I've gave my reasoning, thoughts and opinions, which is what you asked me for. Gold is real wealth backed by thousands of years of history, bitcoins are digital 1's and 0's backed by nothing. It's that simple.
The main point people use to validate themselves for bitcoin being so fantastic is the PRICE, everything else is pretty much technical babble stories they read on the internets. 1000 people own 40% of bitcoins in existence... that is not a good thing. When a few of these whales sell, the price will come tumbling down.
You really enjoy going back and forth. You seem to thrive off it. I wonder how you'd be in person?
I like a good debate and enjoy proving people wrong in person as much as I do online.
The fact that gold is "backed by thousands of years of history" in no way is any kind of proof that BTC is a scam. Its only inevitable that a digital currency will evolve much much faster than gold did as a store of value.
You say that BTC is "backed by nothing" - yes, its correct there is no government backing – obviously there are no underlying assets and this is literally the entire point of bitcoin! (just like gold by the way).
You say that BTC has not transparency - but actually it is 100% transparent - that the entire point of the distributed ledger and the blockchain!
The Ponzi scam involved one person benefitting by paying out a fraudulent yield from ever increasing new investors. With BTC there is no yield being paid for a start, nor is there a person perpetrating a kind of fraud who might be benefitting from the deception of others.
BTC and gold are entirely dependent on the continued adoption and belief of inherent value by others. Both have zero Government backing.
If anything, the "fraud" being committed, is by Governments who steal from people by printing paper money (effectively devaluing people's savings), and indeed the creation of BTC was a reaction to that.
So now that we have concluded that BTC cannot be considered a fraud or a Ponzi scheme, what you should be asking (and maybe what you meant all along) is whether BTC is a "bubble". And this simply cannot be answered - the reason being that BTC cannot be valued. An and for a bubble to be proven to exist, it is required for there to be a calculable inherent value in the asset alleged to be a bubble. This cannot be done for BTC (but it can be done for assets that produce yields, such as stocks or property).
Now finally, you tried to scare everyone with your claims that futures trading will lead to BTC falling in value, and to be scared of "naked shorting", as though this is some kind of mystical boogie-man coming to kill BTC. I will say it again - futures trading will massively legitimize BTC, further putting it on a similar footing to gold. We will likely see far far more money flowing into the underlying asset as a result. Futures now make it very easy for asset managers to diversify into bitcoin now and an asset like bitcoin as they can not get exposure without the need to buy and hold the underlying asset.
"Naked shorting", involves selling a futures contract without holding the underlying asset (in this case bitcoin). The risk here as a naked shortseller is that your loss is potentially unlimited. If the price of bitcoin rises you lose more and more money. So its a massively risky position to be taking on a asset who's value cannot be calculated. At least early on, I don't expect much in the way of large-scale naked shorts in the bitcoin futures market, expect for a few very speculative gambles. It would simply be too much of a risky trade to make in an asset class that has in the past haw shown high amounts of volatility and overall upward movement. So, if anything, I would expect to see substantial long positions instead.
Again, I cannot say with certainty what will happen, but I will try to explain whatever has happened as futures start trading. I would add that uncertainty always creates opportunity to make $$$.
Good luck to all, and time will tell who was right...
