[S-99]

The fact that you can use fractions of bitcoins doesn't help dealing with deflation.

The issue with deflation isn't that "oh, I can't buy/sell bitcoins because they are so expensive", it's that when you have any quantity of them, spending them is worse than not spending them. Why would you want to sell something that is going to be more valuable some time later?

I disagree with your point that it doesnt matter to be able to be able to spend fractions of a bitcoin. The reason this matters is it could have been something easily forgotten from the bitcoin protocol. Sorry if i wasn't quite so clear with that earlier, i was thinking of what if bitcoin didn't have it's own version of pennies. That would be a radical factor leading to people hoarding because they had too. What would you do then if you didn't want to hoard? By a car? 

Supposing bitcoin gets adopted as a standard currency, why do you think it won't deflate with time?

Deflating with time? You actually care about it deflating over the long term where i only care about the short term. It's current deflation is unlikely to last. Which is why it's a mistake to hoard bitcoin currently. There's temporary hoarding of course, and that's all i'd recommend given that the value could drop at any time (which today it did).

Standard currency? What do you possibly mean? Global standard? A standard currency to be spent in your country? Or, just simply your "standard"? The question that you answer...it's rather unknown right now if it will deflate over the long term let alone even being adopted as a "standard" currency. The bitcoin market and politics for adoption are still changing everyday. Any kind of future outlook for bitcoin that anyone can come up with right now is sort of next to hopeful and wishful thinking since it's all difficult to foresee. I'd like to think that it will deflate over time. But, wishful thinking matters not at all with what bitcoin will be doing in its market. Who knows what it will happen with it's trends, values, and adoption rate; all of these are new and unseen before with this new and even unorthodox digital currency. We've seen digital currencies around before, and even their convertability to cash. But cryptology based, peer to peer networked, mining for them (this one is pretty alien, but was a good idea), not from a video game, intended to be used everywhere (internet and real life) all over the world, etc.. This is quite different than second life lindens or world of warcraft gold, etc.

[Phantom Hoover]

i do love how bitcoin advocates brush off most of the bull**** surrounding Bitcoin as just a trivial consequence of it existing in the real world rather than some platonic plane of anarcho-capitalism

[Nuke]

think of it as a beta test.

thats the problem with digital currency. you have to project what the state of digital technology will be 50 years from now. you can make predictions based on moores law. but what to do in case of unexpected breakthrough (such as intel putting out a quantum processor) or setback (we might hit the semiconductor wall before anticipated)? the system has to take that into account. hashing algorithm is supposed to grow more complex over time to keep up with technology, but if your predictions are wrong you either end up with machines that take forever to compute hashes. or you cause instability because machines are hashing so fast you end up corrupting transaction chains. these problems are mind boggling.

[Ghostavo]

The fact that you can use fractions of bitcoins doesn't help dealing with deflation.

The issue with deflation isn't that "oh, I can't buy/sell bitcoins because they are so expensive", it's that when you have any quantity of them, spending them is worse than not spending them. Why would you want to sell something that is going to be more valuable some time later?

I disagree with your point that it doesnt matter to be able to be able to spend fractions of a bitcoin. The reason this matters is it could have been something easily forgotten from the bitcoin protocol. Sorry if i wasn't quite so clear with that earlier, i was thinking of what if bitcoin didn't have it's own version of pennies. That would be a radical factor leading to people hoarding because they had too. What would you do then if you didn't want to hoard? By a car? 

I still fail to see your point regarding the fractions of bitcoins. The only thing that it does is that instead of a fixed maximum total of 21 million units of currency you have a larger amount of units of fixed maximum total. It is a non sequitur regarding deflation.

Supposing bitcoin gets adopted as a standard currency, why do you think it won't deflate with time?

Deflating with time? You actually care about it deflating over the long term where i only care about the short term. It's current deflation is unlikely to last. Which is why it's a mistake to hoard bitcoin currently. There's temporary hoarding of course, and that's all i'd recommend given that the value could drop at any time (which today it did).

Standard currency? What do you possibly mean? Global standard? A standard currency to be spent in your country? Or, just simply your "standard"? The question that you answer...it's rather unknown right now if it will deflate over the long term let alone even being adopted as a "standard" currency. The bitcoin market and politics for adoption are still changing everyday. Any kind of future outlook for bitcoin that anyone can come up with right now is sort of next to hopeful and wishful thinking since it's all difficult to foresee. I'd like to think that it will deflate over time. But, wishful thinking matters not at all with what bitcoin will be doing in its market. Who knows what it will happen with it's trends, values, and adoption rate; all of these are new and unseen before with this new and even unorthodox digital currency. We've seen digital currencies around before, and even their convertability to cash. But cryptology based, peer to peer networked, mining for them (this one is pretty alien, but was a good idea), not from a video game, intended to be used everywhere (internet and real life) all over the world, etc.. This is quite different than second life lindens or world of warcraft gold, etc.

By standard I mean a commonly accepted currency used by everyone. I don't think this will ever happen for a number of reasons, but the most obvious one, at least to me, is the issue I bring forth time and time again, deflation.

Now, the fact that bitcoin is not ever going to be a "standard" currency as I call it, means that it will fluctuate freely with whatever whims the bitcoin economy suffers. However, should it be "standardized", you have a problem. There is a limited, even shrinking amount of currency units available, and (hopefully) a growing economy. These two facts will inevitably lead to a deflation where the currency needs to keep up with its economy, otherwise you will eventually cease to make any meaningful transations.

[S-99]

I still fail to see your point regarding the fractions of bitcoins. The only thing that it does is that instead of a fixed maximum total of 21 million units of currency you have a larger amount of units of fixed maximum total. It is a non sequitur regarding deflation.

I was only bringing it up for a what if the bitcoin protocol was made without being able to spend anything less than a bitcoin. This what if the currency were like this would definitely make deflation of the currency something that would be problematic for those who do have to and will spend their money. It would result in hoarding even when you don't want to, or buying expensive items only In this what if scenario, yeah the currency would definitely fail

By standard I mean a commonly accepted currency used by everyone. I don't think this will ever happen for a number of reasons, but the most obvious one, at least to me, is the issue I bring forth time and time again, deflation.

Now, the fact that bitcoin is not ever going to be a "standard" currency as I call it, means that it will fluctuate freely with whatever whims the bitcoin economy suffers. However, should it be "standardized", you have a problem. There is a limited, even shrinking amount of currency units available, and (hopefully) a growing economy. These two facts will inevitably lead to a deflation where the currency needs to keep up with its economy, otherwise you will eventually cease to make any meaningful transations.

Thanks for answering what you meant by standard. I run into a bunch of tards of whom i later found out their version of standard is instead some complete off the wall personal beliefs, what they like to do, stuff they hate, what they wish, how cleveland steamers are great, pepperoni pizza is awesome, etc....in other words something that is hardly standard but too highly personally custom (stuff that only applies to that person). Glad to find out you did mean what you actually said

Back on topic. No comment, that's an awesome assessment of the likelihood of bitcoin becoming standard is low, and why it's better to have it nonstandard.

EDIT: I must add that i'm not entirely getting on the bitcoin wagon. I saw an opportunity to make money, so i took it. That was an easy $500 i made from selling today. I should have sold yesterday, but the moment i saw the price of bitcoin lowering today; i wasn't going to take any chances, i sold. Whether it be a really cool ****ty currency, there is money to be made off of it in the mean time. And i'm off the wagon.

[Phantom Hoover]

think of it as a beta test.

tell that to the people trying to build an economy on it, not me

[S-99]

I wouldn't even qualify bitcoin as being a test. It's quite not a test. A flawed implementation at most. I hope bitcoin 2.0 doesn't come out. I'd rather litecoin and peercoin mature and take it's place since those two were direct improvements over bitcoin. However, we probably will see a subtle bitcoin 2.0 (something tells me the people running bitcoin won't want to shut it down in favor of superior alternative cryptocurrencies; they're making money off of it after all, no one likes giving up an empire). Subtle would be adding more bitcoins to the ecosystem at most, and perhaps some improvements on the protocol. We'll see bitcoin continually along with the other cryptocurrencies.

[Luis Dias]

think of it as a beta test.

thats the problem with digital currency. you have to project what the state of digital technology will be 50 years from now. you can make predictions based on moores law. but what to do in case of unexpected breakthrough (such as intel putting out a quantum processor) or setback (we might hit the semiconductor wall before anticipated)? the system has to take that into account. hashing algorithm is supposed to grow more complex over time to keep up with technology, but if your predictions are wrong you either end up with machines that take forever to compute hashes. or you cause instability because machines are hashing so fast you end up corrupting transaction chains. these problems are mind boggling.

This is not what happens in bitcoin. Every week, the algorithm checks how fast the last searches were and reacts accordingly. So there is no need to "guess" how the future pans out, it is simply observed and corrected each week.

This means that a lot of new investments of certain people on hardware to "mine" stuff must be used as fast as possible, before the algorithm corrects itself to the new hardwares, and then they lose their window of opportunity. Lots of sad faces out there nowadays due to these shenanigans. And I could not give one gram of **** to it.

[S-99]

All of these potential problems with bitcoin, and none of them have happened. Bitcoin has proven itself to be pretty durable and even be worth something. The protocol could have been made better like what peercoin and litecoin show us, but it operates as intended. Really for now one of the big down sides if a wallet or an exchange gets hacked. I think it's safe to say it's operating as intended by the creator very well. Potential problems aren't actual problems until potential for that problem gets met. The problem with digital currency probably won't happen since no one's had an issue with it over the years bitcoin has been around (not many years, but it wasn't born yesterday). Perhaps issues with mining corruption will be prevalent in the future. I just don't think so. Bitcoin put into implementation has been a success. The technical intricacies of bitcoin has also been a success.

However, people saying that digital currency has no intrinsic value is starting to get old. Bitcoin definitely has extrinsic value, otherwise you couldn't spend it. Bitcoin has intrinsic value, and having intrinsic value doesn't just get down to simply being able to touch and hold something. I liked my bitcoin a lot when i had them. I knew it had worth, and it was going to make me money. And how dare we tell people who do have bitcoin it has no intrinsic value (i'm not offended, i'm talking about miners and people who actually use the currency, i don't hardly apply to this since i was a temporary bitcoin trader). When a miner gets a bunch of bitcoin coming from mining, people are going to tell me that they don't have any favoritism, like, appreciation, and use for what they were able to mine and what they can turn that into?

None of us are bitcoin miners, and as far as i know i'm the only guy in the thread who actually bought some bitcoin and had them in my possession (i bought cheap and sold when it was high, i hope other people got in on it). To assume that digital currencies are intrinsicly valueless; that's just too much to assume from otherwise people that don't know. Digital goods do have intrinsic value, and intrinsic value is more than just about the physical. The intrinsic value of bitcoin is all the goods and services that can be bought and bartered for by using it. That's a lot of services and stuff you can get with bitcoin right off the bat, and it's increasing.

[Luis Dias]

The phrase "bitcoin has no intrinsic value" refers to the simple fact that it is uncontrolable by governments and central banks. Anonymity is a key characteristic of the process (the fact that it is still possible to track people "down" is evidence that bitcoin is still version 0.something, not that it won't reach that level of purity in the future), and by having such a characteristic it can avoid being taxed and escape any means of control by the countries' government.

If this is so, and it is largerly so, it means that there is no incentive whatsoever by governments to have this currency made legal. It will only create an extremely fluid circulation market of capital from one corner of the planet to another escaping any border controls, etc. And because of these facts, I had seen this currency as dead-on-arrival. Of course, I missed the point that politics (especially in the US) is not about governments vs the people, but "people vs people", that politicians are corrupt and easily misled. That their friends are telling them to allow this to happen, that the chinese rich guys are circulating the cash outside of chinese controls to the rest of the world, that's it's all awesome and daisies, but eventually the hammers will start to fall down.

The chinese are already trying to kill off this thing, and it eventually crashed this last week. I think we'll see more of this.

[S-99]

I see what you mean why it has no intrinsic value.

After i made my $500 off of my get in get out market bubble scheme. I saw the value start to go down. It went way down. The lowest i think i saw it tank was $614 three or four days ago. Then it leveled off at $730. Tonight it's up to $940. I knew the value would go back down. But, i didn't think it'd go back up so soon. Debating buying some more.

[Mikes]

I see what you mean why it has no intrinsic value.

After i made my $500 off of my get in get out market bubble scheme. I saw the value start to go down. It went way down. The lowest i think i saw it tank was $614 three or four days ago. Then it leveled off at $730. Tonight it's up to $940. I knew the value would go back down. But, i didn't think it'd go back up so soon. Debating buying some more.

As an amateur speculant who got his first trading experience during the grand IT bubble over a decade ago, I can not tell you just how amusing such notions are.

Word of advice ...  write anything you spend / "invest" off as "teaching money", then it won't hurt as much when it is gone.

And before you start ... no, it will be gone. It's not so much about bitcoin, but rather about the amateurish notions you display here. i.e. no strategy, no diversification, only faith/hope in a single investment option while avidly watching for any course changes to react to - without any kind longterm strategy or safeguards.

My advice would be to buy some lottery tickets ... would give you a better chance at "winning big" than playing investment newbie with bitcoints lol.

[Luis Dias]

The right strategy at this kind of exponential casino investment is always selling a percentage of your gains at some x amount of time, always making sure you get out of the experiment richer than poorer, no matter how the future fares. And yeah Mikes is 100% correct, treat it as a lost fund.

[S-99]

As an amateur speculant who got his first trading experience during the grand IT bubble over a decade ago, I can not tell you just how amusing such notions are.

Word of advice ...  write anything you spend / "invest" off as "teaching money", then it won't hurt as much when it is gone.

And before you start ... no, it will be gone. It's not so much about bitcoin, but rather about the amateurish notions you display here. i.e. no strategy, no diversification, only faith/hope in a single investment option while avidly watching for any course changes to react to - without any kind longterm strategy or safeguards.

My advice would be to buy some lottery tickets ... would give you a better chance at "winning big" than playing investment newbie with bitcoints lol.

Previously, i did have a strategy, it may not have been much, and i did keep my head on straight through the whole thing too. But i just didn't see bitcoin being anything more than a short term investment which is why i was looking for the right time to react. I knew i wouldn't be winning big as i didn't invest that much so as also to make sure i didn't lose big either. My "faith" was more or less not seeing bitcoin get to $1300-$1400 (getting that high just didn't seem realistic). What i did know was that bitcoin had a few months of steady increase in value, where my brain clicked in saying easy fast money.

Now for getting back into it again, i would definitely say is riskier and forethought is harder to use here which more or less gets down to with the recent gain, and that i didn't formulate a plan yet, if one could even be formed, let alone a strategy. Finding out it's current trend definitely helps. But, something tells me this recent gain won't last too long, and not long enough for me to want to worry putting money out there again despite whatever trend x is. Bitcoin sounds pretty risky currently. At least for curiosity i'm still researching bitcoin trends because i'm still fascinated with it.

Yes there are better things to invest in, especially for the long term. I'm not disagreeing with mikes aside from him assuming that i'm trying to win big with bitcoin. You can't win big off of bitcoin unless you were an early miner, or bought them when they were $200 or less a coin. Since i'm neither of those, i would say realistically for myself that i'm not going to be making anything more than a few hundred dollars if not just a hundred dollars. That goes for the money i did make off of bitcoin and any future profit if i did buy more.

[Nuke]

think of it as a beta test.

tell that to the people trying to build an economy on it, not me

technologies seldom have a chance to mature and get all the bugs out before going to market. linux users have been happy running alpha and beta code for years. bitcoin is pretty much the same. this is forseeable, so it makes me wonder if bitcoin wont self destruct after they have the data they wanted. a clever design is one that accounts for the incompetence and other quirks that come with human nature.

reguardless bitcoin mining has become big buisness. people have actually gone out and had asics made to mine coins. it costs a couple million to have an asic made, thats not including design time, thats just the fab cost. you make it back by doing a large run selling the surplus chips to other miners (you of course keep most of them for yourself). that leaves people who use general purpose cpus and gpus pretty much in the dust, and resources wasted on chips that do one thing only. fpga miners work pretty good but cant go as fast and use more power than an asic but are flexible (say the algorithm changes, rewrite the "hardware") and can be re-purposed when mining dies out.

instead of backing currency with gold or debt, you are backing it with flops (or iops). it doesn't make sense to use all those flops to solve artificially complex algorithms. taking a page from seti@home, folding@home, etc, why not instead use those cycles for scientific computing power, you could run fusion research simulations or run climate models with that power. so while in the process of making the rich richer, and the poor poorer, you can get some globally useful data out of it. because of the wide variety of algorithms, you also get away from the custom hardware being made for mining, and instead have to commit general purpose cpu assets to mining, which will drive cpu innovations (instead of having a chip that solves one problem).

so there is room for improvement. or we could just use the beta test version. human nature always takes the stupid path.

[Mr. Vega]

The phrase "bitcoin has no intrinsic value" refers to the simple fact that it is uncontrolable by governments and central banks. Anonymity is a key characteristic of the process (the fact that it is still possible to track people "down" is evidence that bitcoin is still version 0.something, not that it won't reach that level of purity in the future), and by having such a characteristic it can avoid being taxed and escape any means of control by the countries' government.

If this is so, and it is largerly so, it means that there is no incentive whatsoever by governments to have this currency made legal. It will only create an extremely fluid circulation market of capital from one corner of the planet to another escaping any border controls, etc. And because of these facts, I had seen this currency as dead-on-arrival. Of course, I missed the point that politics (especially in the US) is not about governments vs the people, but "people vs people", that politicians are corrupt and easily misled. That their friends are telling them to allow this to happen, that the chinese rich guys are circulating the cash outside of chinese controls to the rest of the world, that's it's all awesome and daisies, but eventually the hammers will start to fall down.

The chinese are already trying to kill off this thing, and it eventually crashed this last week. I think we'll see more of this.

When they say that the Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, it doesn't really get the point across. All commodities, even gold, are only worth what someone else will pay for it. What they mean by it having no intrinsic value is that it does not have what a true currency has: something to give it value beyond its value as a fashionable medium of exchange or as a purely speculative asset. All true currency is either backed by taxation or by debt; they are valuable because you need the money to settle your liabilities owed to your government or to your bank, who will only accept payment in that currency.  THAT'S why the value of token credit and fiat money has been on average so much more stable than any commodity means of exchange, and it's why bitcoin simply cannot assume all the functions of a true currency. It's useful as a medium of exchange where evading the law is a big enough issue to put up with its instability, and it's the ultimate speculative asset (terminal value of zero), but its success so far has been because it doesn't do what a true currency does. They moment anyone tries to use it like a true currency (creating debts or signing long term contracts with payment commitments denominated in bitcoin), its built-in deflationary tendencies will push the currency into a debt deflation spiral followed promptly by hyperinflation as people realize that the now-deflated debts can't be paid (even if they could be enforced). A true currency must have an elastic supply that can expand and contract to meet the needs of its users and it needs an issuer that will take the currency back in exchange for settling liabilities to stabilize its value enough to make it workable in the long run. Bitcoin has neither.

Paul Krugman explains it more succinctly.

[Luis Dias]

The problem with words like "intrinsic" is their own realistic bias. It exposes the thought process behind it as thinking there is something like a TRUE currency or a TRUE X of any sort (like morality, etc.) that can only be standartized by a TRUE authority. This mode of thinking goes back to absolutism and was rightly shattered by Nietzsche and many more ever since. There was never an "intrinsic" value in paper money, and all the examples we have of hiperinflation mania in our history attest to this. Money is worth what the common conscience of the entire economy thinks it is worth. There are some issues here that are important to underline though. It is true that to make people believe that the currency is worth something and its worth will be stable, you will need "stories" and tradition. You need a kind of a mythology that convinces you that this money thing is really really stable and you should really really trust it. If these levels of trust reach a certain level, then the currency meets its own mythological objectives.

Bitcoin's price is now a fool's game, a proper bubble in Schiller's own terminology: a "fad". And we do know that speculation is what is driving most of the price right now.

[Mr. Vega]

The problem with words like "intrinsic" is their own realistic bias. It exposes the thought process behind it as thinking there is something like a TRUE currency or a TRUE X of any sort (like morality, etc.) that can only be standartized by a TRUE authority. This mode of thinking goes back to absolutism and was rightly shattered by Nietzsche and many more ever since. There was never an "intrinsic" value in paper money, and all the examples we have of hiperinflation mania in our history attest to this. Money is worth what the common conscience of the entire economy thinks it is worth. There are some issues here that are important to underline though. It is true that to make people believe that the currency is worth something and its worth will be stable, you will need "stories" and tradition. You need a kind of a mythology that convinces you that this money thing is really really stable and you should really really trust it. If these levels of trust reach a certain level, then the currency meets its own mythological objectives.

Bitcoin's price is now a fool's game, a proper bubble in Schiller's own terminology: a "fad". And we do know that speculation is what is driving most of the price right now.

Confederate money hyperinflation: because the states resisted all attempts by the central government at Richmond to levy taxes upon their populations the Confederacy was unable to create demand for its currency and so had to just keep pumping it out to squeeze what little purchasing power out of it that they could. As the war devastated the South the supply of goods fell which added to inflationary pressures.

Weimer Republic Hyperinflation: The result of a massive debt burden levied upon the German government NOT denominated in Marks. Due to the Treaty of Versailles Germany was not able to export resources like coal directly to acquire the foreign currency needed to pay the debts, so they had to print money for use on the international exchange market to acquire the funds. The problem with doing this is that currency markets are sensitive to supply and demand like any other market and the astronomical amounts of debt Germany had meant the German government had to flood the market with Marks. This caused a collapse of the exchange rate of the Mark which sent the prices of goods imported to Germany through the roof at the same time the French had invaded the Ruhr and shut down Germany's main industrial center. That was what caused the hyperinflation - a foreign debt burden that could only be serviced by money printing and a collapse on supply - it was NOT domestic money printing that did it.

Zimbabwe - Same story as in Germany - foreign debt burden (from IMF loans) combined with a collapse in the food supply thanks to the disastrous land reform policies put in place by Mugabe.

To get hyperinflation, especially if you have a floating exchange rate, you either need a government that can't create demand for its paper money with taxes or you need a large foreign debt burden combined with a collapse in the supply of real goods. Otherwise, fiat paper money has a pretty decent track record. The value of paper money has very little to do with "mythology" and everything to do with the fact that you'll be imprisoned for tax evasion if you don't give the government some of its paper back every year.

[Luis Dias]

As I said, you need a convincing story to get inflation levels really close to 1, 2% a year. We have those convincing stories, and they are convincing exactly because they have a government behind them that has been historically commited to keep the inflation that low.

There are always justifications for any narratives that go outside the convention. Convincing stories. Note that by "convincing stories" I didn't say they were untrue in their basis. This is a bit irrelevant, what counts is the convincing aspect of it. And of course if the story is "robust" in the sense that you can't really detect falsehoods in it, then it is both probably a somewhat true story and a very convincing one.

There is no convincing story as of yet that manages to convince people what the right price of bitcoin should be. Should it be 1$? 1000$? 100.000$? There is some objectivity to it (it depends on the amount of its "market cap"), but it fluctuates wildly because no one really knows how large it will go or can go or will the governments let it go, it's guessing time.

[The E]

Given that the value of bitcoin has had a rather sharp drop (again), Charlie Stross wrote an opinion piece about it, which I completely agree with.

Like all currency systems, Bitcoin comes with an implicit political agenda attached. Decisions we take about how to manage money, taxation, and the economy have consequences: by its consequences you may judge a finance system. Our current global system is pretty crap, but I submit that Bitcoin is worst.

...

Libertarians love it because it pushes the same buttons as their gold fetish and it doesn't look like a "Fiat currency". You can visualize it as some kind of scarce precious data resource, sort of a digital equivalent of gold. Nation-states don't control the supply of it, so it promises to bypass central banks.

...

It's also inherently damaging to the fabric of civil society. You think our wonderful investment bankers aren't paying their fair share of taxes? Bitcoin is pretty much designed for tax evasion. Moreover, The Gini coefficient of the Bitcoin economy is ghastly, and getting worse, to an extent that makes a sub-Saharan African kleptocracy look like a socialist utopia, and the "if this goes on" linear extrapolations imply that BtC will badly damage stable governance, not to mention redistributive taxation systems and social security/pension nets if its value continues to soar (as it seems designed to do due to its deflationary properties).

To editorialize briefly, BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions. Which is fine if you're a Libertarian, but I tend to take the stance that Libertarianism is like Leninism: a fascinating, internally consistent political theory with some good underlying points that, regrettably, makes prescriptions about how to run human society that can only work if we replace real messy human beings with frictionless spherical humanoids of uniform density (because it relies on simplifying assumptions about human behaviour which are unfortunately wrong).

TL:DR; the current banking industry and late-period capitalism may suck, but replacing it with Bitcoin would be like swapping out a hangnail for Fournier's gangrene. (NSFL danger: do not click that link)