Bitcoin and Friends in 2017

By: Submissions

Greetings from Planet Krypto. We are the real deal, long-timer cryptographic-currency geeks; and today I’m gonna interview me, because I know what questions to ask. Please pardon the over-simplifications:

One: will Bitcoin continue to rise in price?
Yes, because consciousness of the deterioration of fiat currencies is growing. Three years ago, the notion that macroeconomic events would ultimately be the primary price-driver of cryptocurrency prices was almost unheard of. It’s now a no-brainer.
[And the Winklevoss Bitcoin ETF? Nooo era! Feel free to ask me.]

Two: can you briefly explain the difference between crypto-currencies and ‘Blockchain’?
Yes. Some ‘cryptos’ are ‘just’ currencies (and they all exist on blockchains); some cryptos (the ‘2.0s’) are smart-contract platforms that have an integral currency; some blockchains will serve solely as ledgers.

Three: how many cryptos are there?
Tee hee – about 4,000.

Four: how are the other 3,999 doing?
About 90% of all cryptos created thus far are dead, and about a half of the remainder are dying. Here’s the best list I know of: http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/coins/info/1001

Five: so . . . Bitcoin has won, so to speak?
Heck no! And this is the reason I’ve written this article. The percentage of total crypto market-cap held by the ‘altcoins’ has at times risen over 20, and I confidently predict it will rise far higher this decade.

Six: why would anyone want a crypto other than Bitcoin?
Because altcoins do non-Bitcoin stuff. The three categories are:

One, the ‘2.0’ smart-contract platforms mentioned above.
Two, the ‘privacy-centric coins,’ oriented to the provision of truly-untraceable transactions.
Three, the Everything Else category, which includes things like ‘country coins’ – Scotcoin – and cryptos with pegged values (!?), and corporate and government cryptos, and whatever else is bound to come along.

Seven: any other reasons why you wouldn’t own Bitcoin?
Yes, and it receives almost no attention from outsider journalists who write about cryptos:
Bitcoin faces a very serious technical hurdle born of its growing success: it can’t rapidly process large numbers of transactions. If you guys were crypto geeks, we’d be discussing ‘segwit’ and ‘the Lightning Network’ and ‘Teechan’; but suffice to say that if macroeconomic deterioration continues to pour billions of dollars of fresh capital into Bitcoin, it will simply choke.

Eight: so, is ‘scaleability’ the word we’re looking for here?
Yup. Whereas three or four years ago, the world was laughing at our pretensions that cryptos would not only become widely accepted, but would become a primary financial refuge from global economic turmoil, it’s now the case that we expect influxes of tens of billions of dollars, and that those influxes will result in ‘cascades’ of enormous quantities of capital into the likes of Ether and Monero and DASH specifically because these can be ‘scaled up’ to handle immensely larger numbers of transactions than Bitcoin can at present.

Nine: any advice for those intending to purchase Bitcoin or other?
This answer should really be a series of articles – let’s see what feedback I get.
Readers, Planet Krypto is the wild wild west west. It’s a madhouse of scammers and sociopathic sock-puppets – but the basics of setting up a ‘wallet’ to store cryptos won’t challenge anyone with good basic Internet skills – I bet your teenage niece can do it in an hour.
The advice we give people is to take a very serious approach to crypto security. We moreover suggest that general Internet security and crypto security be integral.

Next: using cryptos as instruments of exchange – as money – is as safe as cryptography. But trading cryptos on automated exchanges is not. 99% of the mainstream-press twaddle about The Dangers of Bitcoin concerns the hacking of exchanges.
The Tripartite Reality is: One: you can buy and secure some cryptos. Two: you then do or do not learn to use those as (post-Government-fiat) money. Three: you do or do not choose to learn to trade cryptos.

Ten: finally, any comment on the relationship between cryptos and terrorism?
Yes. It’s bad logic to deny what is true rather than frankly state your politics, and then defend those. Crypto geeks made the error of saying, ‘Prove that terrorists used Bitcoin!’ which implied that terrorists didn’t or wouldn’t use cryptos.
Of course they would, and probably do.
It’s just not the point. More ‘n more ‘n more regulations will no more work in this case than they did in The War on Drugs. A recent attack was enabled by a gun and a truck. The next one will be enabled by a pocket knife and a truck. The one following that will be enabled by a karate chop to the throat and a hot-wired station wagon. What are we gonna do? Ban hands and cars?
In this case, Tin-Foil-Hat Terry is spot on: governments are using the unimportant link between cryptos and terrorism to implement financial controls in desperate attempts to shore up a failing economic model.

Mark Blair is a libertarian political theorist with three decades of experience. His computer skills are awful, but the political implications of cryptos were immediately apparent to him. He belongs to an alliance of crypto geeks called ‘IndiaMikeZulu.’ You can contact him here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1579087.0

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