Doesn't it seem strange that there hasn't been a Goldfinger attack on smaller altcoins, since a small fraction of the mining infrastructure of larger coins (mining ownership is highly skewed) could be used to get 51% mining bandwith for some altcoins?
Do you think some other transaction verification methods of altcoins (like IOTA) are strictly better than that of Bitcoin?
You mentioned that 600B is too much for the fundamental value of all cryptos. How would you value it instead? One order of magnitude less? What is your response to critics like me who claim that, at best (i.e., using the best aspects of all cryptos and ignoring all disadvantages like volatility), any cryptocurrency's value is limited to:
(i) anonymous transactions (e.g., monero). (The catch-22 is that when illicit activities and/or market cap increase, the probability for fiat-crypto exchanges being banned increases.) Of course sometimes the need for anonymity doesn't mean that it's for anything illegal, and one could argue the morality of certain illegal transactions (e.g., victimless crimes, sidestepping authoritarian governments). At the other side of the coin, one can also reach pseudo anonymity in fiat. My main point is: Almost all transactions that most people typically engage in, however, have very tiny upside when they are anonymized.
(ii) transactions that are committed without the possibility of dispute. This is also possible in fiat (e.g., credit card gift cards) but not often used since most people want intermediaries to resolve disputes.
(iii) disassociation from fiat inflation. After a reasonable point of wealth, nobody should store most of it in cash anyway. In most nations, inflation only affects cash-on-hand as a net negative return on investment. The cash-on-hand shouldn't be that big and is spent very quickly (inflation doesn't affect it much). If there is western geopolitical instability, the incentives may change for miners, and the security and reliability of any crypto currency is in question. At the same time, the ultimate "doomsday resource" has been precious metals in the hearts & minds of the general population for millenia. Also, instability carries the risk of EMP strikes and other infrastructure vulnerabilities that affect crypto. One could also argue that a Western doomsay scenario is extremely unlikely. Admittedly, the crypto resilience of abusive governments in the developing and third worlds is harder to criticize.
My overall claim is that crypto does have its practical use cases, but those are rare & extremely overrated (especially by the dogmatic/idealistic Libertarian/Anarchist group).
That's a lot of questions, so forgive me if I don't respond to all of them. It doesn't really surprise me too much - Bitcoin was as small as those altcoins at one point and while there have been attacks, it has successfully survived. It relies on the economic principles behind game theory, which is interesting seeing them in practice.
I am not qualified to say if other technologies are strictly superior to Bitcoin. What I can say in a simplified sense is that generally nothing is as it sounds (e.g: white papers tend to overexaggerate the possibilities). Once we get into more practical applications, it will be easier to say what is or isn't superior. There are plenty of times where the technologically superior option has lost out to ease of use, better UI, and a number of other factors.
Fair value is impossible to determine accurately, but I'll likely be estimating a range for Bitcoin at some point and then based off that, you could theoretically calculate a range for the cryptocurrency market as a whole after using a certain dominance level for Bitcoin.
My response to such critics is you're generally right. Most people clearly don't care about privacy given that most people don't use private browsers, they use Facebook and Google, they give away their information to unknown websites just for a free PDF, etc. Most people do want consumer protections in place as you mention (an intermediary for dispute).
Lack of inflation is overexaggerated too for a number reasons, some of which you mentioned and some of which you left out (e.g: interest rates generally offset inflation rises too). I never cared for doomsday resource just because likely only food or water will matter then.
There are use cases we haven't imagined yet though. Just this platform (Steemit) illustrates that possibly something awesome can be created with magical internet money (I say possibly because it depends on people investing in the platform and on less rampant abuse, both factors which I question if 1) we see altcoins crash and 2) we don't see more automated ways to prevent abuse).
Even if we just look at the peer-to-peer transaction currencies, there are three major use cases
Obviously we really aren't close to #2 or #3 yet, but that's the point of innovation. I'm more interested in what Bitcoin will look like in 20 years if I'm being honest, assuming it survives (which is likely going to depend on how gridlocked it becomes due to decentralization).
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Thanks for taking the time to respond with your detailed and honest answers. I find your videos very interesting, even though I don't trade crypto.
Even if we were at that stage, why would they be superior to equivalent fiat services? I don't see the "value-add" of using crypto over fiat for those cases.
After I wrote my questions, I actually found a more eloquent critique of crypto use cases: https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100
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