<story><title>Bank of America&apos;s Research Report on Bitcoin [pdf]</title><url>https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/885843/banks-research-report-on-bitcoin.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>3pt14159</author><text>(If you didn&amp;#x27;t read the article, cs702 thinks bitcoin could hit $90k.)&lt;p&gt;I still think you are off. The fractional reserve system warps incentives too much.&lt;p&gt;1. The world needs more than $600 of float. And most people think they have that. The difference is that its wrapped up in the fractional reserve banking system.&lt;p&gt;2. Due to inflation uninformed people are bullied into investing in mutual funds, stocks, housing, etc. with their savings. Just the &lt;i&gt;existence&lt;/i&gt; of bitcoin as a major worldwide currency could transform the traditional saving model. If a 30 year old puts a days wages into an account and can expect a days wages out when he&amp;#x27;s 80 years old then he can drastically simplify his retirement. He can avoid speculative bubbles and bad mutual fund managers.&lt;p&gt;3. National currency reserves are currently done with sovereign debt - with the idea being that if a nation goes bankrupt they&amp;#x27;ll just inflate their currency anyway and the currency reserve may as well be in bonds. If Bitcoin were to become a major world currency, the reserves could be in actual Bitcoins.&lt;p&gt;All of this to say I still think that there is a 90+% chance that bitcoin will fail, but on that remaining percent, the limit higher than 100 times today. I&amp;#x27;ve done the math a couple ways and I end up with $100k to $10m as my outliers given that bitcoin becomes a world currency.</text></item><item><author>cs702</author><text>Interesting.  I used essentially the same methodology nearly three years ago to estimate the potential maximum price of Bitcoin over time, but I reached a different conclusion: &lt;a href=&quot;http://cs702.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/on-the-potential-adoption-and-price-appreciation-of-bitcoin-in-the-long-run/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;cs702.wordpress.com&amp;#x2F;2011&amp;#x2F;05&amp;#x2F;29&amp;#x2F;on-the-potential-adopt...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The main difference between BofA&amp;#x27;s analysis and mine is that I see Bitcoin as a &lt;i&gt;far superior&lt;/i&gt; alternative for many financial and other types of applications.  For one, Bitcoin as a platform provides a global, decentralized, irreversible log of programmable transactions. For another, bitcoins as &amp;quot;money&amp;quot; are easier to secure, transport, hide, and backup than all prior forms of money ever used by civilization. (Actually, no prior form of money ever used – whether made of bank credits, paper, metal, or other substances[1] – could be backed up like a Bitcoin wallet.)&lt;p&gt;Therefore, &lt;i&gt;if&lt;/i&gt; Bitcoin continues to work as intended (i.e., proves immune to attacks) and gets easier and safer to use (for non-technical people), it will slowly gain credibility in the public’s mind, &lt;i&gt;not just as medium of exchange and store of value, but also as application platform&lt;/i&gt;. Over a period of many years or even decades, as the world gradually learns via trial-and-error how to use it, becomes familiar with its properties, and ultimately comes to trust it, nothing can prevent Bitcoin from gaining as much credibility as other alternatives, including gold.&lt;p&gt;--&lt;p&gt;[1] I highly recommend Nick Szabo&amp;#x27;s essay on the origins of money: &lt;a href=&quot;http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;szabo.best.vwh.net&amp;#x2F;shell.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>weichi</author><text>&amp;quot;If a 30 year old puts a days wages into an account and can expect a days wages out when he&amp;#x27;s 80 years old then he can drastically simplify his retirement.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Your idea here seems to be that bitcoin could help you not only hedge against &amp;quot;inflation&amp;quot;, but also against rising economic productivity. I.e., what a saver really wants is some kind of guarantee that at age 80 they will be able to consume the same fraction of economic output that they were able to at age 30. Could you spell out how bitcoin helps solve this problem?&lt;p&gt;(I take it for granted that hedging purely against inflation is actually a solved problem, because you can just invest in short term bonds, which provide excellent hedges against inflation. But of course they don&amp;#x27;t help at all with rising productivity).&lt;p&gt;Edit: Another - massive! - issue with retirement savings is longevity risk. How can you ensure that you won&amp;#x27;t run out of savings before you die? Bitcoin won&amp;#x27;t help you here.</text></comment>
<story><title>Bank of America&apos;s Research Report on Bitcoin [pdf]</title><url>https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/885843/banks-research-report-on-bitcoin.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>3pt14159</author><text>(If you didn&amp;#x27;t read the article, cs702 thinks bitcoin could hit $90k.)&lt;p&gt;I still think you are off. The fractional reserve system warps incentives too much.&lt;p&gt;1. The world needs more than $600 of float. And most people think they have that. The difference is that its wrapped up in the fractional reserve banking system.&lt;p&gt;2. Due to inflation uninformed people are bullied into investing in mutual funds, stocks, housing, etc. with their savings. Just the &lt;i&gt;existence&lt;/i&gt; of bitcoin as a major worldwide currency could transform the traditional saving model. If a 30 year old puts a days wages into an account and can expect a days wages out when he&amp;#x27;s 80 years old then he can drastically simplify his retirement. He can avoid speculative bubbles and bad mutual fund managers.&lt;p&gt;3. National currency reserves are currently done with sovereign debt - with the idea being that if a nation goes bankrupt they&amp;#x27;ll just inflate their currency anyway and the currency reserve may as well be in bonds. If Bitcoin were to become a major world currency, the reserves could be in actual Bitcoins.&lt;p&gt;All of this to say I still think that there is a 90+% chance that bitcoin will fail, but on that remaining percent, the limit higher than 100 times today. I&amp;#x27;ve done the math a couple ways and I end up with $100k to $10m as my outliers given that bitcoin becomes a world currency.</text></item><item><author>cs702</author><text>Interesting.  I used essentially the same methodology nearly three years ago to estimate the potential maximum price of Bitcoin over time, but I reached a different conclusion: &lt;a href=&quot;http://cs702.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/on-the-potential-adoption-and-price-appreciation-of-bitcoin-in-the-long-run/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;cs702.wordpress.com&amp;#x2F;2011&amp;#x2F;05&amp;#x2F;29&amp;#x2F;on-the-potential-adopt...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The main difference between BofA&amp;#x27;s analysis and mine is that I see Bitcoin as a &lt;i&gt;far superior&lt;/i&gt; alternative for many financial and other types of applications.  For one, Bitcoin as a platform provides a global, decentralized, irreversible log of programmable transactions. For another, bitcoins as &amp;quot;money&amp;quot; are easier to secure, transport, hide, and backup than all prior forms of money ever used by civilization. (Actually, no prior form of money ever used – whether made of bank credits, paper, metal, or other substances[1] – could be backed up like a Bitcoin wallet.)&lt;p&gt;Therefore, &lt;i&gt;if&lt;/i&gt; Bitcoin continues to work as intended (i.e., proves immune to attacks) and gets easier and safer to use (for non-technical people), it will slowly gain credibility in the public’s mind, &lt;i&gt;not just as medium of exchange and store of value, but also as application platform&lt;/i&gt;. Over a period of many years or even decades, as the world gradually learns via trial-and-error how to use it, becomes familiar with its properties, and ultimately comes to trust it, nothing can prevent Bitcoin from gaining as much credibility as other alternatives, including gold.&lt;p&gt;--&lt;p&gt;[1] I highly recommend Nick Szabo&amp;#x27;s essay on the origins of money: &lt;a href=&quot;http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;szabo.best.vwh.net&amp;#x2F;shell.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fat0wl</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve wonder about #2 though. We see the downsides of saving in an inflationary system, but a finite currency system... do we really expect that to be stable for 50 years, and if so, based on what precedent?&lt;p&gt;I was surprised to see BOA list &amp;quot;It&amp;#x27;s finite&amp;quot; as an advantage. It seems like this mentality is all anti-inflation (which seems justifiable) yet the alternative is taking a wildly experimental approach to savings. BTC hasn&amp;#x27;t proven stability within a month really yet, why trust it for 50 years? And then if you put in that 1 day&amp;#x27;s wage of Bitcoins, what happens when the market cap for BTC fluctuates? It won&amp;#x27;t always be in a steady demand, it will depend a bit on how many people are using it, no?&lt;p&gt;I am a doomsdayer also I think that it can only succeed if it always remains the same price or keeps going up, but the belief that this is possible is obviously intellectually malformed.</text></comment>