people like you! |
