The monoliths of finance will set the legislation that will determine everything about crypto-currencies in all major economies. And if their extreme political power isn't enough, they already by far own the most patents relating to blockchain tech.
Bitcoin + Ethereum = $58 billion.
JP Morgan = $330 billion. That's one "dinosaur" with $25 billion per year in net income.
The notion that they're dinosaurs and they're ten years late, is laughable. Along with all the other banks and central banks, they'll dictate the terms by which crypto-currencies will exist (the only alternative to being controlled by the banksters that control everything related to finance, is to remain a niche that never goes big / mainstream).
As it turns, they won't. Or, more to the point, can't. Bitcoin didn't 'ask' for permission for anything, because permission isn't required to do math.
There seems to be this unshakeable belief in some people that things that things that aren't given permission by a government aren't legal, where it is, in fact, the other way around.
It's got more to do with the knowledge that governments are the ones who decide what's legal and what's not. So if governments deem cryptocurrencies as "illegal", or something worth regulating, then there's literally nothing you can do against that.
Wouldn't be the first time mere math has been heavily regulated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
We are not talking about some unchangeable "god given natural law" here, we are talking about human made contractual frameworks which have been evolving just as much as the societies they are meant to govern.
Guns are not 'legal'. The government doesn't have the power to take them away from you. Free speech isn't 'legal'. The government doesn't have the power to take it away from you. These amendments which you have brought up are about defining the limitations of government. QED.
Not every nation does have a constitution, some even completely lack a comparable document. I'm also not a US American because as I said before: It's pretty much only US Americans who seem to have issues understanding this very simple dynamic.
> Guns are not 'legal'. The government doesn't have the power to take them away from you.
As confirmed by the supreme court: The government does have said power to enact regulations of said firearms because the second amendment leaves that interpretation room.
> Free speech isn't 'legal'. The government doesn't have the power to take it away from you.
The government, of course, has the power to take that away from you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone
How "free" is speech really when you can't even choose time, place and manner of said speech?
I ask you again: Who is in the ultimate position of power to interpret a nations constitution and actually enforce said interpretation? Idealists might claim "the people!", when in all actuality it's the acting government.
Case in point: Many of the people in Hamburg also demanded their constitutional given right to "freedom of assembly", the vast majority of them did so peacefully. Guess how that turned out? With a media campaign painting the whole movement as rioters and common Germans demanding that police should simply shoot them.
Maybe I wasn't clear. They are ten years late because they missed the 100,000% return on investment. I promise you, before they sell their board members on the idea of "getting involved" with BTC, they will present a figure called "opportunity cost", which represents the gains they have not realized by not participating. That figure is incredibly high, hence they are ten years late.
Also, I don't believe they can dictate terms with BTC's existance at all. They can depress or inflate the market, but since there is no central authority - all they can do to influence prices is determined by their market participation. An example of a real market that they can dictate terms with would be US debt(treasury bond futures). By participating in the bond auctions with the fed: they get to set the rate. There is no equivalent process by which they can influence BTC, much less dictate it's existence.
Without control of the nodes, the mining hashpower is only a secondary concern. If the miners ever tried to enforce their will, the nodes would simply change the PoW algorithm, and the miners would effectively be out of work.
- People live in countries
- countries levy taxes to be paid in "real money"
- banks deal with the "real money"
- BTC exchanges have to work with these banks + gov't
At the end of the day, you need to pay your taxes - presumably in your national currency.
Suppose you had a commerce that only accepted bitcoins. How will you pay your taxes ?
If the public does not want national currencies, then governments need to make them wanted. Physical force is an obvious approach, but probably impractical.
There is still money to be made scalping BTC, but since the price is higher the margin required is much, much, much greater. And with more margin comes more possibility of loss, etc.
Working on it. See: Bitshares, or any other decentralized excange
Which is? I would love to read more, any pointer/links for reading about that?
It's easy to simplify though... imagine that all trades for anything, happened between $1 and $10. Now imagine a graph from bottom to top, starting at the bottom($1) and ending at the top($10). Horizontally, draw a bar next to each price, and the width of the bar should represent how many trades happened at each price. In my poorly drawn example below, you can see 2 trades happened at $1, while 4 trades happened at $3(more than any other price). Auction market theory says that the price is likely to return to $3, since that is where the majority of business was done. So to trade based on that, you are looking to sell at $5 and buy at $1, in anticipation of the market moving back towards that center of $3. It's a gross oversimplification, but that's the heart of auction theory.
$5 ++
$4 +++
$3 ++++
$2 +++
$1 ++
https://www.amazon.com/Auction-Theory-Second-Vijay-Krishna/d...
Why is having new BTC competitors a bad thing?
In a way cryptocurrencies have become the new Wallstreet where few people, with very specialized knowledge and connections, can make money while they keep telling everybody else "It's so easy everybody can do it" so they have a steady supply of new suckers.
Fast forward.... WTF is going on now? Regulated exchanges for bitcoin, dozens of btc clones, new exchanges being birthed/destroyed each month, and the dinosaurs of finance adopting it 10 years too late. It's a crazy mixed up world.