The Quora post that killed Bitcoins. Please discuss if his arguments are valid.
Hi, I'm Adam, I wrote this answer on Quora. Against my better judgement, I'm going to wade in here and make a couple of clarifying points.<p>1 - Scam. I regret using the word "scam" in my answer, because I think it overshadows the broader point I was making about Bitcoin's severe structural design flaws. After watching the community react to this debate, I'm pretty confident that the average bitcoin supporter is not intentionally defrauding people. Consider my inflammatory rhetoric redacted and apologized for.<p>2 - Volatility. Since April 1, the average change (up or down) of the bitcoin/dollar exchange rate has been just under 8%. That's unprecedented. It's a clean order of magnitude more volatile than the stock market, which is considered a "volatile", "risky" class of asset. It's two orders of magnitude more volatile than a legitimate currency pair like the Dollar/Euro. Now, it's all fun and games while the exchange rate is basically trending up, but if that trend reverses look out below.<p>3 - Liquidity. All of that volatility comes on an average bitcoin volume of something like 20,000 per day. If I put in an order for $15,000 worth of Bitcoin right now, I'm pretty sure I could move the market between 5% and 10% to the upside. It's probably even worse to the downside. Call me a skeptic, but with that kind of easy price manipulation, I'm not quite ready to denominate my paycheck in Bitcoins quite yet.<p>4 - What It Means. A number of people criticized me for not understanding that Bitcoin is designed to be complementary to traditional currencies, and that analyzing it as an alternative is invalid. A number of different people criticized me for not understanding that Bitcoin is a different kind of currency, which will inevitably replace traditional fiat money, and that analyzing it as a component of the fiat currency system is invalid.<p>The Bitcoin community is diverse, and no one really knows what this is supposed to  be yet. That's totally fine with me. I can assure you I don't have any skin in this game. My money is in LinkedIn stock.* But I've studied world currencies extensively (and trust me, a normal currency debate is not this lively). So, I don't know what Bitcoin will end up as, but I know two things with certainty:<p>a) that it's unstable as a currency<p>b) that it's currently behaving as a speculative vehicle in an aggressive bubble<p>* That was a joke