If he really is just Smiling Dave back to rehash his same arguments then that’s just sad.
Cheer up, it’s not me.
…meet the regression theorem at some point in the future.
How can it magically acquires intrinsic value?
The former President of the Mises Institute AND its founder seem to be quietly coming around.
I expected an article by Lew defending bitcoins based on your balyhoo. All the link says is that he accepts DONATIONS of bitcoin. Note that you can’t pay for the Mises Institute products in bitcoin.
I think bitcoin is a fraud, doomed to fail by the regression theorem, and that only fools will touch it. But that’s if they have to pay for a bitcoin, or accept it in exchange for something valuable. If someone is willing to give you free bitcoins, take 'em, cash 'em in.
AJ and all you others, if you want to send me free bitcoins, I will graciously accept.
As for that computer store that accepts bitcoins, the Ithaca Hour had a bigger following for a few years. Then, like a game of Old Maid or Musical Chairs, the last one stuck with the Ithaca Hours lost.
BTW Kyle, have you read my blog articles on bitcoin?
“Widely accepted” objection quickly melting though the hands of adherents.
You must be joking.
BTW, I’ve stopped following the bitcoin threads here because:
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The trolls just keep on coming, not bothering to understand or address my objections to bitcoin. You see what they are resorting to now. Lew Rockwell is willing to take bitcoins, if he doesn’t have to give anything in return. But he won’t sell you a single book or T-shirt in exchange for bitcoins. They report that as him “slowly coming around”.
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I’ve stated my case quite clearly in my blog. All the interested reader has to do is go there, search for “bitcoin”, and he has it all.
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My researches into various forms of fools’ currency similar to bitcoin [published on my website, do a search for “Ithaca hour” to get you started] show that they may have a zombie like existence for a few years before collapsing into dust. The Ithaca Hour lasted 18 years. So the trolls can crow for 18 years. Meet you then.
Smiling Dave,
your excuses are becoming and more ridiculous. Last time you denied that Bitcoin is a medium of exchange. Now when LRC started accepting donations, you found another excuse. Noone here is taking your “arguments” seriously anymore. Those that were halfway coherent were refuted. The rest are fables which are better suited for a different type of publication.
I’ll just reiterate that Ithaca Hours are not a wannabe money, they are a wannabe money substitute, based on the US dollar, similarly to various LETS systems and mutual credit based on national currencies. As http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_currency says, their economic foundation lies in mercantilism and monetarism. It is an attempt to perform an expansion of the money supply by decentralised monetisation, without having to rely on banks. But this has no effect on their sustainability. They can hypothetically survive as long as their users believe in mercantilism. Although I think that mutual credit systems are probably more sustainable than less usual forms like the Ithaca Hours.
I think that if local currencies gained a larger market share in their respective geographical areas, the expansion of the money supply caused by them will cause larger and larger disequilibria and eventually their users will realise that they made themselves poorer. But who knows? Stupidity is boundless.
Bitcoin on the other hand is based on the Mengerian concept of emergent catallactic origin of money, as a result of a decrease in transaction costs of trade (which Menger calls “economic sacrifices”) and the network effect (which manifests itself as liquidity, or in Menger’s terminology, “salability”). What it provides is on one hand a more efficient financial system, on the other a better protection against the manipulation from the states and banks. Not everyone might be able to reap or even recognise its benefits at this stage, but this nevertheless is the logical conclusion. Its future does not depend on deniers, rather on entrepreneurship, such as that of BitPay which provide the LRC donation platform.
Last but not least, as I said on my blog, http://www.economicsofbitcoin.com/2012/12/let-me-tell-you-something-about-me.html , Jeffrey Tucker recruited me to write a book about economics of Bitcoin, to be published by Laissez Faire Books. I would like to thank you, Smiling Dave, for helping this happen, as your irrationality heavily contributed to my motivation in research and writing.
Something tells me that when all the world already accepts Bitcoin, you’ll still be saying it’s not ‘widely accepted.’ Can you really claim your widely accepted objection hasn’t been significantly chiseled away at within recent months and news? Or have you simply not been following the news?
Hey! Rock on dude! I hope some of my contributions warrant inclusion 
I think that Smiling Dave’s comments on Bitcoin are given less consideration than they could be because he mixes his technical arguments with insinuations about the character of people he’s discussing with. I find it tiring to read through. It’s unfortunate because he seems to put a lot of thought into the technical side.
His technical objections have been dealt with. All he has left are the insults.
Maclean’s has posted an excellent article (http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/01/02/why-bitcoin-is-the-banking-industrys-newest-biggest-threat/) detailing Bitcoin’s mainstream status.
From the article: Bitcoin’s big advantage is that it is essentially the cold, hard cash of the Internet.
It’s things like this that make it difficult to take Bitcoin promoters seriously. The cold, hard cash of the Internet? So Bitcoin is accepted on websites as universally as cold, hard cash is in any country (except Zimbabwe)?
Wordpress accepts Bitcoin. So do a couple other quite large sites.
If that statement that Bitcoin is the ‘currency of the internet’ isn’t yet true, it soon will be.
I think an often overlooked question is what Bitcoin means for financing terrorism >_> We may see a bitcoin crackdown in the name of fighting terrorism :\
Maclean’s a Bitcoin promoter? If only!
The only way to determine what bitcoins are is to look at the way they are used. They are not used as a currency, they are tokens, same as in a game arcade.
I actually use bitcoins, so I know. None of the bitcoin promoters on this thread will convince me that bitcoin, as it stands today, is a currency because I know from personal experience that it is not.
How are you defining ‘currency’ and ‘token’???
Are you suggesting that only something which begins and ends a complete lifecycle can be a currency? As in someone being paid in bitcoin, living on it and paying it out entirely?
To provide a more specific question: let’s say I live in Europe, receive my income in Euros and pay most of expenses in Euros, but occassionally order from American eBay using dollars. Am I using dollars as tokens? I hold to dollars for a very short time, probably milliseconds if the conversion is automated.
I say that they are tokens because of the way they are used.
Your definition of currency is anything that has been used in a transaction anywhere at anytime. That can’t be true because there are barter transactions like that as well. Such as the use of salt in times past.
Bitcoin is a token because of the way it is used. On SR, for example, vendors accept bitcoin because of its relative anonymity and ease of transaction. The vendors are completely hedged however - they get their payouts in US dollars, not bitcoins. Does this not fit the definition of a token? Buyer nor seller has the bitcoin as the ultimate goal. They use the bitcoin to facilitate the transaction.
I appreciate that supporters of bitcoin advocate that bitcoin should be a currency to replace or supplement national fiat currencies. However, bitcoin isn’t a currency because it doesn’t function as a currency. I don’t even know how anyone could even hold that to be in dispute.
well tokens are used to represent something else, what are bitcoins tokens for?
who told you that? Currency is a medium of exchange. Exchange media are used for indirect exchanges.
barter exchanges are direct exchanges or they involve the use of exchange media (like salt) which makes them indirect exchanges and not really barter.
no, it does not. It is properly defined as an indirect exchange. Bitcoins are not tokens for dollars. Bitcoins are exchangeable for dollars in certain markets. A token stands in place of the thing of value that it represents. Bitcoins are currency, specifically digital cryptocurrency.
the same can be said about exchanges involving dollars or euro or salt (when salt is used as media of exchange).
if you look at the way these words are defined you might change your mind.
Lew Rockwell, founder of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, already got $1,899 in Bitcoin donations since he started accepting them (and that’s only as of Dec. 31, 2012).