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Re:Increase in Bitcoin Addresses as More People Join the BTC... by rglullis on Friday November 20, 2020 @02:18PM (#25163848)
I was buying and selling BTC when they were less than $7. I have a wallet with multi-hundred BTC transactions and would make some newcomer cry thinking "how could he give this all away?". I will tell them that this mentality is backwards: if people were not willing to spend hundreds of BTC 7 years ago, it wouldn't have gone anywhere to the level it is today. I will continue to use it to buy whatever I can. If you find my discussions on various crypto subreddits, you will find me arguing that focusing on price of token X or project Y should be the last of people's concerns and to focus on how to make the tech more useful than the system it is trying to replace.

You may have a lot of people on the hodl camp, but a lot of people are like me - less worried about lambos and more focused on ensuring that we can create feasible alternatives to the status quo.

Yes, there will be a vast majority of people that are in it for the short-term gain. It doesn't matter. Every market needs to have speculators. I will still be focused on the long term.

I am not betting my life savings on it and I am not recommending anyone to do so. What I am telling people though is that crypto will be a fundamental part of how groups of people coordinate themselves and allocate their resources, and that the sooner they start getting acquainted to it the easier it will be when it is more mature for wider adoption.

> North Korea... $2 billion dollars and counting as documented by a pro-crypto news source.

I am aware of the story, this is not what I am calling FUD. What I am saying is that you are using crypto as a scapegoat. State-sponsored terrorists can cause damage regardless of them being financed by crypto, gold, oil or greenbacks.

Black markets were not invented with crypto. Money laundering is estimated to be between 800 billion to 2 trillion dollars. Those were the number before crypto, yet you make it sound like BTC, ETH, ZEC and Monero are the Four Horsemen of Apocalypse. THAT is what I am calling FUD and BS.

> platonic ideal currency

I know it will never be perfect. No implementation of any system ever is. But the only way to have something better than the existing flawed solutions is to iterate, use it, test it in the real world and keep improving.

To make an analogy with Free Software: I know that is never going to be perfect or satisfy every use case, but its flaws are on the implementation side, not the principle. The more I use and the more I contribute to it, the less people get to be dependent on proprietary crap.

What you are saying is that people should not bother working on making a better Free Software Desktop because the current systems are not as "usable" as Apple and likely will never be. That is, quite frankly, a horrible way to live.

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