Open Thread, November 8 - 14, 2013

witzvo

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Is there a LW consensus on the merits of Bitcoin? Namely, is it the optimal place to invest money, especially in regards to mining equipment?

I think the value is liable to increase fairly dramatically over time, and that buying/mining Bitcoins will prove incredibly profitable, but I'd like the input of this community before I decide whether or not to put money forth for this venture.

For bitcoin being an efficient online currency, the transaction fees make it impractical. Ripple provides a much better way of doing micropayments.

If one would want to build a way to make a router provide payed access to anyone who comes along, Ripple is a better technology. The same goes for renting VPN on demand and similar tasks.

It much easier to imagine that some third world country shifts from using prepayed mobile cards for distant currency transfers to using Ripple than that they shift to using bitcoins.

Ripple allows an entity in the country to pl... (read more)

0Vaniver13y

I have not seen a significant LW consensus. My view is that it is unreasonable to expect one can time the market effectively, and so one should invest in Bitcoin based on the long term prospects, which are either $0 per coin or hundreds of thousands / a million per coin, in which case the probability of hitting the upper end is the primary factor of interest. Unfortunately, my estimate of the probability that it'll take off is roughly linear in the price, which means I don't consider price shifts very informative, which means it's always a hard decision to be in or out.