What happens if you are disabled in a horrible negligent accident or defrauded in some conventional transaction and defendant hides all assets and transactions in BTC?
I can't imagine a long term equilibrium where [Americans, at least] store trillions and trillions of dollars in BTC without substantial additional regulation.
Edit: for those in relatively more corrupt, tenuous circumstances then BTC is a net positive, of course.
Even that I'm not sold on. You could argue that it gives incentives for the rich and powerful to maintain the status quo since their own riches become out of reach from the corrupt government.
Meanwhile the commoners are still very much under threat since most of their assets will be physical (their house, their clothes, their belongings, their bodies etc...).
The idea that cryptocurrencies are empowering the poor makes about as much sense to me as trickle down economics. If you are in a position to benefit from Bitcoin it means that you already have a significant amount of disposable income you can convert into bitcoin and afford to "HODL" in your wallet for a while. "Being able to transfer money across political boundaries without censorship" is completely irrelevant if you're a poor farmer in Buthan or an elderly shoemaker in rural Pakistan. Transfer what money, to whom and for what purpose?
This whole concept is just social-washing cryptocurrencies to obfuscate that it's profoundly libertarian (the USA flavor) at the core. If you consider that the government is always the enemy and it can't be fixed and should instead be thoroughly destroyed, then and only then do cryptocurrencies make sense. It's not about good vs. bad government, it's about no government.
Certainly not. As I keep telling people here, cryptos are property, not currency. Why should governments be in the business of telling people what type of property they can and can't own?
A coin is nothing but a couple of large numbers that are easy to multiply together but very difficult to factor...that's it. If the people of earth want to assign large fiat currency values to complicated key-pairs, then why shouldn't they have the right to do that?
Of course crypto-traders need government...like we need libraries and schools and police and all that, just like everyone else, right?
Uh what? That's like the second biggest thing the government does after, you know, army.
You can't own a dead lobster shorter than 6 3/4 inches in the United States without committing a felony, even if the lobster met its untimely end without your assistance.
Of course that's what the government should be in the business of doing otherwise we'd likely all be dead, and separately, there wouldn't be any more lobsters.
Private property right go back to the Magna Carta and form the basis of the US Constitution and it's Bill of Rights.
If you believe it's governments duty to control all property rights than your a Marxist and to be honest, I have no interest in debating you.
Bitcoin is regressive and would be harmful to the economy if it obtained widespread adoption, and therefore, the government has the right to curtail its use and ownership.
I mean, maybe you're claiming that I can't transfer the property, but that I have the right to own the property as long as the government approves of where it's going. Sure. That certainly reduces people's willingness to assign a large fiat currency value to my pantry.
You're registering your wallets with your government and that's about it. Bitcoin is fully transparent, so government can track every transaction and if you're doing transaction to some non-verified wallet, you have to explain it to your government.
I would argue that bitcoins are even easier to track than bank accounts.
What government can't do is to steal your money or block your access to your money.
Gov: “Here is our wallet blacklist feed. If you transact with these wallets, you go to jail.”
On the plus side, FinCEN can automate currency transaction report generation and monitoring on a public distributed ledger.
Me: "I'm already in Africa, find me, losers"
"No thanks. We're in America and have $20M of assets and 50 employees and we'd rather not lose it all and go to jail."
You should read about US sanctions, that's actually pretty close to the truth. Living outside of US jurisdiction means... living in Russia, AFAIK.
You can make it illegal to use Bitcoin, but it was designed to make it practically impossible to enforce such a ban.
"If you transact with these blacklisted wallets, your wallet also automatically becomes blacklisted, and if we find you then you go to jail. As an exception - if you receive any amount of BTC from a blacklisted walled, you have 7 days to send the same amount (or greater) to [this government wallet] and that will erase all your legal liability and make your wallet whitelisted again. We can even automate the process for you if you trust us enough to give us your wallet keys. Alternatively, register email/phone numbers with us and we'll notify you when your wallet is blacklisted, and tell you how much BTC you should pay us"
> We can even automate the process for you if you trust us enough to give us your wallet keys.
Haha seriously? Your solution is that people give their private keys to the government? You must have no experience with crypto or what it's about it all. Nor really experience with how the government works and how often it gets corrupt. A corrupt clerk now is a small nuissance, a corrupt clerk in your proposed scenario means that thousands of addresses get stolen of all of their tokens. There is zero chance that this scenario will ever be implemented in any meaningful way.
If you completely ignore how big corporations and ultrarich are able to hide their assets behind shell corporations and various other structures, then yes maybe your vision is correct. But that it not what happens in reality.
In reality right now the rich can hide whatever they can, and the poor have no recourse against frivolous seizures, lawsuits etc. What crypto does is levels the playing field.
(Roads and rubbish can easily by taxed by usage, from the people who clearly use those services, but there are other central commons that should be taxed on state or federal level.)
Yes but the amount of amber, gold, silver, etc. on Earth is a known unknown. There are presumably deposits of gold that we don't yet know about. The amount of BTC is known. You seem to be conflating rarity with fixed scarcity.
> Using existing anti-money-laundering laws & global institutions, you'd be effectively banned from getting back any value from your BTCs (or, doing so would expose you to all the associated risks).
While this is true, this is sort of the whole point of bitcoin. Like, it's a currency that is independent of any nation-state and acts as a sort of systemic-hedge against governmental incompetence/malfeasance. So the fact that it could even be banned by any particular country is kind of part of its value proposition. And, similar to VPN's, just because an IP-based technology is banned doesn't mean that it'd become impossible to use.
Aka any movement of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoins would have a huge impact on the number of Bitcoins estimated to be in circulation.
[+] Do note that I do not accept it is "currency" - because it has low acceptability, by design.
Vice also wrote an article on this: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjppx3/iran-bitcoin-us-sanct...
There's a difference between known unknown with high variance and known unknown with low variance. As I understand it, astrophysicists have a non-controversial model for how much gold is present on earth. Geologists probably have a reasonable model for how much gold is easily accessible.
To your questions: 1. You can't know how many shares there are going to be for companies. Even if you choose to use some company's stock as a long term store of value, that company will eventually fail at making profit and will issue new shares.
2. If the US banned BTC, it's easy to move overseas with it; memorize the key (not easy, but possible) and just spend the money when you get overseas. Or if you're going to stay in the US, you could just use it the way the dark web already does (not totally clear on how all that works, but clearly it does).
Yes, there is some guarantee. The guarantee is that government already have had numerous motivations to ban bitcoin already, and yet most governments have not seriously attempted to do so, likely due to the very significant efforts that would be required to do that.
I have been hearing "The government is going to ban bitcoin!!!" For 10 years now. And for 10 years, no government has been successful, and most countries simply been dismotivated from doing so.
there is no such thing. not in bitcoin, not in usd, not in gold. all value is extrinsic and assigned by market.
> tons of other things do! E.g. why not invest in amber, it's probably one of the rarest things in the universe
and tons of other things are invested into: precious metals, commodities, etc. bitcoin is the first digital commodity, which can't be inlated by some centralized authority.
> is there ANY inherent guarantee
yes, bitcoin transaction is finite and irreversible as soon as signature is published via any possible information channel and sufficient number of blocks are found on top of the one that includes the transaction. you can morse-code it into ionosphere to be picked up by the receiver or you can flashlight it across north korean border, no internet required.
US regulation may prevent you from interacting within US jurisdiction, but that's a different issue and precludes bitcoin being money about as much as US ban of certain drugs precludes them from getting people high.
Just as a nit, there absolutely is. Food provides value in that you can eat it to survive. Housing provides value in that it provides shelter from the elements. A goat provides milk and you can eat it. Barter systems typically involve the trade of two such goods. The problem is that such goods typically spoil with time, which is a primary advantage of fiat currency -- it is not subject to physical constraints.
Historically, people also used things like salt, which had intrinsic value (for preserving and flavoring food) but didn't spoil. But the use becomes so abstract that its pointless to haul salt around. Eventually you transition to precious metals, which also have some intrinsic value (for engineering various goods) but much less concrete. Then you transition to effective "gold IOUs" (gold-backend currency).
The idea of having a currency completed untethered to anything of value is relatively new. One of the most interesting aspects of bitcoin is proponents fervently advocate for one element of the gold standard (a fixed supply), but not the other (something physical of utility).
That's what it means to say that goods lack intrinsic value.
The exception is of course money, whatever good it is that is winning the Keynesian beauty contest of "good which I think everyone else will want as much of as they can get".
> One of the most interesting aspects of bitcoin is proponents fervently advocate for one element of the gold standard (a fixed supply), but not the other (something physical of utility).
if gold became useless for exchange purpose and only it's use-value was relevant, market price would go down to pretty much nothing, the scammiest cryptocurrency exit-scams would be brought to shame by that drop. so physical utility of gold has absolutely no relevance to gold-standard. even jewelery use-value was mostly driven by exchange-value, so that would become irrelevant as well and the market would be flooded by worthless golden trinkets and rings.
According to Wikipedia: "The world consumption of new gold produced is about 50% in jewelry, 40% in investments, and 10% in industry.".
Now, there are ETFs, futures, options, etc, that inflate the speculative portion, but the valuation due to physical properties is still likely within an order of magnitude of its total market value.
> Food provides value in that you can eat it to survive.
People value food (in many cases) because they can eat it. It doesn't mean that the value is intrinsic to the food. In fact, in many cases the value of the food is zero (or even negative! -- it still needs to be disposed-of) because no one wants it.
> Housing provides value in that it provides shelter from the elements.
People value housing for that reason, but housing doesn't have that value on its own. It has value because people want to use it for something. There are many abandoned houses that show this value is not inherent, but rather conditional and context-dependent (like all other value).
> A goat provides milk and you can eat it.
Yes, some people value goats for that reason. If you put one in my house, it will immediately have negative value, because not only do I not want it, the time it will take me to find a good way to get rid of it will dwarf the amount I can sell it for.
> Historically, people also used things like salt, which had intrinsic value (for preserving and flavoring food)
Again, people value it for that reason, but the value isn't in the thing (intrinsic). The value is imputed to the salt by people.
> Eventually you transition to precious metals, which also have some intrinsic value (for engineering various goods)
Again, no, but this one is perhaps the easiest to understand -- the value is imputed by people because of what they can do with it. In situations where they can't do anything with it, it has no value, revealing that the value was never intrinsic in the first place.
> The idea of having a currency completed untethered to anything of value is relatively new.
I would argue that this is not the case, and comes from a narrow way of looking at value. Say I'm a nerd (this may or may not be a true story). In early 2012, I find out about a thing called Bitcoin. I don't understand it very well, but it sounds cool, and I mine some just to say I have it, and then tell people I have it. I value it. I can't do anything with it physically, but that's true of a lot of things. I own a number of pieces of art that I value, even though I can't really do anything with them other than know they're there, sitting in my closet or storage unit. It doesn't make the value somehow not-real, because all value (in this sense of the word) is imputed to things by people; it's not in the things themselves.
You just have to look at natural ecosystems to see the reality of this; almost anywhere there's an energy gradient creating a niche there's some lifeform taking advantage of the situation.
And what is actually being valued? Not negentropy itself; merely particular economic goods that are examples of the process of negentropy.
WRT guarantee... yes, let's say I accept that you can send BTC to somebody regardless what laws the US passes. The question is, can you receive something in exchange? Because if you can't then it means that the technology is not offering you any guarantee. So that guarantee can't be the "intrinsic value". (you don't claim that it is - you just claim intrinsic value does not exist, which is a completely new discussion that I don't want to get into right now)
Anyways yea, not harping on you too much for semantics but the rabid crypto fanboys(not calling you one) really fuck up their terminology and understanding of basic economics.
Hey, wait a second, isnt McAfee supposed to eat his dick since bitcoin didnt hit the million mark?
that is quite the goalpost shift. bitcoin allows you to send and receive bitcoin securely and without asking permission. it is not bitcoin's purpose to ensure whatever the contract you're trying to realize entails. there are escrow services and what not for that.
the guarantee bitcoin gives you is that once transaction was finalized:
- you are the sole owner of assigned bitcoin
- only you can change that record in the ledger
- nobody can stop you from doing that
- nobody can dilute your share of the asset beyond the normal issuance schedule[+] BTC is not money, but I'm going to let that slide for this part of the argument.
yes it is. no technology will suddenly make censorhip go away. but technology can allow one to circumvent censorship. bitcoin doesn't solve censorship, corruption, fascism, genocide and whatever else you may want to throw in to justify your skepticism, but it doesn't have to. it solves a very specific problem: non-debaseable digital money and permission-less transacting of it. that comes with a set of compromises and great deal of responsibility for your actions, but it's a useful and valuable tool, first of it's kind and certainly the biggest revolution in finance since gold standard.
Exactly! It also is interesting how people were berating USDT for not having their coins backed in USD. Does it matter? As long as people are amicably agreeing to trade it at 1 USD, it's working as designed.
That BTC is not (yet?) money should again be non-controversial, since the vast majority of economic agents anywhere won't accept it directly (so you need to exchange BTC for cash first). It does have a decent claim at "store of value". But, where is the "intrinsic value"? You claim two of them:
1. ability to independently verify the money supply
2. being able to transfer money across political boundaries without censorship
I don't understand either, to be honest:
1. You can verify the supply of other things (e.g. company shares) at an independent body. I'm pretty sure that's true for "money in circulation", too. Ok, the verification is not distributed, but is that distribution so valuable? Or do you actually mean "The supply is naturally-limited and nobody can easily produce tons of BTC out of thin air"? Then, yes, BTC has that property... but, tons of other things do! E.g. why not invest in amber, it's probably one of the rarest things in the universe.
2. Transfer across political boundaries: is there ANY inherent guarantee? Say US decides tomorrow that trading BTC is illegal, how would BTC protect you from that? Using existing anti-money-laundering laws & global institutions, you'd be effectively banned from getting back any value from your BTCs (or, doing so would expose you to all the associated risks).