Tuesday, September 4, 2018

Wow - great reply in the comment section of The Economist

Bitcoin is a network. It is not like any other asset. People are not trained to think correctly about this phenomenon unless they have training as physicist or mathematicians.
Please plot BTC price in a log-log plot. Not just log but log-log. What you would see is a straight line that goes up, up and up, with some relatively small deviation from general pattern. It is called a power law when you see such a trend. By the way you will need to use a time scale that has zero at genesis one (most available data sets have no data so early on). This is remarkable. Here the graph: https://imgur.com/gallery/mpxUoGR.
This cannot be due to chance. The value of BTC is based on some fundamental phenomenon. It is a network, like cities, the internet, systems of rivers and so on. Physicists are familiar with such complex systems.
The incredible usefulness and utility of BTC is that is a mathematical way to give value to a decentralized network that can transfer information from one place to another. It is encrypted, it is decentralized and if one could hack it, one could make billions of dollars overnight (crashing the system but still enriching fast an individual if he could sell the BTC fast enough). It has not been hacked so people give value to that. This happens with out conscious participation of the agents participating in the network but because the exchange is continuous and pervasive and not manipulated (with the exception of the not significant bubbles you see in the chart) the value increases with time as more participants join in. Please absorb all this and understand.
Before saying meaningless things about one of the most important financial and information theoretic innovations of all the time.

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