Monday, February 27, 2017

Is Bitcoin dead ???

In God We Trust

YES, It's dead as a dog:


  1. Speculators are not buying it in droves for it like they did before.
  2. It's the currency of choice for criminal activities, notably fraud, malware and extortion -- and no legit businesses want to be associated with these kinds of things.
  3. Technological limitations, namely the number of transactions that can be processed per unit of time, mean it's not scalable.
  4. Bitcoin miners are highly-concentrated in China, where the internet connectivity is notoriously laggy, and the whole state censorship defeats the whole libertarian ideology.  Venezuela, where food and medicine are scarce but electricity is basically free, also hosts a lot of Bitcoin servers. 
  5. Since the whole Silk Road debacle, longtime proponents, namely drug dealers, have given up online and mostly went back to back alley trades.
  6. Fractures within the community, as different factions want to go in different directions.


NO, the cat still has eight lives bro:


  1. People have written Bitcoin eulogies many many times before.
  2. Lots of money has been and continue to be invested into bitcoin-related businesses.

MAYBE Yes maybe not?


Bitcoin is too complex, too user-unfriendly to be useful as mainstream digital currency, and doesn't solve real world problems except at the margins -- dollar bills, coins, debit and credit cards are simple enough to use.   It will stay useful in the corporate setting, maybe, and even that isn't guaranteed.  But the blockchain technology may just evolve and morph into something totally new and unexpected.   Who knows?

Best two-fer job interview question


  • "Tell me about the last time you solved a problem."
  • "Tell me about the last time you walked away from a problem.  Explain about your efforts and why they didn't work."

Leave a comment if you can suggest a better question.


Thursday, February 02, 2017