<story><title>Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180</title><url>http://bitcoinity.org/markets</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tribaal</author><text>Yeah, as much as I like the concept of bitcoin (and the blockchain), I don&amp;#x27;t see adoption becoming anything more than anecdotal.&lt;p&gt;No interest rate, and you have to secure it yourself? No thanks. My &amp;quot;big bad bank&amp;quot; guarantees me at least a small interest in saving money, and if my card is stolen, I get a new one in 24 hours and all transactions are cancelled. I&amp;#x27;m happy to pay some transaction fees (&amp;quot;extortion!&amp;quot;) to get that kind of insurance.&lt;p&gt;Bitcoin is the electronic version of &amp;quot;let&amp;#x27;s buy a lot of gold and stash it somewhere&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Burn karma, burn. Ah well.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TheDong</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s worse than that. To me, the biggest flaw of bitcoin is that you have to constantly spend energy on it (as in computation power &amp;#x2F; burn coal) for it to remain viable. As soon as enough people get tired of throwing away money at their miners someone can pull a 51% attack, so everyone must put more energy into their miners to protect their investment... forever.&lt;p&gt;Over time the amount of energy wasted by bitcoin could become stupendously dumb. We could be using our spare processor cycles to fold proteins or aid in numerous other research, and yet we&amp;#x27;re using it to allow people to send bits of data to each other without a need for centralized trust.&lt;p&gt;Compare that to the centralized bank where you have a single centralized trusted source which allows transferring money from one person to another to take no more energy than a modest server and some backups -- far less than the power consumption of a single GPU miner.&lt;p&gt;The above problem also won&amp;#x27;t get better. Even after you&amp;#x27;re no longer mining for new coins, you must keep up the mining volume to protect existing coins and allow transactions to occur at all. I personally find the above to be a fundamental problem with the &amp;quot;proof of work&amp;quot; solution. Sure, on paper you&amp;#x27;ve solved the General&amp;#x27;s problem, but the reality is that you&amp;#x27;re throwing massive amounts of energy out the window. Because of that, I think this proof&amp;#x27;s place should have been to remain on paper.</text></comment>
<story><title>Bitcoin crashes over 25% in 24 hours, under $180</title><url>http://bitcoinity.org/markets</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tribaal</author><text>Yeah, as much as I like the concept of bitcoin (and the blockchain), I don&amp;#x27;t see adoption becoming anything more than anecdotal.&lt;p&gt;No interest rate, and you have to secure it yourself? No thanks. My &amp;quot;big bad bank&amp;quot; guarantees me at least a small interest in saving money, and if my card is stolen, I get a new one in 24 hours and all transactions are cancelled. I&amp;#x27;m happy to pay some transaction fees (&amp;quot;extortion!&amp;quot;) to get that kind of insurance.&lt;p&gt;Bitcoin is the electronic version of &amp;quot;let&amp;#x27;s buy a lot of gold and stash it somewhere&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Burn karma, burn. Ah well.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hueving</author><text>&amp;gt;Bitcoin is the electronic version of &amp;quot;let&amp;#x27;s buy a lot of gold and stash it somewhere&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s even worse than that because normal people at least have a decent idea of when their gold is secure. A non-techie just has to trust that the online bitcoin provider or author of the wallet is doing what he&amp;#x2F;she really says and in a secure fashion.</text></comment>