My assessment is that the greatest vulnerability in Bitcoin is its breathless supporters, who will look past the dynamics of Bitcoin in adoration of the mechanics of Bitcoin. To that end, larger, more sophisticated enterprises (banks, hedge funds, etc) are likely leeching slowly off the system, propping the price up and inflating it when they can, so they can extract as much value as possible out of its correction to a value commensurate to its utility. Every other technical vulnerability, notional or demonstrated, is at least an order of magnitude harder to exploit.

I think the split you draw between people looking at Bitcoin-the-real-thing and people adoring the machinery is an excellent one.

If you look at the original paper, it's pretty clear that Bitcoin was meant to be peer-to-peer electronic cash: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

In practice, it has failed at this aim. I don't think that was necessarily so; plenty of things start out rough and become more useful over time. But the mechanics-adorers I've talked with seemed willfully blind to all the practical issues. We can't fix problems we refuse to see, so Bitcoin has preserved its machinery at the expense of fulfilling its vision.

In practice, Airbnb has failed at its aim of providing airbed style accommodations for conference goers.

They have succeeded wildly in providing accommodation for conference-goers. The last conference I went to many people were staying in AirBnBs and even coordinating to share them.

They succeeded by expanding the mechanism to support actual discovered user needs. Which is what Bitcoin signally failed to do.

Is bitcoin becoming a store of value really as obviously better for it than AirBnb becoming a more general accommodation provider? If not, it's not really a fair comparison.

Besides, AirBnb didnt even fail in providing accommodation for conference goers with included breakfast. It still works perfectly in its original intended use.

Airbnb is a business. It's "aim" is to grow and make money.

Bitcoin was a political experiment before it was a technological one. You don't pivot political beliefs the way you pivot a business. The technological experiment is still ongoing, but the political experiment has failed its goals.

Airbnb is a service, where bitcoin is a commodity. I don't mean to imply you are wrong. I simply mean that there may be an even more interesting parallel out there where a commodity is no longer being used in its originally intended way which may support bitcoin's evolution of purpose.

How is bitcoin a commodity? I think you give it too much credit to elevate it to that status.

It's structure and behaviour much more resembles a commodity than it does any other asset class; it is basically digital gold. The CFTC agrees and considers itself the responsible regulator.

With the important distinction that it's not an economically useful commodity. Sure, the CFTC regulated it, because their remit is one of the broadest. So you could call it a commodity by default. But it's not like you could make jewelry or breakfast cereal from Bitcoins in the same way you could use commodities like gold or wheat. So it's arguably more like a gambling instrument than any real commodity.

Really, though, I think the closest financial match is a private currency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_currency

These are illegal in most places because they historically have caused a lot of problems without much in the way of redeeming value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banking_in_the_United_States#1...

Gold has a value beyond what it is worth (and which aids to its value): you can use it as a jewellery.

Digital currencies can be used via computers and networks while physical currencies such as banknotes and gold requires sneakernet.

Airbnb is a service. Bitcoin is a commodity in the same way online poker chips are a commodity

How would you change the machinery?

Personally, I wouldn't. Most people don't want digital cash for the same reasons they don't use real cash: your risk of theft is higher, it's not as convenient to use, transactions can't be reversed, and you lose a lot of buyer protections.

I use technology to solve problems for people. The few niches Bitcoin has found (e.g., speculation, money laundering, ransoms, light drug crime) are not really what I would call solving problems for people.

Your personal opinion on cash is irrelevant to the subject. Cash has property you say you don't want. Some people might and do want them. Just have a look at what the relationship between Germans and cash.

Bitcoin has property similar to cash to many extend. It was not technically possible before its invention and as such as it is a real intrinsect value (dont ask me to quantify it)

It wasn't my personal opinion. In the US, the use of cash is below half of personal transactions and has been declining for years; most countries are similar. I personally am more like the Germans here, but I recognize that I'm an outlier.

Regardless, your point doesn't make a lot of sense, because many Germans surveyed on this say they use cash because it gives them better control over spending and more clarity as to where their money goes. Bitcoin is in no way superior to a debit card in that regard.

The value of new possibility isn't really intrinsic; you measure it through seeing if people actually use it. With Bitcoin they mostly don't, which suggests that it is at best more useful to a small slice of people.

I see so many red flags with Bitcoin that is amazes me that it still has its backers.

There would seem to be organizations (states?) that can wield tremendous resources to mine Bitcoins. I would think this would devalue the currency and, as is so often the case in life, fuck over the little people.

Never mind the insane amount of actual energy resources needed for this virtual currency. It almost seems immoral.

And with exploits like the one in this article, how can anyone continue to have confidence in it? It feels more akin to Confederate money printed during the U.S. Civil War.

What’s the difference between dynamics and mechanics?

The mechanics would be the internal workings, a tamper-proof shared ledger. It's so amazing! Think of all the possibilities!

Then it hits the real world, and suddenly what people actually do with it and its valuation is dependent on how the exchanges operate (are exchanges even mentioned in the original paper?), energy prices in China, media coverage, interactions with alt-coins, etc.

You seem to assume that the greatest feat of Bitcoin is it's price. Yes, sure the price might be affected (somewhat) by how exchanges operate and media covers. However, many people don't care too much about the monetary price, and play the long game. In the long run, the market always adjusts. In in the end, it is the same with any other commodity or currency.

Mr. Bachman, with all due respect, I would argue that the majority of people proclaiming they don't care about the price are bluffing. Perhaps even bluffing themselves. Bitcoin's price increase has far outpaced its adoption or disruption of the financial system.

What game are you playing if you don't care about the price?

Do you care about the price of 1 dollar? "In what?" you will ask. "Exactly. In what?" I will respond.

Everyone who decides whether to keep their dollars instead of spending/investing them (or even to borrow and be short dollars), do care about the future value of one dollar.

In loaves of bread, in liters of milk, in months of rent, gigabytes of internet, square feet of land, kilowatts of electricity; in i7s and shitty steam games and iPhones. I care about the price of 1 dollar in the labor I put in, and the goods I get out.

Exactly. This is what I wish for bitcoin. I dont know if it will ever be true though.

That's not an answer. The poster claimed not to care about price, but to be playing the long game.

I'm asking what the long game is? You haven't helped.

This is basically the plot of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, which takes it to its logical conclusion (but I won't spoil it, it's a fun short read.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_as_Big_as_the_Ritz

http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/users/m/morillo/public/fitzgerald... [PDF]

Nah, you could short-sell Bitcoin. Take out a sell option, crash the value, buy cheap, then exercise the option. Information is valuable, no matter which direction it predicts the market to go.

An interesting thought, but in practice, trading derivatives affects the value of the underlying pretty strongly. Whoever is selling you those puts is selling bitcoin (or futures) to hedge, which would drive the price down as you try to put on your position.

With options, buying deep OTM puts won't result in an immediate impact on the underlying market because they have such low delta and market makers aren't going to move a lot of spot to hedge it.

The problem is that if you successfully rook put sellers in this way for some ungodly amount of money, they will never be able to pay out on your claim. Kinda like when all the big Wall Street Banks were caught out because AIG was threatening to go bankrupt and default on their CDS.

You might never exercise the option, but you could probably resell the option at a far higher price

It wouldn't be immediate, but the second you put on a trade with any kind of size that far out of the money, the market makers will wise up.

That sounds like a perfect trade. But doing something like that will paint a target on hacker/s back. So, slowly leaching is a much better idea than getting it in one shot.

I would think a slow-play is significantly easier. For one, it doesn’t require much capital, unlike shorting.

Where would you buy a put (sell) option on Bitcoin (without substantial counterparty or settlement risk)? I genuinely want to know. I would have bought one in November if I could have.

I’ve read about plans to introduce crypto currency ETFs, but I’m not aware of any that are publicly traded yet.

Even then it's not clear you'll be able to buy options on them...

interactive investors offer this i believe

Bitmex

Assuming you want to make money directly, sure. If you want to harm a community in which the currency is widely used, the incentives are different.

What kind of incentive does the attacker have to just harm a community of a distributed system?

Association with or interest in a different (crypto or not) currency, leading to wanting to shake faith in the target currency.

Hostility toward a community in which the target currency is particularly popular.

“Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Concern over the impact Bitcoin has on global energy use?

If you had a strong interest in Ethereum (for example), then I think you’d want to avoid the wholesale destruction of Bitcoin. If the biggest crypto currency fails, it’ll probably send shockwaves through out the entire crypto currency market.

Mind you, I say this as a crypto currency outsider.

> If you had a strong interest in Ethereum (for example), then I think you’d want to avoid the wholesale destruction of Bitcoin. If the biggest crypto currency fails, it’ll probably send shockwaves through out the entire crypto currency market.

That's true as long as cryptocurrency itself is seen as fringe; it's less true if cryptocurrency becomes generally accepted.

Of course, a nation-state or other actor interested in preserving the role of fiat and keeping cryptocurrency on the fringes is also a possibility.

How about environmentalism?

Pure carnage? Blackhats are real.

An interest in a competing financial system.

Just to say they did it.

Money? Tax is a pretty good motivator for governments.

Making GPU prices great again

Trolling, because the internetz.

But what if someone else also finds the vulnerability? You can't be sure they'll also act slowly. It's like a game theory dilemma.

"Don't bite the hand that feeds you"

Even finding a single double spend attack that only double-spends 1 satoshi would be enough to destroy bitcoin.

No it would not. Finding a BTC double spend attack vector would be like finding a 0-day: good and maybe even profitable up until fixed, which would take hours, days at most. Have 0-days destroyed Microsoft, Android, Firefox, Electron or Chrome?

Microsoft, Android, Firefox, Electron and Chrome aren't currencies.

They have an underlying value/utility. People have a real, tangible need _outside of the use of those products_ to get them fixed. Can you say the same for a cryptocurrency?

yes?

What is the value of currency you can legally print on any printer?

Zero.

Edit: any crypto-currency you can exploit gives you option to print yourself money.

Double spend isn’t like printing money on a printer.

It’s more like being able to write two checks for your whole bank balance and having them both clear.

So very relevant are:

- whatever goods you bought with the checks need to be impossible to recall. So, like you need to find (two) someone’s who will effectively cash your check. You can’t buy a house because the police will come take the house back.

- you need to do it fast. The second you make are the first transaction you need fork and start mining hard. 51% gives you a speed advantage, but it’s very small. It still takes time to get the network to follow you.

Double spend is a very specific heist. Even if someone did it, it wouldn’t mean Bitcoin is valueless, it would just mean a certain class of heist is somewhat more probably and people need to adjust their security practices accordingly.

Tricks like waiting for extra confirmations, requiring identification before accepting payment, etc, are easy remediations.

You're over reducing things to the point where they don't make sense anymore lol

First of all, the value of a currency that could be printer on any printer might not actually be even 0.

Secondly, cryptocurrencies do not operate in vacuum. Its not as simple as "printing yourself money".

Right, it could possibly be negative.

Second, if I went to a store spent 199 dollars and those 199 dollars magically reappeared in my hand, didn't I create money out of nothing and reduce dollar value? Yes I did. Even if I never cloned any money I reduce the expectations of future stores that their money won't magically disappear.

And yes, I am aware banks do this, but they are regulated and when they abuse it, you get a financial crisis.

So it's ok if your currency becomes unreliable for many hours? It would immediately negate the trust of what happened during that period of time, affecting the trust of any balance in participating addresses.

Bitcoin hasn't been useful as a currency for a long time. I don't think that's a good measure for determining how an event might affect bitcoin price.

Bitcoin averages something on the order of 200,000 transactions per day. It's useful to someone.

That's definitely not proof of real economic utility. How many bets happen in Las Vegas every day? But economically, they're negative-sum events exploiting cognitive weaknesses.

They are not negative sum, because they provide entertainment.

Also, all systems that pay taxes are negative sum as well! Utility is not measured in money.

Entertainment can also have negative value. That's what the parent meant: your entertainment is provided by someone exploiting your gambling-addicted (and gambling may cause an actual addiction afaik, no less so than opioid addiction although based on different biochemistry) dopamine circuitry in order to extract actual (social) value.

All entertainment is someone exploiting your chemistry. Thats the whole point.

They mainly provide addiction. Go to a casino sometime and look around. Do those people look like they're entertained? The slot machine zombies barely look human anymore.

You're also wrong about taxes. Consider my local taqueria. They buy raw materials and create value by making ready-to-eat food just when people are hungry. They receive cash in exchange, a portion of which they pay in taxes to fund the infrastructure their business depends upon.

That is positive sum for all participants. It has to be. If taxes tipped it into the negative sum category, they'd eventually close down.

I dont think you've followed through on that model of yours.

If you buy 50 dollars of taco materials, then taco materials seller makes likes than 50 dollars ,because the state will charge a tax on him. If he didnt sell 50 dollars worth of raw materials, he would have 50 dollars of raw materials to consume, instead of less than 50 dollars.

On the other side, making the taco, you have the same issue: if you sell 100 dollars of tacos, and someone pays you 100 dollars for them, you then pay taxes.

You earn less than 100 dollars, and someone else lost 100 dollars. Repeat the proces ad-infinitum and your holdings go to 0. (assuming for simplification, any rate of positive taxation on income).

This makes no sense at all, and is not how business works.

Most economic activity is positive sum. When I'm hungry and on the go, a taco is more valuable to me than raw taco materials, so I pay more for it. Value has been created. The taqueria owner takes money in, pays their expenses, and is left with a profit. Taxes are paid out of that profit, and you could just as well model it as another kind of expense, a societal infrastructure fee.

Many countries use value creation as an explicit taxation model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_tax

Those are still positive-sum interactions in the economic sense: https://www.tutor2u.net/economics/blog/qa-what-is-a-positive...

> Value has been created

But not dollars, which is what you are using to classify gambling as negative-sum.

> Many countries use value creation as an explicit taxation model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_tax

If the gobernment collected that tax but didnt spend or issued money, even VAT ends up capturing all the money supply.

This is an unnecessary long argumentation. Gambling is not negative sum because they provider entertainment that has utility.

That is not in fact what I am using to classify gambling as negative-sum. It is also negative-sum in cash terms, but I'm speaking of value.

I understand you are claiming the entertainment value outweighs the harm of exploitation and addiction. I strongly disagree.

I dont think you've followed through on that model of yours.

If you buy 50 dollars of taco materials, then taco materials seller makes likes than 50 dollars ,because the state will charge a tax on him. If he didnt sell 50 dollars worth of raw materials, he would have 50 dollars of raw materials to consume, instead of less than 50 dollars.

On the other side, making the taco, you have the same issue: if you sell 100 dollars of tacos, and someone pays you 100 dollars for them, you then pay taxes.

You earn less than 100 dollars, and someone else lost 100 dollars. Repeat the proces ad-infinitum and your holdings go to 0.

Not (necessarily) true.

Expected value is not the only thing to consider. Higher moments matter.

Insurance typically has negative expected value but it’s rational to buy it (in conjunction with owning the insured object) to reduce one’s variance.

Gambling will increase the variance of one’s portfolio at the cost of expected value, which can be rational depending on one’s situation.

An awful lot of casino gambling involves series of small stakes bets on low payout options which don't even meaningfully increase upside portfolio variance over time after the house edge has been taken out. Might still be rational from a utilitarian perspective if one really, really enjoys card games of course, but not from a portfolio allocation perspective.

Apart from weird edge cases where an actor needs to double their money overnight to return to solvency in order to have a chance of benefiting from an income stream in future, there aren't many cases where it makes sense from a portfolio allocation basis given the existence of non-negative expectation bets in other markets with a wide range of possible variances. The insurance and investment management industries are built on the principle that economic rationality works in exactly the opposite way to gambling: that inherent value exists in reducing risk.

Exactly. Thank you.

Use as a currency was the point I was addressing. Bitcoin has been a working network for 9 years with 300,000,000 plus transactions.

It's a useful currency.

300 million transactions in 9 years is ridiculously low compared to any "fiat" currency. Googling around I find a post that gives a lower bound for number of debit card transactions in the USA alone as 47 billions for 2012 alone[1]. That's not counting the rest of the world and the other exchange media like cash or bank transfers. 300 million transactions is nothing. I mean thing about it, it's one single transaction for every person in the USA over the course of 9 years. Alternatively it's less one transaction per year for the entire population of Canada.

Amazon alone probably handles more transactions over the course of a couple of weeks.

[1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-credit-and-debit-card-transac...

Gambling has way more transactions. LIBOR options have more transactions. Any actively traded stock has more transactions. None of those things are currency.

Even prominent Bitcoin advocates agree it's not effective as a currency: http://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/

I wonder how many minutes it'd take for cash to manage 300 million transactions.

Visa does 2000 per second. 200k per day is almost laughable.

And Visa can do 7x that in a minute

speak for yourself, only thing I cant pay is my mortgage.

I have a shift card, bought tacobell with bitcoin.

That's not buying anything with Bitcoin. You are converting your Bitcoin to USD and then purchasing using the traditional, centrally controlled financial system.

And that's not even considering the transactions fees it costs to get the Bitcoin to your account.

Then there are the transaction fees for using the card, which coinbase says is free "for now".

That's like saying you can't buy anything with a VISA.

Sure, transactions are intermediated through some consensus denomination for exchange. So?

He still lost bitcoin and gained tacos. Just as someone else might lose a portion of a credit balance and gain tacos. You get just as full either way.

No. Someone is traveling to Europe, going to a restaurant and paying for the Euro nominated beer with his US based VISA and starting to claim that hey, cool, I paid for the beer with USD. You see, I lost a portion of my USD balance and gained a beer.

If you insist that the guy paid his beer with USD, it is going to be very difficult to discuss about anything as the meanings of the concepts are so twisted.

It is quite obvious that using a credit card that then accepts BTCfrom you does not mean that you use BTC to pay for anything but your credit card bill.

It's more like saying you can't buy anything with gold.

Credit and debit cards are just a way of shifting dollars around. Bitcoin is more a commodity than a currency. Yes, you can convert gold or oil to dollars and buy things, but you can't walk into a store and give them some gold flake or a quart of Texas crude in exchange for a candy bar.

> Credit and debit cards are just a way of shifting dollars around

A credit card is shifting a line of credit, an intangible promise to pay, a form of trust, that happens to be denominated in dollars.

We can pretend it's just a balance of dollars, even though it technically isn't, because it makes conversations easier, and in practical fact that's how it appears to work. But that's just a shorthand.

We can use the same shorthand to say someone bought something with bitcoin.

There's no reason to demand perfect technical precision with bitcoin and no similar pedantic precision with lines of credit.

> you can't walk into a store and give them some gold flake or a quart of Texas crude in exchange for a candy bar

I think this is the best test. Here the guy has done that. He walked in with bitcoin and walked out with tacos. When you say that's not really what happened, it feels like a no true scotsman response.

It did not. He gave them dollars, not a quart of crude. That he might have a side deal with somebody else to trade beanie babies for dollars does not make beanie babies a currency.

Bitcoin is not a currency. Plenty of other things are true currencies, so there's no fallacy here.

Was there an individual bitcoin transaction for each purchase? No, he just paid his credit card bill with bitcoin.

Whatever the receipt says is what you paid with; those receipts are definitely in USD.

Sure you could also pay your groceries with lead dispensed from a gun. But that's currently nowhere near broad addoption. It just doesn't meet the definition of "currency", though it will virtually always be current.

You didn't buy tacobell with bitcoin unless Taco Bell quoted you a price in BTC...

Shift isn't sustainable in it's current form. They are temporarily not charging for domestic transactions. Since there is a cost for those transactions, there will eventually be a fee per transaction.

This has already happened multiple times to BTC and it's still around. BTC is not a currency; that train left long ago.

I dont think it has?

You don't think what has? There have been double spend attacks against BTC.

source?

Not exactly a double spend, but billions BTC being printed out of thin air: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=822.0

It has happened before but that was in 2010 when the codebase was < 2 years old.

It's happened quite a few times after that. Consider the merchants who have been known to use fewer than the standard # of confirmations and what it takes to reverse or reuse those charges. For example, here is a blog post on one way to do this: https://blog.acolyer.org/2015/10/01/misbehavior-in-bitcoin-a.... If you want to search you will find that there are scripts to automate this type of action by constructing bitcoin transactions.

Also, consider ghash.io or the odd OKPAY double spends.

If Visa or SEPA got hacked over 12 hours and then fixed the root cause, would you stop using credit cards or bank transfers altogether? I would not.

Credit Card companies and banks can reverse the transactions, so long as they keep track of things in batches, have strong backup system for their ledgers. So long as they're not SWIFT transactions that leave the country, and the country that's attacked as a strong/regulated inter-bank transfer system.

If a bank is critically hit so bad funds become impossible to correctly attribute to people (Fight Club type unrealistic scenario), at least in the US FDIC would probably come in to play. The bank might even have to be treated as a failed bank.

People wouldn't stop using banks, but they would stop using that bank.

> People wouldn't stop using banks, but they would stop using that bank.

I'd really like to live in a world where that's true, but I don't see Equifax going anywhere. PayPal does a form of this as well, except it's the central system and not a rogue actor that locks your money away. Well informed users avoid PayPal, but there appear to be many more uninformed users.

Neither of those things "are money" and they're all highly reversible.

A major hack against Visa would absolutely tank the value of Visa the company however, and if people who believed they were paid weren't made whole somehow then it would also tank the acceptance of Visa.

And it would be an ongoing devaluation without Visa being able to show they'd fixed the underlying flaw - which you can't with a 51% attack.

My credit card gets stolen yearly. Sure, they can reverse the charges but changing the number everywhere is annoying..

Don't underestimate how long it takes to deploy a fix to such a vulnerability. Any change in consensus (which this would be) is a hard fork, and deploying it without carefully coordinating months in advance is certain to cause chaos.

Why do you think a double-spend attack would be easy to figure out? It could rely on start of the art crypto attacks which aren't known to the general public, or some very obscure bug which has slipped past thousands of eyeballs.

You won't really be able to process tx that low, you'll need to pay a tx fee proprtionate to the number of bytes. 1 satoshi per byte is a good rule of thumb for a very cheap tx. It takes more than 1 byte to describe one satoshi, so you can't get your tx to propagate.

Theoretically the attacker could also be picking up 0-fee transactions, but my intent was to really say this: it doesn't matter how small a double spend is - the ramifications for the network are the same.

Would even a single counterfeiter be enough to destroy a new fiat currency, or is your thesis specific to crypto?

What about state level actors, say the NSA, that consider bitcoin supplanting the US dollar as the standard medium of international currency exchange a huge threat to the world economy? (or at least their ability to control it)

I think people need to be concerned that Governments, at any point of time, with their incomprehensibly huge computation power, can use it to crush bitcoin. Not only that but they can pass laws that allow them to forcibly seize the fattest wallets. Which ultimately ensure's that the Government can, behind the scenes, kick the scaffolding out from beneath us. All I see right now is state level actors experimenting in this regard, because seriously who single handedly has the computation power to take control of these cryptocurrency's if its not the government or a company like Google?

> bitcoin supplanting the US dollar

To the extent there is a legitimate threat to dollar supremacy, it is in the Chinese renminbi. The U.S. dollar is ascendant because of the huge base of American consumers, who buy stuff with dollars others then need to find investment for. Plain and simple network effects.

The RMB is not even fully convertible, it is the opposite of liquid.

The US dollar is useful to countries like china is because the US government acts as a debtor of last resort, allowing them to park surpluses in treasuries.

> The US dollar is useful to countries like china is because the US government acts as a debtor of last resort

Which ultimately derives from our mammoth consumption. If Chinese consumption eclipses America's and their economy rebalances, they will have lots of Chinese consumers buying goods with renmimbi, leaving sellers offshore with boatloads of the currency to find investments for. (I consider this to be a moderate risk, and not one which would supplant the U.S. dollar but instead cause it to share the world stage.)

TL; DR Bitcoin is not a serious threat to the U.S. dollar. It promises huge profits to banks, which is why they're salivating over it.

Parking money in cash isn’t feasible, which is why much of the USD’s worth is in treasuries, the dollar is just incredibly liquid and easy to borrow/lend.

The Chinese government is not interested in filling this same role, even if now anemic Chinese consumption somehow picks up, they will probably still want to maintain absolute control over the exchange rate.

I agree that the renminbi is not presently a threat. Just that it has the potential of becoming one. That potential flows from the potential of China's consumers. A native base of consumers Bitcoin lacks. My point is that if the renminbi is a long shot for challenging the dollar's hegemony, Bitcoin is out past Pluto.

Our mammoth consumption helps, but the USD is also baked in as the unit used by the World Bank.

https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/11...

How is the government going to forcibly size a wallet? Are you suggesting they can break the crypto, or that they will compel people to divulge their keys?

"Today in an emergency bill, Congress made it an act of treason to move funds from bitcoin address 1BLABLABLAh555"

There are probably simpler methods, but if the United States really wanted to, they could probably buy/seize enough computers to pull a 51% attack.

That doesn't let them seize all the wallets.

You are not wrong to argue that state level actors are a serious threat.

But fortunately, these state actors seem to have no interest in attacking crypto.

It seems like the governments that matters IE the 1st world, are perfectly happy to allow people to have access to a censorship resistant method of financial transactions.

This makes a certain amount of sense. The governments of the 1st world claim to care a lot about freedom. And it seems that they are getting us have it.

Or you know, they love the idea of an immutable record that’s far from anonymous. Cash is hard to trace, a Bitcoin is easy to trace for something like the NSA. It’s a giant digital paper trail by design! Besides, Bitcoin is as likely to become a dominant currency as shells or promises. No one outside or BTC fanatics honestly entertain that idea, and only a few who do espouse it do so because they really think it’s likely. For obvious reasons hyping the currency translates directly into profit, so it’s hype all the way down.

Well, a couple of the cryptocirrencies out there have privacy baked in, such Monero.

I don't see any of these privacy coins being banned yet, so.....

But anyways that is besides the point.

The argument that the OP was making was that governments are areal threat to crypto. And MY point was that these governments are NOT actually attacking cryoptocurrencies so I guess things are going to work out fine for cryptocurrencies.

And MY point is that extrapolating too much from minimal data is unwise. If you’d like it put in historical terms, “...Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend...”