The Memory Pool

“The more mainstream Bitcoin becomes, the more compelling the speculative attack will be.”

“But Bitcoin transcends more than just the virtual. It also transcends all other monies that came before it, by introducing something that cannot be improved upon further, something that did not and cannot exist in the physical world: absolute limitation via zero terminal inflation.”

“What is a new idea — what Satoshi figured out — is how to indepen­dently agree upon a history of events without central coordi­na­tion.”

“Bitcoin is an impenetrable fortress of validation.”

“The Industrial Revolution freed humanity from the Malthusian trap. Bitcoin, having put an end to counterfeiting once and for all, frees us from the fiat trap.”

“What that future looks like exactly, no one knows, but bitcoin will definancialize the economy, and it will no doubt be a renaissance.”

“Whereas the dollar (and other fiat currencies) are one for a few in the short-term and all for none in the long-term, bitcoin is one for all, now and in the future, because it fixes the economic foundation for everyone.”

“There may be debate but bitcoin is the inevitable path forward. Time makes more converts than reason.”

“No matter how many cycles of quantitative easing the Fed and its global counterparts have in their bag of tricks, bitcoin is inevitably becoming a rallying cry for all those that see the train wreck coming and are unwilling to stand idly by.”

“Bitcoin obsoletes all other money because economic systems converge on a single currency, and bitcoin has the most credible monetary properties.”

“Could the whole apparatus of central bank policy be the root cause of the problem rather than the ever-elusive solution?”

“Volatility in bitcoin is the natural function of monetary adoption and this volatility ultimately strengthens the resilience of the bitcoin network, driving long-term stability. Variation is information.”

“Those that attempt to copy bitcoin signal a failure to understand the properties that make bitcoin valuable or viable as money.”

“Banning bitcoin is a fool’s errand. Some will try; all will fail. And the very attempts to ban bitcoin will accelerate its adoption and proliferation.”

“Bitcoin exists as a solution to the money problem that is global QE.”

“Put a price on economic stability and the economic freedom a stable monetary system provides; that is the true justification for the amount of energy bitcoin should and will consume. Everything else is a distraction.”

“Every other fiat currency, commodity money or cryptocurrency is competing for the exact same use case as bitcoin whether it is understood or not, and monetary systems tend to a single medium because their utility is liquidity rather than consumption or production.”

“[Bitcoin] will only proliferate if it creates utility for those that adopt it.”

“Ultimately, bitcoin is backed by something, and it’s the only thing that backs any money: the credibility of its monetary properties.”

“We accept the good with the bad, recognizing that due to the very nature of bitcoin, we do not get to decide. There are always trade-offs, and in this case, that bitcoin will unavoidably be used for illicit purposes is the trade-off we gladly accept in exchange for the economic stability that an unmanipulable global currency will provide.”

“If a global financial system is to be built on a decentralized monetary system, the foundation must be protected at all cost.”

“Bitcoin was consciously, yet spontaneously taken up as money while no one was watching, and our world will never be the same.”

“The […] listed network effects can only serve to strengthen [Bitcoin]. Competitors beware.”

“[T]he bullish case for Bitcoin is compelling but far from obvious.”

“Compromising on trustlessness could help the Bitcoin price find a local maximum, at the expense of finding a much higher global maximum.”

“From the settlement layer view, the growing adoption of Bitcoin is increasing its liquidity internationally, allowing it to compete with global reserve currencies for increasingly more valuable transactions, causing transaction fees to rise.”

“I personally suspect that Bitcoin’s steadily improving privacy will prevent us from ever measuring decentralization in a truly objective way. Losing easy quantification but gaining stronger privacy seems like a good tradeoff to me.”

“Like with most things, Bitcoin Dominance is a very crude metric and one that’s unfortunately very easy to manipulate. The recent enthusiasm for ICOs has made the manipulation even worse and continues to hide the fact that Bitcoin is doing really well.”

“This article is about how money interacts with the rest of the economy after it has matured and about how mismanagement by an issuer can cause it to fail.”

“If it became easier for people to trade different forks of the same currency, then investors could get direct experience with different ideas without endangering the network.”

“If someone says “blockchain tech” to you, you might as well walk away right there. They’re just trying to sell you on their new decentralized crowdfunded blockchain tech internet of bitthings appscam.”

“I fully support the attacker’s actions, and I wish I had thought of it first.”

“If achieving consensus in a non-trust manner is ever possible in practice, then it is only possible with a Proof-of-Work scheme and highly specialized expensive production chains.”

“Bitcoin upgrades must be a clear improvement to Bitcoin as an investment or else they face a sharp uphill battle to adoption.”

“Bitcoin has the right properties for the world’s money, and the more the world comes to terms with this, the more stable it will become.”

“Bitcoin makes conspiratorial group cohesion more difficult. If the Fappening took place as I described, then this effect is right at the center. The possibility of getting bitcoins by releasing secrets caused the group to fall apart.”

“The difference between Bitcoin and a Ponzi scheme is that in a Ponzi scheme, the early adopters benefit by cashing out. With Bitcoin, there is no reason ever to cash out.”

“Krugman’s article and Gobry’s follow-up are confused, do not establish their case, and say nothing about Bitcoin.”

“Working in the Bitcoin world is like working for a drug addict with bipolar disorder.”

“There are two ideologies in the Bitcoin world. They are not political ideologies; they are different visions of Bitcoin’s place in the world and how adoption will happen.”

“Protecting ourselves from the dangers of crypto-anarchy requires embracing it even more fully and internalizing and practicing the virtues that have helped great men weather the storms of life since antiquity.”

“That monetary behavior is a form of altruism, and of reciprocal altruism in particular, has been demonstrated by relating the properties of money to the definition of reciprocal altruism and to its required features.”

“All Bitcoin entrepreneurs today build on top of the success of the Silk Road. Their work was made possible by his.”

“Bitcoin raises the cost of many kinds of attacks, going far beyond protecting against central banks meddling with money supply.”

“Bitcoin provides us alternatives to compelled trust in monopolies but it can never obviate the need for trusted human connections. Nor can it protect us from our own pesky brain bugs’ ambiguous filters on perceived reality.”

“There is a war going on for your bitcoins, and willpower is your only defense.”

“All this aside, non-enforced contracts, contracts which the participants uphold out of their own free will rather than at the behest of some third party or by the point of the sword of some blind demigoddess are a thoroughly fascinating turn of events.”

“Bitcoin will overtake weak currencies like the dollar through speculative attacks and currency crises, not through the careful evaluation of tech journalists and 'mainstream consumers'.”

“Only Bitcoin can restore the necessary balance between the Gods. Only Bitcoin can give us life.”

“There is a fundamental agency problem with Bitcoin: agents can disappear or simulate a heist upon themselves. They cannot rationally be trusted without extreme costs being imposed on them which are more stringent than traditional banks.”

“Potential Bitcoin attackers are in a Prisoner's Dilemma. In the same way that the people cannot easily rebel against the king owing to a lack of coordination on their part, governments cannot rebel against Bitcoin for the same reason. The government puts the people in a Prisoner's Dilemma against one another, and Bitcoin does the same to government agents.”

“Appcoins are a terrible idea.”

“Don’t be a venture capitalist—be a speculative philanthropist.”

“Someone still lost in the dollar world looks at Bitcoin and sees wild and extreme volatility, whereas someone in Bitcoin looking back at the dollar sees the worst and longest economic crash in history.”

“The difference between money and a bubble is that a commodity whose price is a bubble actually has some underlying value.”

“Does Bitcoin need to be sanitized and separated from its anarchist, black-market roots in order to become acceptable to the general population? Absolutely not!”

“This article is about the possibility of Bitcoin-induced currency demonetization, or hyperbitcoinization, which is what would happen to any hapless currency that stands in Bitcoin's path of total world domination.”

“What falleth, that shall one also push!”

“The best way to improve Bitcoin’s image is simply to improve the Bitcoin economy.”

“The real hero is the hoarder.”

“For now at least, Bitcoin’s present trend is self-reinforcing with no equilibrium in sight.”

“Those who worry about Bitcoin’s volatility fail to understand what it actually means for Bitcoin.”

“No one should ever use Mastercoin under any circumstances or appraise their value as anything above zero.”

“The Bitcoin Central Bank will be the longest lasting institution of its kind thanks to the anti-fragile independent monetary policy it has set in stone.”

“In short, the altcoin phenomenon is the product of greed and bounded rationality.”

“Once it was known that bitcoin could be sold, even for a pittance, new possibilities opened up.”

“Proof-of-work should not be seen as a mysterious or wasteful system, but as something functional, natural, and potentially of value for the design of any communication protocol.”

“Stay one step ahead of the government and don’t get embroiled in politics.”

“If Bitcoin becomes money, the government’s control of money will have ended.”

“Public-key cryptography is the greatest tool of liberty ever devised.”

“With cryptography, one libertarian inventor can create an entire libertarian society.”

“There is no reason to deposit your money with a 3rd party. Bitcoin makes fractional reserve banking an obsolete technology.”

“Low transaction costs make Bitcoin the most competitive medium of exchange in humanity’s history, and it may be the case that a currency with even lower transaction costs is theoretically impossible.”

“New capital formation is the impetus for two trends that push the equilibrium of all industries towards decentralized markets: increasing technological sophistication and a deepening of the division of labor.”