I have a new article up over at Let’s Talk Bitcoin which attempts to answer that question.
The feedback I have received so far (including the comments at LTB) makes it pretty clear that many adopters simply do not understand how, in general, economics or finance works or how developing countries struggle with credit expansion. And that is fine, but can be disastrous when making what amounts to investment decisions. Again, a vocal minority (majority?) of these adopters think they will be lounging on yachts and private islands because the price of bitcoin reaches $1 million.
And that likely will never play out for a variety of reasons that I have described in numerous articles.
Below is a list of pieces and papers that I have published covering these issues over the past three months in chronological order:
- Bitcoin Hurdles: the Public Goods Costs of Securing a Decentralized Seigniorage Network which Incentivizes Alternatives and Centralization (pdf)
- Learning from Bitcoin’s past to improve its future (pdf)
- Bitcoins: Made in China at Bitcoin Magazine (pdf)
- What Block Chain Analysis Tells Us About Bitcoin at CoinDesk
- What Dogecoin Must Do to Survive at CoinDesk (pdf)
- Will colored coin extensibility throw a wrench into the automated information security costs of Bitcoin? (also published at Business Insider)
- A Marginal Economy versus a Growth Economy at Let’s Talk Bitcoin
(pdf) - Can Bitcoin change from a bubble economy into a growth economy? at Let’s Talk Bitcoin (pdf)
- The Bitcoin Universe Now Resembles A Medieval Agrarian Economy at Business Insider (pdf)
- How to succeed in Bitcoin’s command economy at Let’s Talk Bitcoin (pdf)