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Re:Long Island Iced Tea Soars 500% After Changing Its Name t... by relaunched on Thursday December 21, 2017 @10:29AM (#15979407)
My biggest concern with the lack of underlying utility / value is does currency have any real, long-term value if there is no sovereign government willing to go to war to defend its long-term interests? Or if there's no underlying system of law to protect those that engage in it? Is the plan that sovereign governments use their resources to reinforce a currency that undermines its own?
Re:Long Island Iced Tea Soars 500% After Changing Its Name t... by eeZah7Ux on Thursday December 21, 2017 @10:55AM (#15979660)
> lack of underlying utility / value is does currency have any real, long-term value if there is no sovereign government willing to go to war

You just described the value in your question. A wealth store/transfer platform that does require armies to protect its "banks", as they are distributed/global, does not encourage wars.

Re:Long Island Iced Tea Soars 500% After Changing Its Name t... by spookthesunset on Thursday December 21, 2017 @02:18PM (#15981904)
> A wealth store/transfer platform that does require armies to protect its "banks", as they are distributed/global, does not encourage wars.

Sure it does. It uses an insane amount of power. Wars are fought over the resources to generate that power all the time. You could argue that the governments of the world are indirectly subsidizing crypto by using war to maintain a stable source of energy. With no government around to protect the river that powers the hydro dam, or acquire the oil / coal required for the power plants, what is gonna power these blockchains? Solar? Who makes the solar panels? That requires trade... who structures that trade? Government.

Sorry. Bitcoin, nor any blockchain, cannot function without the all mighty government.

Re:Long Island Iced Tea Soars 500% After Changing Its Name t... by eeZah7Ux on Thursday December 21, 2017 @05:03PM (#15983235)
> It uses an insane amount of power. Wars are fought over the resources to generate that power all the time

There has been a lot of exaggeration around the amount of power used for mining. It's less that the energy used to run Google, Facebook, and many industrial applications and certainly not remotely comparable to the bulk of oil consumption in 1st world countries.

(Don't get me wrong: I'm not a fan of Bitcoin and I don't use cryptocurrencies.)

> You could argue that the governments of the world are indirectly subsidizing crypto by using war to maintain a stable source of energy. > Sorry. Bitcoin, nor any blockchain, cannot function without the all mighty government.

This is a complete strawman. You just conflated the efforts being spent by countries to protect their entire wealth including stocks, gold, fiat money, derivatives with the efforts to access energy sources.

Re:Long Island Iced Tea Soars 500% After Changing Its Name t... by api on Thursday December 21, 2017 @10:32AM (#15979440)
It very well might if it were useful as a currency.

Hyper-deflationary token systems that not only don't scale but lose their utility when adopted are horrible currencies. The more people use a particular block chain the less utility it has because the system doesn't scale in either transaction volume or token price stability.

Re:Long Island Iced Tea Soars 500% After Changing Its Name t... by adventured on Thursday December 21, 2017 @10:38AM (#15979492)
Since Bitcoin isn't a currency and never can be, and seeing as it's a store of value (which matches up to its profile in terms of mining difficulty, scarcity, etc), the question if you believe Bitcoin is going to actually one day be worth $3 or $5 or $8 trillion: which countries own outsized holdings of Bitcoin? The US and China to name two. Very large quantities of Bitcoin were mined & purchased in the US in the first 3-4 years of Bitcoin. And China has represented about half of all mining the last few years as the difficulty has soared.