Comment: Re:Is the gold rush over? (Score 1) 768
That was the point...BitCoin is great for people who got in early and mined a lot. But for everyone else, adopting it means essentially giving those early adopters stuff for free.
If you buy $20 worth of BTC and then buy $20 worth of stuff with BTC, how exactly are you losing anything? You're not. This is just one of several myths surrounding Bitcoin. Another is that it has no intrinsic value. First of all, nothing has intrinsic value. If everyone decided gold was worthless tomorrow, it would be. What these people mean to argue is that BTC isn't a commodity. You can't do anything with it except use it as a medium of exchange. This too is a false. It's a proof-of-work system and can be used as a replacement for CAPTCHA's. Maybe I'm showing my age here but I remember HashCash and how that was supposed to stop email spam forever. Obviously, that didn't happen but Bitcoin has the same usage that HashCash did/does have. It's useful as a commodity. You can argue that it's overvalued compared to how much is actually used as a commodity but so is gold. How much gold do we really need to turn into audio connectors, food decorations, teeth, etc? I doubt it's enough to justify gold being somewhere around $50 a gram.