Why would it be? Bitcoin on it's own is just a good that can be traded, just like gold, silver, or bags of potatoes. If you setup an exchange for gold,but then instead of paying people who deposited gold with you ran away with all of it, would you call gold a "scam"?
This is really annoying. No - not even comparable to Tulip mania. That thing was based on artificially limited supply. If you want to start trading bitcoin or get your own miner, you can do it any time you want at a reasonable investment. Supply is always known in this case and demand is not ongoing (as in, bitcoins you keep don't disappear after a couple of days, unless you keep them with mtgox). Or do you want to explain why it's comparable?
Isn't BTC supply also artificially limited? I though that was the whole point so it wouldn't become 'inflationary'?
I can't stop being amazed by the persistent denial and non-sequitur arguments made by many BTC fans as to why none of the problems BTC has been suffering from are relevant and how BTC is nothing like a tulip bubble or a pyramid scheme, or a scam, or whatever, but the 'money' of the future. Huge price swings, theft, illicit trade, failing exchanges, problems withdrawing or converting BTC, yeah sounds like a great alternative to 'money controlled by central banks' :-S
It's just like gold, silver, and it's definitely much better than fiat, because... it's THE FUTURE, it's FREE, and it uses TECHNOLOGY!
It's limited in a known and consistent way. I'd say it was artificially limited if there was a person telling you you can't get more than 1BTC/mth while others could find a way to work around it.
Basically it's "world cannot produce more tulips" -vs- "I forbid you to start your tulip farm using law and crazy high prices". One of those will fall, the other will not. I'm not saying it's not a scam, that early adopters don't have leverage, that there are no problems, etc. Only that tulip mania does not apply here.
Because bitcoin has an artificially limited supply built into the system and the pricing has exhibited the kind of wild fluctuations more characteristic of penny stocks rather than a currency? Toss in the fact that the entire system is predicated on making early adopters rich and it's a basic econ lesson concealed behind some cool crypto code.
Any time hordes of people are rushing into a new investment with an unstable price in hopes of getting rich quick and assuring themselves that the math will protect their investment then it is exactly like Tulip Mania.
Not really - the ability to use Bitcoins to transfer useful amounts of money is very much dependant on their value and vice-versa. They probably don't need to be anywhere near the current price in order to support the current transaction volume, but I doubt $0.01/BTC would work.
True - I was reaching out for an extreme. When the price dropped to less than $3 from ~$35 I think it was close to losing its critical mass, but I think as long as the price is at least $10-20/BTC, the infrastructure backing it as a medium of transfer will still exist.
