At that point, the people who are interested in building something worthwhile will be the only ones who remain, and we can work in peace.
Because this has already happened in 2014-2016. It happened before that too. Each time the speculative bubble rises, it is being driven at first by improvements to the tech and/or ecosystem. Then it gets a life of its own, goes crazy, and runs out of gas. But along the way, more people learn about it and decide they care enough to continue the project.
Even if you are only in it for the money, the tech matters. Because the closer you are to the tech, the better you understand where the long term value will be, and when the price has outrun that value.
Maybe I'm overthinking it, but it seems inescapable.
But no one would get rich quick, so it would probably never take off in the first place.
Right now we're seeing the tip of the iceberg of potential cryptocurrencies. Pretty much only token-based (ie. non-ledger) based currencies, where we need global BFT consensus to track the current position of every single coin. This is crazy. And, as it turns out, unnecessary (see: Holochain).
When the iceberg capsizes (as Git capsized the CASE industry), globally consistent ledger-based value-stable currencies based on peer-to-peer co-signed personal blockchains will supplant these unnecessary globally consistent token based ... things. (Do I really care that you just slid a nickel across the table to someone? Nope). Same with crazy Turing-complete globally consistent VMs implementing Smart Contract languages. Not necessary.
You are correct -- value-stable currencies won't have anyone getting rich quick. But, when every sub-saharan goat herder and neighbourhood kid with a collection of trading cards can independently monetize his/her wealth into a value-stable currency, we'll see the face ripped off of the global Fiat monetary systems...
Which political views? I read the article and only saw a view on money, not politics.
What’s being criticized is the very idea that money should involve politics.
The argument is that we should be as free to choose which kind of money we use as we are to choose which kind of car we use. There should be no law giving competitive advantage — in the form of legal tender law, and the absence of choosing which numeraire to use as the basis for calculating capital gains tax — to currencies issued by central banks with whom the government has an account.
It’s entirely possible to deliver an argument for the separation of government and money without criticizing either in and of itself. It’s very much like arguing for the separation of church and state without saying anything negative about either of the two in isolation.
I obviously don't think anything is wrong with using alternative currencies, but I'm not sure that separation of currency and state can happen the same way separation of church and state has. Even if the government doesn't control the issuance of currency they will undoubtedly have an outsized influence on whatever currency they choose to support.
I honestly don’t see the big difference: the people, by voting on representatives, choose both which religions and means of payment the government accepts (assuming a democracy, of course).
This is perhaps what separates libertarians from liberals, conservatives, socialists, etc.: we simply do not deny others the liberty we claim for ourselves.
If a monetary system that cannot be debased/controlled by government is available, does that not allow you to elect to create and/or join a community of similar beliefs? Or, would you prefer that I (or someone else) be able to gain control of your government, and then choose to make it (financially) impossible for you to choose your associations and/or behaviors?
Or, perhaps: does your "utopia" require others to fund it, in order for it to work? This is, unfortunately, the case with most people's personal beliefs. They require the non-consensual forced effort of others to succeed...
In the unlikely situation where this happens and I'm alive to experience it, I'll be the most extremist libertarian you've ever seen. "You don't like this? Just create your own community on some planet a few light years from there and do your thing." Communists colonize their own little solar system, anarchists cohabitate in an other, fascists create the Germania consortium.
But that's not the world we live in currently. We're all stuck on the same speck of dust in the middle of an absurdly large ocean of empty space. So yeah, for now unfortunately it means we have to play nice with each other and compromise. Whether you like it or not you're part of a society.
Please keep generic ideological bickering off HN. It's always the same, therefore never interesting in the local sense of the word.
I'm not sure about your claim that valuing liberty for myself and others is about "taking as much as you can for yourself", though...
if in in fact you are referring to competing for resources in a zero-sum game, that is a different thing than say, Free Speech.
What problems do you see infinite blockchains solving?
No comment on whether or not a crash is inevitable, who knows where the price is going. That's not really too important to me. But the fact that Bitcoin is for now the most secure and technologically sound blockchain is what makes it interesting. And actually having those unique characteristics is what makes it special. I definitely don't see much special with 'blockchain the data structure' on its own.
I think forks are definitely the biggest concern for Bitcoin. I think most longterm holders arent realizing how big of a threat it is.
Bitcoin Cash is still around and can probably stay around for a long time reusing Cores work. Other forks will be less friendly and won’t preserve Bitcoins transaction history.
Thank you for putting words to an idea I've had for a while.
I agree that central banks are imperfect and that they sometimes abuse or just misuse their power. When they abuse the trust we place in them it creates real, specific problems. Cryptocurrencies have no trust, but they have even worse versions of the same specific problems.
This shouldn't be surprising. The entire reason we created central banks in the first place was precisely to attempt to manage these specific problems. The implicit argument is that centrally managing a currency isn't just imperfect and corrupt, but that it's so incredibly imperfect and corrupt as to be worse than nothing.
In all possible worlds, individuals will fork Bitcoin and the competition for economically and technically sound digital monies will only increase. And in all possible worlds, individuals will manipulate markets with very low volume, ie. Bitcoin for most/all of its existence.
This is all deterministic. It could not be otherwise.
Good thing no one suggested that.
What baffles me is the obsession over price. Nobody obsesses over USD/JPY, unless you’re a forex trader.
Rather than focusing on price, the focus should be on building new ideas with blockchain technology. Dapps are easier than ever to deploy with Truffle/web3.js[0] for example. You can come up with cool alternative governance models like Dash[1] has.
I’ve been following Bitcoin since 2010. It’s never been about price for me. It’s been about what cool things you can build with the technology.
This is not really accurate. There are of course many ways both fiscal and monetary for policymakers to "tighten the screws", as it were. They just haven't chosen to do so in recent years.
Perhaps a better way to describe it is that a pump and dump strategy has a transient effect on the value of the asset in question, whereas a central bank increasing the money supply has a persistent effect on the value of the currency in question.
Also relevant, there are no functioning democracies in the world today. There are a bunch of republics and parliaments and representative democracies and such, but without exception they empower some relatively small central institution to make broad, sweeping decisions on behalf of the nation.
> But Hayek used the notion of distributed knowledge. Well, it looks like we do not even need that thing called knowledge for things to work well. Nor do we need individual rationality. All we need is structure.
Irrational exuberance is a good thing!
And while these ideologues are busy demonizing the central banks a handful of individuals manipulate bitcoin to levels a central bank could never even attempt...