The point is that Bitcoin has introduced an actual "digital cash" currency without institutional/governmental middlemen. That institutions can be built on top of that, and that some people want such institutions, doesn't change the novel utility of finally having a currency that functions like digital cash.
It's like saying it's ironic that people use physical USD for anonymous p2p transactions when USD banking systems have KYC laws. It's a non sequitur.
And the reason behind that is obvious. Something whose value may double in a month or whose value may halve within weeks is a terrible currency.
If I expect it’s value to increase then I would be a fool to spend it. If I expect it’s value to drop I would be a fool to accept it.
Cryptocurrencies are anything but currencies.
Would be true if bitcoin was full premined, but it wasn‘t.
There are still 900 new bitcoins mined per day, and with an open source / patent free environment the space is a competitive market, the cost to produce one should tend towards the price of selling it (less so when the price rises quickly).
So how is at least a dollar lost (for every dollar won)?
For people speculating, there's always a buyer and a seller. If I buy $100 of Bitcoin from person A and then later sell that for $101 to person B, then I have gained a dollar. A dollar that A would have gotten had they held on, or B would have gotten had they bought in earlier. It's a zero sum game. Except that everybody involved is paying transaction fees, putting in otherwise-valuable time, and taking risk (e.g., of theft), so in reality it's a negative sum game.
That's very different than actual investing. If I put $100 into a friend's company, then they will hopefully use that money to create something more valuable than the total investment. I'll come out ahead, but so will my friend and my friend's customers. That's a positive-sum game.
You’re cherry picking your price analysis time period. Last year I could have said “BTC has trended down tremendously the last 2 years” and I’d have been right as well.
If you want to make the opposite argument, that it has a downward trend, you have to cherry pick a fairly small period.
You have to cherry-pick narrow enough time period to see bitcoin dropping in price.
If you pick sufficiently large time period bitcoin always grows. This screms 'investment'.
I'm not saying its bad, but its an extremely high risk investment so not suitable for the money you can't afford to lose. I've heard of many people withdrawing superannuation to put into crypto (or using credit) for example.
Volatility results from the fact that the markets have a very hard time pricing an asset (because the asset's properties are hard to understand and its future behavior is therefor hard to predict).
This results in the creation of noise on the price signal.
It does not mean the asset is inherently bad. It just reflects lack of knowledge.
https://miro.medium.com/max/1838/1*Ao2C0phpSfknHvorWl2a3Q.pn...
I've been banned from Paypal. I've run into many verification issues over the last decade with banks because I have no proof of residency once my driver's license expired.
Like physical cash, it doesn't need to be superior in all ways to be useful at all.
Every state I've lived in (13 so far) has an ID card that looks and acts exactly like a driver's license, with the only legal difference being that it is not valid for driving.
Unless you're not in America, in which case someone else can chime in.
I don't have any of that. But maybe you can appreciate that I don't want to have to jump through those hoops just to be able to send someone $100 digitally.
Surely you store fiat currency somewhere, and isn't there a "transfer money" button where you plug in an account number and institution and the money arrives shortly after?
The inability to make transfers immediately and without fees between accounts held at different banks is bizarre for those used to UK banking.
Isn't that trivial to do from a reporting point of view? Just export your wallet history and do a lookup on that day's price.
It's another reason why using a cryptocurrency is still a gigantic hassle in comparison to fiat.
But one of my points here is that, while I'm sure some people here are chomping at the bit to nail me with a gleeful "see? ironic!", I simply don't have to use Coinbase. I can, for example, exchange Bitcoin locally the same way I can trade USD for pesos with my roommate. I was SOL at one point when I was simultaneously banned from Paypal while my bank at the time spontaneously rejected further access to my own account, the two institutions I was depending on to operate abroad. It's what made me turn to Bitcoin, and I began considering how ridiculous the state of our financial status quo where I have precarious access to my own money.
I can appreciate that my outlier needs make it hard for people to relate to me the same way most people don't understand why an HNer cares about Linux when Windows works for them, but I think most people here are disappointingly eager to reject any possible upside of "digital cash". Even if its upsides are exceedingly niche for most people, that's not reason to dismiss them.
To me it's like reading an HN thread where everyone dismisses Purism's smartphone because Android and iPhone do the job for 99.9999% of people, and who the hell could possibly care about separating the CPU from cellular baseband? Or maybe they're claiming that only criminals would care about that. Well, that very few people are in a position to appreciate it has no basis on whether we deserve the option.
This is my last comment on this particular submission.
It is not difficult for most citizens in first world nations to keep and maintain a bank account.
Do you have a source for that?
It seems to me that asking for sources is a common technique for discrediting opinions on HN. It looks like a legitimate question but obviously if they had a source it would be a fact rather than an opinion.
If you are actually interested in how that opinion is formed ask a relevant question or point out what they are missing.
Personally I find that opinion entirely reasonable given that there are no problems I have that Bitcoin would solve better than the alternatives unless I was inclined to buy something online anonymously or to speculate on Bitcoin itself.
Just because a random guy barters bitcoins for goods/services, that by no means implies that bitcoin is anything close to money.
There is a very specific definition of what money is, and bitcoin's volatility alone rules it completely out.
It takes two to barter.
> treating it effectively like a foreign currency
They really aren't. They accept bitcoins in exchange for goods/services, just like we see in any barter system.
Calling bitcoins "foreign currency" is just a desperate attempt to hide the obvious consequences of it's volatility, which eliminates it's role as money, not only as a store of value but also as unit of account.
Each and every single random guy on the internet who wants to buy stuff with money cares about money, and the properties that allow something to work as money.
Specifically, properties like being stable in its value within the market, and reliable both as a means of deferred payments and meet debts.
Bitcoin, or any cryptocurrency, is nothing of the sort. Far from it.
For some random guys on the internet. yes. Some other guys are using it without waiting for it to be everything the previous system had. (deferred payments etc.).
No, it's not. It’s too volatile to be an efficient store of value or a useful unit of account for general purposes; it's got some use as a competitive medium of exchange for certain circumstances (but again not really with the generality of any major fiat currency.)
It's commodity that seems to (retrospectively, at least, and there is some reason to expect this to continue for the near future) have good investment performance if you are in a position to wait out down periods, which makes it nice as a component of an investment portfolio.
It's good at things that aren't the purpose of money, but mostly not good for things that are the purposes of money, except for a narrow subset of one of three major purposes of money.
Bitcoin is obviously not money, and among the many reasons the fact that it does not serve as a store of value nor a means to defer payments, which is a single requirement that comprised the very definition of money, is just one of them.
Nope. I don't buy things in crypto only because of the reporting burden. Every cup of coffee bought with crypto has to be reported on a tax return.
You should.
And then report every cup of coffe on your tax return.
And file on actual physical paper, preferably printed with a font that's hard to machine-read.
It's reported as a security - other, which is laid out like the stock trades 1099. Your taxable amount is the difference in price between what you paid for the currency and what you "sold" it for (both in USD).
If you're talking about the US, I think you're wrong: you need to declare all your hobby income, and since 2018, you can't deduct hobby expenses.
See e.g. https://www.creditkarma.com/tax/i/hobby-income-taxed https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tips/self-employment-taxes/4...
That's annoying. Would be nice if they didn't keep changing things around all the time.
I, for one, have and will continue to use it as a currency in some cases. I'm quite sure I'm not the only one.
HODL would not be the meme it was if the goal was to actually use bitcoin in day to day transactions.
There's an easy solution to that problem: spend BTC when you buy things, and then every week-end, buy it back to get rid of whatever monkey money (fiat) people gave you (salary,payments,etc...)
That seems like a lot of work, but it's easy to automate.
And if enough people do this, this will strengthen the BTC economy and weaken fiat, so you can feel good about yourself when you go to bed.
Ask the people who bought hundreds of millions of dollars (without inflation) of drugs on Silk Road, Empire Market, White House Market etc since 2013 until now. I am making up hundreds of millions based on the seized Bitcoins by the FBI, the real number probably exceeded Billions a long time ago already.
The WannaCry and other ransomware folks don't sit on their millions of dollars of extorted Monero/Bitcoin either. They buy cars and fancy things with them, and that's one reason many of them got arrested.
Few real world examples of scams against everyday folks:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=canada+bitcoin+...
Safeway now has BTC ATMs and we we'll be able to drop "canada" from the query and get good results from the US soon.
Bitcoin has a potential to serve as that kind of saving “currency” a lot of people actually need.
If you on the other hand have a long saving window so you can tolerate huge swings in the price of the bitcoin (or other cryptocurrency) then the question arises why not diversify your investments like regular people and buy ETFs or other assets?
Maybe buying ETFs is harder than buying bitcoins, but in general the idea is (I assume) the same. However, what I feel most people are allured by with bitcoin is its random price movements where out of nowhere its price surges up and creates a total hysteria in the market.
I myself heavily dislike assets which price is mainly driven by emotional rationale and while bitcoin's idea may be good, I would not suggest anyone to put their savings in bitcoin. It would seem to encourage people to treat markets with magical thinking where the prices are set by otherworldly powers and not as tied to the revenue stream that is generated by the said asset.
So far over the course of my decade-ish long career most invoices are paid via fiat but actually my record sale was paid in Bitcoin. The client paid for approx 500 consulting hours in BTC (and is still a client to this day, paying for many more hours than that batch in subsequent purchases albeit sometimes in fiat).
I prefer Bitcoin over government fiat currency when doing large transactions like that because of the risk that a bank will freeze the funds or hold the transaction arbitrarily without warning and on either side of the equation; ie- you don't know if the party sending or receiving may be subject to the freeze.
I wouldn't necessarily say that most of its market cap is coming from people treating it like a currency. But I most definitely think it is effectively a currency in some places and in some special circumstances.
I take it that the point of the post is that, by and large, due to the fact that the blockchain is public and analyzed and mining is conceivably traceable to special purpose hardware, it's not for many practical purposes usable as a stateless, institution-free vehicle for transactions.
I'm not sure how to square the circle on this, but it certainly is a currency in some cases.
The site charges a small fee for the service of derisking the holdings.
This does seem to solve a real user pain point (risk and the complexity of hedging) and benefits from scale economies.
Yes, people are investing to speculate on its price, but they are also investing because it has a fixed supply that cannot be inflated away by governments.
Take a look at the U.S. M2 money supply YTD and the DXY and consider what happens next as more wealthy investors begin to recognize this advantage inherent in Bitcoin.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
USD vs Bitcoin is a comparison of currency.
The emergent cartel of miners becomes that.
From the article:
> The whole idea of proof-of-work mining is broken the instant hardware comes out which is specialized for mining and useless for general computation because at that point the need to have compute power for other purposes is absolutely irrelevant in having any effect on mining, and there ceases to be any force that causes mining to be distributed around the world. It becomes a "race to the bottom" to find where people can get the cheapest electricity, and then mining anywhere else - anywhere the government tries to make sure ordinary people actually get the benefit from electricity bought for tax money, for example - becomes first pointless, then a net loss.
It's the same story as some countries not having good quality coffee, avocados, quinoa, etc. because the export-quality goods are priced out of widespread domestic consumption.
With electricity production and distribution being a natural monopoly (and therefore typically regulated by the government), blockchain can't escape the realities of foreign exchange rates and government control.
Edit: Your comment was edited after I made this one. I see no relation between the quote from the article and how miners are supposed to be middlemen.
It doesn't take 100% collusion, but certainly no more than 51%, and I've read speculation (though no proof) that less is sufficient.
> middlemen
A mining cartel can't edit a blockchain, but they can choose to accept a different blockchain, which is effectively the same thing. Do you accept the premise that a sufficiently large cartel can exist, by state intervention in the price of electricity?
[Apologies for the edits. I often find I dislike my first draft.]
Chain splits do not "edit" blockchains, they still require their own proof of work, and they cannot modify transactions, only drop them. Honest participants in a chain that is orphaned will not have had their money spent in the new chain, leaving it available to spend again. That's all that can be done. It requires a lot of work to be done once, let alone maintained over time on consecutive blocks, and in extremely short order the rewards sacrificed by fucking with the blockchain make continued attacks expensive to the degree that they'd be practically impossible.
People aren't thinking this through. The "race to the bottom" endgame is not that miners consolidate in one state with subsidized electricity, but that mining operations eventually power themselves off-grid through renewables, making distribution entirely detached from geography and jurisdiction.
I agree that continued attacks makes a complicated situation, given the cartel participants would probably hold a significant amount of coin and would risk devaluing themselves against some other currency (though in the end-game scenario, what other currency matters?).
Let's imagine that the majority of domestic and international trade is conducted in Bitcoin, with maybe some alterations to the protocol to enable hundreds of thousands of transactions per second at essentially zero cost from the perspective of an individual actor (non-miner), even bursting up to tens of millions of transactions per second, somehow. Suppose then that two large governments, say the Unites States of America and the People's Republic of China, get into a little tiff about some boats hanging around the Taiwan Strait. Would these societies (in aggregate) prefer that their domestic and international trade be conducted in Bitcoin, or in a domestically-controlled currency?
A cartel could lock out a set of accounts from the Bitcoin network. Perhaps only temporarily, but long enough to have serious effects.
> power themselves off-grid through renewables
That'd be cool, but I doubt that off-grid will ever reach the efficiency and scale that on-grid will provide, due to fluctuations in the power sources and the economies of scale. It's hard to make a currency choice by betting on that technology, especially as the calculation could swap as the technology changes.
Of course, as Bitcoin currently stands, it's difficult for this to come to fruition because most holders are speculators rather than people interested in using it as currency.
Why would Bitcoin transactions be exempt from KYC?
You can also not comply with KYC laws in the traditional banking system; you're just going to get roflstomp'd by the financial authorities, c.f. $200mm fine for Deutsche Bank for insufficient AML/KYC controls in 2012-2015 time period.
Why would you imagine the result will be any different for crypto-banking? FinCEN is already promoting KYC for exchange-hosted wallets.
In many situations lack of KYC is a bug, not a feature.
Some people seem to be actually believe that.
You just happen to be one of them.
You don't.
Just like free speech, tracking what people do with their money is a violation of basic human rights.
Giving governments that kind of power is downright crazy.
If you want to catch criminals, resort to traditional ways.
At this point, bitcoin is a competitor to gold as an asset store. Maybe it will be more like a currency at some point. But there's a long way to go and a lot of forces against it for that to occur.
Who are they? How many are they? What insight do they have that we don't have? Is this chance higher than the possibility of collapse for Bitcoin?
Bitcoin was born in the Global Financial Crisis when the world was discovering the massive scam which the financial services industry had perpetrated, causing the whole problem. People wanted a way to do transactions without having to trust institutions which demonstrably couldn't be trusted. Hence Bitcoin which acts like digital cash with no trusted intermediary.
Still, note that you don't need Paypal to move Bitcoin.
Most people take it for granted that they need a bank to do anything, and they don't really consider how powerless they are over their own money. Like how it's illegal to carry too much cash (and it can simply be taken away). And how your bank can impose arbitrary restrictions against you like rejecting transactions and freezing your account. I've lost various bank accounts over the years as a permanent traveler. I'm banned from Paypal.
I want to be able to send $100 cash digitally with the operational minimalism of giving someone $100 cash in person. I want some control over my money even when I want to exchange it digitally.
Bitcoin isn't a currency yet. Most people can call up their credit card and get stuff blocked and returned instantly. Debit cards are definitely less of a service in that regard though and shouldn't be used like credit cards.
But the services are valued by most people.
As a currency, and as someone mentioned earlier - it's currently terrible due to it having an unstable valuation.
I was referring to credit cards being a service that consumers value because they have fraud protection and other things. The parent was talking about arbitrary restrictions and freezing accounts. That typically happens when you have fraud on cash accounts (bank account, debit card, etc). And a credit card layer works extremely well.
I just had someone accidentally send me money on Venmo and I returned it to them right away. Cash or cash equivalent digital services are nice, but it limits "purchasing power" (great for consumers IMO, bad for merchants), has no rewards, and little to zero fraud protections.
Countries that use chip and pin on debit cards are definitely more secure. This should be in place in all countries. Fraud on a debit card is a nightmare. Fraud on a credit card is not usually a big deal for consumers.
Regardless of the various financial instruments, bitcoin cannot be a real currency when it's value is unstable.
People use banks because they provide financial services. You don't have to use banks, if for some reason you want to avoid them, but then you're left without access to those services. As far as I know, Bitcoin doesn't provide financial services, so it's not a replacement for banking.
Notice also that the whole business model relies on the bank having privileged access to central bank money and sharing that access with the plebs for some percentage interest. However current technology makes it feasible for central banks to simply interact with consumers directly. The only remaining problem is how to decide who is likely to pay back the loan. Retail banks could be relegated to credit check providers.
Which country is that? It's not illegal anywhere I know of.
Are you really free if you have any arbitrarily defined “large” amount of money, only to have it sorted and it become YOUR burden of proof to show the origins of the cash?
[1] https://babatax.com/cash-transaction-limit-in-india-cash-pay...
[2] https://wolfstreet.com/2017/01/28/europe-limits-on-cash-tran...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/08/german-plan-pr...
[4] https://www.accountantsdaily.com.au/business/14087-governmen...
Transaction with cash between private citizens are permitted tough (like buying a used car in cash), but it's not a good idea to do so if you don't trust the other party (because then how can I prove that I gave you the money?)
> The more scalable the network becomes, the more centralized it becomes, until ultimately a "scalable" cryptocurrency would be doing things exactly the same way as a credit card processor.
It's more like TCP/IP than businesses built on top of the protocol.
Every new scam or venture that runs into regulatory issues is a fascinating trip that often results in "well yeah that's a terrible idea..."
There is some magical thinking within the Bitcoin community that only a fixed block size will prevent centralization. I have never heard a solid argument to back that up. Everything in technology is growing exponentially (cpu power, network throughput, disc space). So in relative terms the block size is decreasing exponentially. Technically Bitcoin mining should get exponentially more decentralized. This is not happening.
If we let the block size grow at the same rate as the surrounding tech, or at least at some rate, the supply problem would go away. The transaction fee would go down and we would not need to use flaky and centralizing tech like the lightning network that mimics the financial system that we wanted to escape.
For a long time this was a theory. However several forks of Bitcoin have tried it in practice (eg BCH, LTC, BSV). Over several years these experiments have shown that if you stop restricting the block size you get a system that is dependable, cheap to use, and scalable.
My wish for 2021 is for people in Bitcoin to reconsider if they have made a mistake in restricting the blockchain. I hope they will have the courage to change their minds in light of data.
Yes, Bitcoin requires many of the same structures as traditional finance. That does not make them equivalent. Traditional finance does not allow you sovereignty over your money. Bitcoin has central custody, sure. But it's opt in. That's what makes it different. You may or may not care about this property, but its undeniable that it's novel in the digital realm, and empirically many people do care about it.
Bitcoin & crypto also might not be sovereign in origin but they have plenty of sovereign influence, basically as much as any sovereignty wants to impose on it. Especially as entities like the SEC & IRS come to terms with it, it will be just as vulnerable to government control as fiat currency. This is especially the case because any wide-spread adoption will require adoption by large financial institutions, which cannot avoid regulatory regimes of their local jurisdictions. From the US government's standpoint, US citizens holding bitcoins is not much different than US citizens holding Euros. How that money enters into the US economy & interacts with US financial institutions or changes hands from person to person are basically subject to the same rules & regulations. If you're conducting a a transaction in excess of $10,000 then whatever mechanism facilitates that will still be subject to CTR's, and any "suspicious" transaction of lower limits will still be reported, by law, to the government.
Basically, if you want to convert bitcoin to the local currency to buy something, you'll need to use some sort of off-ramp that will be a regulatory bottleneck. Want to build a "shadow" economy purely driven by crypto exchange? Well, you'll still have to deal with the IRS knocking on your door & saying "You have things of value that you are performing work to receive. We don't care what currency or form you received them in, you received things of value. Give us our cut."
In short, it doesn't matter that it wasn't created by a sovereign authority: The control a sovereign authority can exert over it is, contrary to many of the most philosophical hopes for crypto, indistinguishable from sovereign currency in everything but name & source of origin.
Let me be clear though: I'm not anti-crypto. I'm probably a little ambivalent, and a little optimistic that it might replace high-friction mechanisms that exist in current financial infrastructure. What I do believe is that crypto cannot both go mainstream and fulfill the philosophical hopes that many had wanted for it.
I'm not sure that's quite true. Decentralization was a goal, but it wasn't necessarily the case that that decentralization had to pervade all use of the currency. The values of the ecosystem are that more decentralization is better - that's true, so Satoshi et al would have preferred to make decentralized transactions sufficiently scalable not to require centralized exchanges, but I don't think that it has fundamentally failed in its goals just because a lot of transactions happen in bank-like entities. The point is that users have the power to do it in a decentralized way.
> Bitcoin & crypto also might not be sovereign in origin but they have plenty of sovereign influence, basically as much as any sovereignty wants to impose on it. Especially as entities like the SEC & IRS come to terms with it, it will be just as vulnerable to government control as fiat currency. This is especially the case because any wide-spread adoption will require adoption by large financial institutions, which cannot avoid regulatory regimes of their local jurisdictions. From the US government's standpoint, US citizens holding bitcoins is not much different than US citizens holding Euros. How that money enters into the US economy & interacts with US financial institutions or changes hands from person to person are basically subject to the same rules & regulations. If you're conducting a a transaction in excess of $10,000 then whatever mechanism facilitates that will still be subject to CTR's, and any "suspicious" transaction of lower limits will still be reported, by law, to the government.
This just isn't accurate. It may in fact be vulnerable to some level of government influence, due to the fiat gateways involved. But it's just not true that it's equivalent to fiat in that regard. Cryptocurrencies will never be as regulable as fiat is, and I think it's pretty clear that that's true, given how widely they've been adopted by cyber criminals and darknet markets. Governments have been completely unable to prevent their use in this way, and will continue to be unable to do so.
It's true from a legal perspective that the government views it just like foreign currency (actually, in the US, they treat it like property, not currency, but we can ignore that for now). But from a technical perspective, its very very different. The technical differences make it very difficult to regulate. Think about music. When music got digitized, its legal status didn't change. It was just as illegal to download an MP3 as it was to steal a CD. What changed is the topology of the technical landscape underneath it, and that is what made all the difference.
> Basically, if you want to convert bitcoin to the local currency to buy something, you'll need to use some sort of off-ramp that will be a regulatory bottleneck. Want to build a "shadow" economy purely driven by crypto exchange? Well, you'll still have to deal with the IRS knocking on your door & saying "You have things of value that you are performing work to receive. We don't care what currency or form you received them in, you received things of value. Give us our cut."
I think you are under-weighting the significance of friction. In principle, sure, the IRS might do that - but we don't live in principle. We live in a physical world with resource constraints. If you make something harder to accomplish, it may no longer be economical to do it. Collecting income taxes from people that keep their money in crypto who don't want to pay them will never be as efficient as doing so in the fiat banking system.
What do you mean sovereignty? Do you mean property? Traditional finance is not only compatible with the ownership of money, it relies entirely on it!
So much talk about the benefit of crypto currencies seems - in my eyes at least - based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how societies work.
And most of all: you can’t replace trust with tech.
From the tone of your statement, I think you meant mis-understanding. I'll add also a misunderstanding of macroeconomics and a rejection of empiricism. The cryptocurrency folks read a bit too much of von Mises.
I'd say, you can (Bitcoin is one of many recent exercises of replacing trust with math). But it's not worth the price. Or, put another way, trust is a ridiculously powerful optimization that enabled humanity to form societies in the first place. It's very similar to how introducing a central node into a network reduces communication costs from O(n^2) to O(n). In the general case, it's stupid to not take advantage of it.
I consider Bitcoin to be the closest we've came so far to expressing trust in units of energy. POW shows us how much computation has to happen to achieve mathematical guarantees in lieu of trust. Somebody could probably derive some upper and lower bounds on the energy costs of trust in terms of information theory. I'd love to read such a paper.
Even in the very basic ecommerce use case: buyer purchases item online with bitcoin. The buyer must necessarily trust the vendor to deliver.
There's no recourse outside of the good graces of the vendor. There's no chargebacks or third party mediation.
Thus Bitcoin actually reverses the risk assumed by online purchases from the vendor to the buyer.
This is the reason why Bitcoin is a failure outside of niche grey and black market concerns. It is far worse for the consumer than existing solutions that isolate them from transaction risk, and will usually kick back a small percentage in cash back.
The middlemen are being created again yes, but they are being replaced with mostly open-sourced software solutions like smart contacts and auditable ledgers. Bitcoin started the party, but the other projects are now finding their feet with technology that uses open consensus as the basis for open, functional, opt-in systems.
Look at Gitcoin, this would not have been possible without the Bitcoin project gaining traction.
> centralized mining activity in a country where centralization means it's effectively owned by exactly the kind of government most people thought they DIDN'T want looking up their butts and where the people who that government allows to "own" this whole business work together as a cartel.
It looks to me like an attack on the reserve currency status of the USD. It's not a sure bet, but China is willing to tolerate it in the event it succeeds. Chins holds the mining power, so they effectively win if Bitcoin takes over. It's easy for them to clamp down and control.
> This is a pretty funny point because every time I go on twitter and see people talk about crypto, what they're essentially having is a discussion about public policy, and often they seem to try to reinvent institutions that already exist
The Bitcoin early adopters want to replace the incumbent systems with their own so that they can enrich themselves.
Now that Bitcoin has had time to play out, it feels like an attack on USD with way too many downsides.
This is a pretty funny point because every time I go on twitter and see people talk about crypto, what they're essentially having is a discussion about public policy, and often they seem to try to reinvent institutions that already exist without even knowing it. From market-makers, exchanges, insurance and so on, precisely as the author points out all the dreaded middlemen they were trying to avoid