> These properties also mean that in a pinch, if you live in an unstable society or one facing high inflation it can work as an alternative financial system.

At the time of writing this comment, if you want your BTC transaction confirmed in the next hour it would cost you ~ 10USD ( https://bitcoiner.live/ ) .

What planet do you live on where you think a non-negligible percentage of people in ANY country, let alone a developing one, can afford 10 dollars for each transaction they make? That's not even considering the price effect that global demand would have on fees. Bitcoin can't even meet the demand of the relatively small cult of people worldwide that buy it, few of which even move their "assets" off the exchange.

Parasitic investors have strangled cryptocurrency. If you think Bitcoin can currently serve any purpose other than making rich people more rich, you're a fool. Wake me when Tether is dead and people start using crypto as it was intended, peer to peer digital cash.

EDIT: I apologize for coming off so harsh. My anger is (mostly) not at you. I'm angry at seeing the enormous potential bitcoin had to do good in the world go completely to waste.

Why are you so set on digital cash? I completely agree, Bitcoin is a bad replacement for cash, just like gold bullion is.

10 dollars is a steep confirmation price but if you have a life savings of, say, the equivalent of a few hundred or thousand USD that you hold in cash and your local currency is rapidly inflating making it worthless, btc is an amazing life raft that you could put your money into. If you are able to migrate and get a high paying job and still have family somewhere far away in the world that you want to help, $10 fee is not that crazy to send them monthly payments that they could then trade for cash or food.

Then there are obviously the side chain solutions, lightning network, or even just using exchanges to transfer btc to altcoins with faster settling times and lower fees if you really do want digital cash.

> I completely agree, Bitcoin is a bad replacement for cash, just like gold bullion is.

It doesn't have to be a bad replacement for cash. It can actually be a fantastic replacement for cash if we continue building it as one. The fact is, the current BTC devs decided bitcoin can't scale before ever even trying. They were short-sighted, took VC money to pivot to "digital gold", and started spreading the false narrative that it never could have worked.

> Why are you so set on digital cash?

Because until bitcoin is useful to regular everyday people, there won't be enough buy-in to offset the huge exchange rate fluctuations caused by speculators. If that doesn't happen then it will only ever be useful to speculators.

Your above example scenario makes perfect sense if you're a skilled worker from a wealthy country but it's nonsense if you're among the remaining 80% of the people on this planet. Bitcoin can help EVERYONE if we let it. Luckily other coins have picked up the slack.

> the current BTC devs decided bitcoin can't scale before ever even trying

Please keep the Bitcoin-the-protocol and Bitcoin-the-currency separate. The protocol obviously can't "scale" to even remotely close to everyday payment systems such as Visa or Mastercard.

That much should be evident, and was the subject of pretty much every discussion around the protocol about ten years ago or so. The basic idea has limits. 10x of a tiny number is still a tiny number.

Payments can still be viable in Bitcoin-the-currency however. This can be done in a number of ways, from Visa-like third parties to decentralized payment networks such as Lightning and a number of similar ideas. Settlements will always be necessary so there will always be need of something like blockchain in distributed systems.

No system where every actor needs to keep a permanent record of every transaction of every other actor forever can scale to the entire planet. Transactions must be an issue only for the parties involved in the transaction, and maybe for a third party.

> The protocol obviously can't "scale" to even remotely close to everyday payment systems such as Visa or Mastercard.

Citation desperately needed

> No system where every actor needs to keep a permanent record of every transaction of every other actor forever can scale to the entire planet

If the costs associated with keeping these records are negligible and all the work is done for you electronically by an app on your phone, then yes. It absolutely can scale.

> Please keep the Bitcoin-the-protocol and Bitcoin-the-currency separate.

I am. Bitcoin is the protocol. BTC is the currency.

Can someone explain to me the technical reason as to why it costs $10, when it used to cost pennies (I think)?

Has the proportion of transactions gone up compared to the miners?

cactu2093 is exactly right. It's basic supply and demand. What their explanation doesn't touch on are the things that have affected supply and demand. Here are a few of them:

1. Massive media hype surrounding the price in 2014 caused everyone and their mom to try and buy bitcoin. The original developer (Satoshi) had added short term limit on the number of transactions that could be processed in a given time (transactions per block) as a short term fix for a few bad actors spamming the network. So the network was left unable to process the massive increase in demand caused by the price hype. This "fix" was stated to be temporary but was left in for the reason below.

2. A handful of new BTC devs ran off the old guard who believed the network should scale up with demand. This resulted in them intentionally refusing to change the software to accommodate yet another round of increased demand due to media attention (2016).

3. Increased regulatory scrutiny made it difficult to buy/sell crypto outside of large, regulated exchanges, effectively reducing liquidity for those that aren't institutional traders and those unwilling to give Coinbase a DNA sample just so they can buy crypto. The new regulatory and institutional friction killed many of the original use cases for bitcoin leaving mostly institutional traders left. These traders are unphased by high transaction fees, especially since most of their trading takes place off-chain on an exchange website.

AFAIU, it's just basic supply and demand. A block is mined every 10 minutes and has a fixed size, so you're paying for a slot to put your transaction in the block. And there actually is no fee listed anywhere that you pay and it guarantees you a spot, it's a bit like a stock order book where you can offer any fee that you want on your transaction and the miners will pick the highest fee transactions available to match with. $10 is about the average minimum fee size being accepted in blocks atm. Ultimately as demand to send transactions goes up, fees go up.

If you're sending from an exchange, you're actually splitting that fee with multiple people (one transaction with multiple recipients including yourself). If you're on your own transaction (e.g. sending from a hardware wallet), you're going to pay considerably more (closer to the tune of $10).

FWIW, you can pay a much lower fee and the transaction will probably be confirmed... eventually...

For example, I donated to a torrenting site with a very low fee and it took ~3 days to confirm.

Thanks, almost exactly what I was looking for. So the tradeoff appears to be that the the quicker I want to settle a transaction, the more expensive it is.

There's a limit to that though. You can also pay too low of a fee and your transaction NEVER gets processed.

When you submit a transaction for the first time, it enters the client software's mempool. Miners pull transactions from the mempool if they deem the fee high enough to include. If your fee is too low, it sits in the mempool long enough that the client software purges it forever. It has to be resubmitted or it never gets mined

It's kinda hard to create a world-class transactions system when the philosophy is that the bottleneck should be a below-average computer and internet connection.

The narrative of Bitcoin completely changed from when I first got into Bitcoin in 2009-2010. It was supposed to be a decentralized currency and people tried to use it that way back then. Now, since it has failed to be able to scale and handle that, it's suddenly a "gold", a "value store" that really has not much of a purpose and is being outclassed by coins like Monero and full proof of stake coins like Algorand.

regarding the transaction cost, wells fargo charges me $15 to receive a wired payment.

If the use case is only large gold like transactions, the BTC use case makes more sense. Tbd.. shake it out.

I'm not arguing that BTC isn't better than Wells Fargo. I'm arguing that you can't build a "financial network" on it. BTC is a great alternative to Wells Fargo although almost ANY OTHER COIN is a better one.

Can you anchor a financial network on BTC stability? (If it achieves stability). IDK.. Total aside..I imagine this utopian energy-financial system future where we overbuild our renewable grid and instead of storing energy we discharge the (green energy) overproduction into crypto mining operations. There are some dudes already on it, it's a new angle to grid power flow modeling.

On your aside, I'm amazed that smaller energy producers have not already become crypto miners. It would be so easy and incredibly lucrative. They could simply flip a switch any time the sale price of their generated power is less than the price of the coins their mining facilities could produce. They would get an instant profit increase. Almost all the costs associated with mining are fixed.

You are on point there - No one's got to it yet is the best explanation: YC?!? It's happening at the Utility scale with commercial miners, esp. with merchant (uncontracted) energy. Small producers (residential , commercial solar) just need an easy button solution without having to learn the crypto details. I don't know what that threshold kWh price is, but demistify that and one can define target markets across the US in one broad stroke with EIA utility pricing data. The formula in a prepackaged product with an app seems to be the only trick. Then get it in the hands of residential installers and boom. It'd probably sell like (can I say it on HN) liquid crack.

Most banks don't charge their customers to process incoming wire transfers. You're saving $5 when you could be saving $15.

It might be international, I'm not sure but I blame myself for sticking with Wells after their fake account fiasco. I just love that stagecoach logo...

How much does it charge you to receive a direct deposit, or to buy a cup of coffee through their credit card?

There are L2s that solve this, in exchange for slower inclusion into the main chain. Or you can just trade wrapped BTC on another network. In that case, the Bitcoin main chain functions like a gold depository institution in traditional finance.

I'll make sure and tell my grandma that she can save money by wrapping her BTC and trading it on another network rather than making on-chain transactions /s

It blows my mind the amount of talent being wasted building "solutions" for an intentionally crippled chain. One can only polish a turd so much.

Choose an L2 and send me $1. I dare you.

> Parasitic investors have strangled cryptocurrency. If you think Bitcoin can currently serve any purpose other than making rich people more rich, you're a fool.

This is an inevitable result of deflationary currency.

The whole point of his comment is that BTC is better viewed as store of value rather than a medium of exchange

Except that BTC is a terrible store of value, possibly the last option in a long line of better classical options such as real estate (or related funds), stocks, bonds, basket of currencies, commodities.

We already have tons of options for 'store of value' why on earth would we invent another, worse one?

BTC is not a store of value or a currency - it's a weird social movement.

Absolutely. There's no storing value in something that regularly swings 20%+ on a given day. The only people who are saying this are holders of Bitcoin. It was originally designed to be a decentralized currency, and now it's not. There are much better & safer value stores, even traditional rare metals.

Worth noting: there is no such thing as a 'perfect store of value'.

We are psychologically caught up in the idea that 'gold' or 'property' has some 'intrinsic value'. Like if there were a nuclear war, it would all be cool, our 'Billions' would be protected!

But no, we can only hold on to stuff that others might find valuable some day.

In other words: currency, even 'stores of value' is a social contract within the system you operate.

If the system fails, well, both currency and stores of value are probably going to not be worth a lot.

Yes - Gold is nice because it's a default currency you can use anywhere. Property tends to hold value as long as there are people there who want to use it - and the legal system that recognizes ownership exist.

But otherwise, there is no way around it: you cannot magically store value in your pocket independent of a bunch of other complex systems being in place.

BTC is reminiscent of the 'Drain the Swamp' ideas, that somehow all the politicos and bureaucracy are useless and irrelevant. Well yes, shenanigans abound and does inefficiency, but that doesn't meant it's worse than nothing (!) our systems are made by smart people. The only way forward is 'doing something better' and BTC is probably not that.

""social movement" that went from like $1 to more than $ trillion dollars...? "

This is pure Ponzi Scheme language, helping to prove my point.

There are rooms on Clubhouse you can join where people talk and hype up these kids of schemes, this is not one of them - don't bring this here.

With the lightning network, the cost of a transaction is negligible.

You can't use lightning network without opening a channel. Opening a channel requires making an on-chain transaction which most of the world can't afford. Lightning network is absolutely useless on BTC. Add lightning network to a chain that isn't crippled then let's talk.

I use the lightning network almost daily and I’ve never done that. I just use a wallet that is lightning capable and that’s it.

How exactly are you using the lightning network without an initial transaction to charge up your metaphorical gift card?

You could use a custodial solution untill you stack enough to get a channel of your own.

> an unstable society or one facing high inflation

What are the chances that in an environment where the USD is not usable, there is an available network and electricity that makes bitcoin usable?

I think we're more likely to see a Texas scenario in the US: the electricity becomes unreliable, but the money remains stable.

Users of USD or EUR worried about inflation and getting into Bitcoin are really worrying about the wrong kind of tail risk. Users of other non-hard currencies have more of a point.

Like yesterday, when Fedwire and ACH were offline for hours?

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/government/federal-res...

That didn’t affect 99.9+% of people, and is a far cry from the USD being “unusable”.

Congratulations on not needing to send a wire transfer or ACH during the outage. For anyone who was expecting to do that, it was literally unusable.

Your take is like claiming a major AWS outage didn’t happen because you personally didn’t get on the Internet that day.

The original comment was talking about USD not being usable, not ACH. Having to delay money transfers for a day does not make a currency unusable.

Most ACH transactions take 3+ business days to settle anyway since it's a batch processing system.

I use only USD and didn’t even know that happened, so it seems like a bad example.

How many people would have noticed, if not for the headlines?

Anyone trying to send money using ACH. Maybe that doesn’t include you, but many regular people use it on an everyday basis.

In my lifetime, if I were to compare 3 numbers - no. of hours there was no electricity (X), no. of hours there was no mobile data coverage so that I could continue doing transactions without electricity (Y) and no. of hours Fedwie/ACH was down (Z) which prevented me from bank transfers, I'd say X and Y and at least 2 orders of magnitude bigger than Z.

If Fed/ACH going down for a few hours bothers you a lot but electricity/mobile network reliability doesn't faze you, you must be living in a truly unique place.

My computers and network are powered by uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) which I highly recommend for every important system. I have a generator in case of extended outage, which I also highly recommend to everyone who is able to have one at home, regardless of whether you own a computer.

I personally have fiber, cable, and LTE feeding my home gateway. This might seem like overkill to non-tech folks, but I recommend it to anyone whose productivity/career is highly reliant on being online.

I realize this isn’t necessarily a typical home setup, but I also think most people are horribly unprepared for many potential situations.

This isn’t a claim that I have zero downtime at home. It’s only to say that if my Bitcoin node is offline then any hope of relying on fiat banking was abandoned much earlier.

> This isn’t a claim that I have zero downtime at home. It’s only to say that if my Bitcoin node is offline then any hope of relying on fiat banking was abandoned much earlier.

Even if I had a setup like yours, I'd give up on bitcoin before "fiat banking." You can't buy gas for your generator with bitcoin.

Yet.

I don’t mean this flippantly.

One of the cryptocurrency is going to win out for day-to-day usage; the question is which.

As Andreas likes to say: “email used to be a multi-step series of memorized commands from a green terminal in a University.

Now my Mom can do it with a touch of her finger.”

I believe we’ll get that in the near-ish future.

> One of the cryptocurrency is going to win out for day-to-day usage; the question is which.

I don't know why you're so confident about this? It's entirely feasible that none of them are ever usable for day-to-day transactions.

Personally, I haven't seen any evidence that Bitcoin (or any other cryptocurrency) is ever going to enter the mainstream. Even if it did, I don't see any benefit to using it over USD for the vast majority of people.

Bitcoin can actually be quite resilient to that. Also the USD failing, doesn't necessarily mean a global world war. The US can go the way of the Soviet Union or the British Empire.

Can you elaborate on that please

Mismanaging themselves into irrelevance- see Texas power grid.

> What are the chances that in an environment where the USD is not usable, there is an available network and electricity that makes bitcoin usable?

The post you replied to said unstable or high inflation, not unusable. An unstable dollar will not instantly bring about the apocalypse, there are plenty of real life examples of unstable, high inflation currencies. The currencies took years to fully fail.

Not to mention, a few years of hyper-inflation don't even imply that the currency will fail.

In the 80s and 90s, Greek inflation was in the 15-20% range. Italy dropped to 5% more quickly but at the start of the 80s was in the 20% range.

In the 70s UK inflation was 10-20%.

that type of inflation is clearly bad for keeping cash, but not going to cause the collapse of civilisation. From about 73 - 80 US inflation was in the region of 10% per year.

What about usable but inconvenient? Most of the world is like that, Africa, China, India, for large transactions gold or the USD is inconvenient and dangerous. Venezuela, Argentina, are other examples closer to the US.

I don't think cactus2093 meant US / western world.

I get that I said USD, but the fundamental premise doesn't get that altered.

Bitcoin is heavily resource intensive. In an environment that is already resource pressed either due to political instability/natural disaster/inflation/whatever, what are the chances that the resources are going to be found that can actually operate bitcoin, and won't be better utilizied elsewhere?

You don't need to do mining in the disaster affected area. You need _someone_ to mine and to confirm transactions, but that can happen anywhere the world.

It might be available, but you might not be able to open a bank account for it. You can store cash of course, but that has a different set of problems.

Argentina?

An "unstable society" and "high inflation" or two very different things. Bitcoin could easily help (and does in some parts of the world) in the latter case.

In an unstable or even collapsed society things are different. While true that historically gold could be used to buy things it might be at a very depressed buying power or it can be used when dealing with a stable outside society. A hedge for a unstable society is something that actually has "need", for example, antibiotics. Even then, once violence is a standard part of life and interactions the usual calculus of interactions changes.

History provides examples for societies that kind of collapse but sort of kept going on money surrogates that could get daily necessities at a high price; history also has examples for the violent kind of collapse/instability and there I would not count on bitcoin or gold to help absent access to violence.

BTC would be a bad choice in any unstable economy or high inflation. A much better choice in the case of high inflation, would be the currency of the nearest large country i.e. USD, Euros, Pound. Possibly RMB.

You get a free financial system, just without the monetary policy until the country can get moving again.

BTC doesn't provide any value whatsoever as it's by design a terrible medium for exchange, and not a very good store of value.

There is no situation where BTC is useful whereupon there are not already many better solutions.

Can you "physically own" Bitcoin? Or what does "physically own" mean exactly? I kind of understand what "physically own" gold means, but not sure it means the same as "physically own" Bitcoin.

Getting downvoted on this. I am not complaining about the downvotes, but seriously, please enlighten me...

What users of the Bitcoin network own are private keys. These allow you to control corresponding entries on the Bitcoin ledger by signing transactions and broadcasting them to the Bitcoin network.

Signed transactions can even be shared through other channels, to be broadcast at a later time for settlement, like a check. This is how the Lightning Network functions.

Keys can be held in many forms, including purely in software, digitally inside a hardware secure element, or converted to words and printed on paper or metal.

Bitcoin even has basic scripting that allows more complex setups, such as only allowing a ledger entry to be updated after a certain duration (timelocks) or requiring a quorum of signers (multisig), so simply having a corresponding private is not always sufficient to immediately spend the corresponding funds.

In the past “brain wallets” were popular, where the private key is generated from a memorized passphrase. These are a bad idea because it’s trivial to watch addresses corresponding to every entry a password dump, and automatically move these funds whether you’re the original owner or not. I mention this to illustrate how having the corresponding private key is necessary to control funds but it’s not sufficient to prevent someone else from controlling the same funds.

On top of all this, most “Bitcoin users” leave “their” Bitcoin on exchanges, so what they really own are IOUs rather than Bitcoin itself.

Bitcoin “ownership” can be pretty abstract.

Also almost all governments have KYC/AML/CFT regulations that apply to crypto exchanges as well. And governments can monitor, control, sanction your bitcoin transactions by controlling these exchanges through regulations. When the local currency becomes unstable and the local government becomes unstable, one should assume access to crypto exchanges like coinbase will be very very hard.

this is where decentralized exchanges like Uniswap come into play, no KYC, no account

And how do you move your money to/from a DEX? It still needs a regulated exchange like Coinbase to interface with Fiat money, no?

You can sell goods and services locally and accept Bitcoin as payment. Craigslist even added a “cryptocurrency ok” flag you can set on your posts.

LocalBitcoins enables face to face transfers.

Bisq is a DEX that enables remote exchanges using any form of payment, including most centralized payment services, and even cash through snail mail.

But then, the seller has to pay taxes - either business taxes if it is a merchant or capital gains taxes in case they sold an asset. And taxes are paid only in Fiat. So you still need Fiat integration somewhere.

Yes, that's correct. Basically, bitcoin doesn't have privacy and is losing self-sovereignty through regulation.

You’re right, “not your keys, not your coins”

Fair question.

It would be more accurate to say that you can own "mathematically guaranteed exclusive control over" bitcoins.

and you that can store that mathematical guarantee on any number of cheap, readily available physical devices.

You can also elect to destroy the possibility of outside knowledge of the secret, leaving the "physical memory chip" as the sole means of humanity interacting with those coins.

It’s a comparison to your traditional bank account. At chase bank you don’t physically own the money in your account - it’s in a banks database. With Bitcoin you own that coin and it’s stored in your own digital wallet. Like cash v bank account, but Bitcoin is safer and easier to store than cash.

Your Bitcoin is stored as an unspent transaction output (UTXO) in a globally distributed ledger (i.e. a database). But for most people the private key that would allow them to spend that Bitcoin is not actually in their possession - it's owned by Coinbase for example, who are acting as a bank and keep yet another database to store who owns what.

If you use a local wallet to store your BTC, let’s say on a HDD, the the magnetic pattern on the disk that makes up the bits that represent your coins would be physically owning then. They can’t be retrieved any other way.

As codehalo pointed out, there's no magnetic pattern that represents coins on your hard drive. There is a magnetic pattern that represents your private key for your wallet (if you store it there), which possession of you might equate to possession of the coins to since without it they can't be used.

Still, access isn't really possession is it. I can lend my house key to a friend but they don't possess my house. The deed is what really declares me the owner. In the case of your coins, it's the consensus of the blockchain.

Bitcoins are like bearer bonds. Unlike houses.

Bitcoin is not stored on your HDD, or on a local wallet. The "local wallet" simply points (or references) an address on the bitcoin blockchain. There are obviously more details, but you can do your own research.

Isn't this functionally equivalent to the statement "(access to) the coins is stored on your HDD" for most purposes?

Not all discussions require the highest level of technical detail.

Do I still own the BTC if the whole BTC network shuts down?

If you have a $100 currency note in your hand, you can spend it as long as there exist someone who believes there is a market for $100 bills. Same as with a gold coin.

But if you have a $100 in your bank account, there is an additional constraint – you can spend it only if your bank is alive and functioning correctly and lets you specifically (you are not sanctioned/banned) to spend it.

Same is the case with bitcoin for those who store their private key on exchanges.

First there should exist a market for it (others who also believe bitcoin has value). Then, just like banks, the bitcoin exchanges where you escrowed your key have to let you spend it through them.

If all exchanges you have access to in your country decide to ban you (because your govt told them to) then you cannot spend your bitcoin.

In this way, bitcoin and your bank account balance are similar and they both are different from hard cash in hand or gold coin in hand.

If you hold your private key yourself and run your own bitcoin lightweight node to connect to bitcoin network and submit your transactions, then you don't need exchanges. Even then, others who use exchanges maybe blocked from transacting with you through govt sanctions etc.

> But if you have a $100 in your bank account, there is an additional constraint – you can spend it only if your bank is alive and functioning correctly and lets you specifically (you are not sanctioned/banned) to spend it.

Given my bank is on the list of "systemically important banks", if it goes under/down there's probably more going on in the world such that I probably won't be worrying about my proverbial $100 too much:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_systemically_important...

(And I do have accounts at multiple banks in case of IT problems at one bank.)

> If all exchanges you have access to in your country decide to ban you (because your govt told them to) then you cannot spend your bitcoin.

Of all the things that I could worry about going wrong in my life, these doomsday scenarios are not even in the Top 1000. I'm more worried about stubbing my toe than some of these currency collapse scenarios that some Bitcoin fans come up with.

You own your Bitcoin as long as there is at least a single node out there storing its Blockchain. But it would be the only instance left that could confirm your ownership in that doomsday vision of yours.

You can think of Bitcoin as a kind of identity management system. The blockchain stores transactions mapping public keys to each other and monetary values. As long as you remember the private key matching your public key you can issue transactions on the blockchain.

Contrary to common belief Bitcoin is not stored on your hard drive, they contain only your private keys. The monetary units themselves, “UTXOs”, are stored on the network of Bitcoin nodes distributed all over the world.

The keys own the coins, you're ancillary.

All you need is a wallet address, which you can put on a USB stick or even print out on a card and store at home.

You dont need the wallet address, you need the private key. They are not the same.

I like bitcoin cause the price keeps going up. When that stops I won't like it so much.

I'm pretty sure this is 99% of the value of bitcoin for 99% of people that hold bitcoin.

I was watching CNBC the other day and they were doing a roundtable thing like the sports channels do. Each host was shitting on bitcoin about how terrible it is, and how millennials are stupid for liking it, and it'll go to zero one day, etc. You know the drill.

Then the main host asks who has a position in Bitcoin. EVERY SINGLE ONE of the investors that was just shitting on Bitcoin 5 seconds earlier admitted that they all have substantial stakes in it.

The first guy tried to come up with a technical justification for why he is doing it.

The next guy blamed his wife for wanting to get into it because all her friends were supposedly talking about it, so they bought 10 bitcoin back when it was $9k a share.

The third guy simple said "It keeps going up, so I keep putting money in it. As soon as it stops going up I will stop putting money in it".

The other 3 people after it basically just said "yeah, exactly what the third guy said."

I personally get nervous with Bitcoin. It isn't stable which makes it far from a currency. You can't have a currency that goes up and down 10% throughout the day. Transferring $100 could be $90 or $110 over the course of a few hours. That's significant and cannot be ignored. I understand the idealistic portion of it too and how it gets us closer to a perfect money system, but truthfully the only reason we continue to talk about Bitcoin is that it continues to go up. I don't have very much faith in Bitcoin. But I'll admit I have some and I have been riding it up. It makes no sense to me. I am just along for the ride.

> rooting for their own society to collapse just to have another reason to use Bitcoin.

I view the main value of Bitcoin (or gold, especially paper gold) is as a gamble or hedge against currencies collapsing, in a situation which leaves Bitcoin (or gold) relatively unaffected.

Without doing the formal calculation, I'd guess that Kelly criterion will suggest that an average person with an average risk profile should hedge 0 on this basis (exactly what the vast majority of people have done).

If you've invested more than that, it becomes in your personal interest that currencies collapse in precisely that way.

Gold is commodity. The financial system is an industry that provides goods and services. Gold is not an alternative to the financial system. How could it be? It's a completely different thing.

>Gold is not an alternative to the financial system.

The modern financial system itself is in fact an alternative to gold

We're going to need some more detail on that argument.

Not sure what OP was specifically referring to, but the argument is true in the sense that pre-1971, gold was money and currency was backed by gold. Now money is whatever the Fed says it is, and currency is backed by faith.

Otherwise known as credit, which has been the prevailing valuation since the Stone Age.

The difference between relying on credit backed by a physical item (gold bricks) versus credit backed by "the Full Faith and Credit" clause of the Constitution is what happens in the event of default by the issuer of the credit. If the wheels stop turning at some point, there is no recoverable asset.

> credit backed by "the Full Faith and Credit" clause of the Constitution

Can you or someone explain why “the full faith and credit clause” of the Constitution is commonly associated with “financial credit”?

The full faith and credit clause has to do with the states generally honoring court judgements, public licenses, etc... from the other States.

What does that have to do with a default by an issuer of credit?

You're confusing macro-economics with micro-economics. There is "no recoverable asset" with currencies and currencies aren't debts that demand payments.

Am I? From 1861-1933 you could redeem paper currency for gold. I agree you can’t do that today, which was the original distinction I was making.

You are. You are conceptualizing currency as debt, as if currencies represented finite deposits of gold which implies the value of the currency. Even with the gold standard, governments still decide the value of the currency.

Doesn't seem like I'm confusing the two. Regardless of how the value was decided, you could still get gold in exchange for paper currency through the Treasury at the fixed rate. You can't do that today, because the money isn't backed by gold.

No it is not

Why not buy gold if that's what you want? What is better than gold about bitcoin? I never really understood this argument. I see some value in bitcoin but it doesn't have the same properties as precious metals: bitcoin value is only based on faith (so from this point of view it's not too different from so-called fiat currencies), there is no natural demand.

If you have gold, silver, platinum, you will always have at least some demand from the industry. Even if the majority of the current market price is due to speculation you still have an actual need for the metal. That's not the case for bitcoin. You could have the market losing faith tomorrow and it's done, your coins have zero value.

Crypto assets are their own things, it's not helpful to associate them to something that has different properties such as gold.

The industry demand of gold is minuscule. It's a rounding error. Buying a $1000 asset with $10 in "intrinsic value" is really no different to bitcoin.

Bitcoin can be transferred electronically, and can move across borders without being hassled at customs.

Where do you get this from? Statista data show way more than 10% of demand from the Jewelry and tech industries: https://www.statista.com/statistics/274684/global-demand-for...

Jewelry is just an extension of speculating on the metal. You can make a necklace out of many materials and it will function the same.

Cobalt is used more in electronics than gold. The MC is not close to the same. Almost 100% of golds value is from speculation.

> You can make a necklace out of many materials and it will function the same.

How so? Jewelry's function is to look a certain way.

I can make a necklace look almost exactly like gold but out of another material. The slight difference in subjective aesthetics does not justify a 1000x+ price increase. Its expensive because its a speculation.

Cobalt is also thousands of times of abundant than gold...

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

>If you have gold, silver, platinum, you will always have at least some demand from the industry. Even if the majority of the current market price is due to speculation you still have an actual need for the metal. That's not the case for bitcoin. You could have the market losing faith tomorrow and it's done, your coins have zero value.

Is there a difference between investing in gold (30% "real" value, 70% "speculated" value) and investing 30% in copper (100% "real" value) plus 70% in bitcoin (100% "speculated" value)?

Only that it would have been way more profitable

Volatility?

So when the power goes out or someone looses a hard drive, how easy is your bitcoin to transact?

Disclaimer: I have no BTC. I just want to point out the current transaction UX is not reliable at all.

I rarely hold any cash on my person and typically pay for everything with my iPhone, otherwise with a physical CC. If the merchant has no power or a broken machine, I cannot make the purchase.

This literally happened to me a few weeks ago while buying a slice of pizza ($5 or less). My phone had power so I offered to Venmo the owner instead but they said no.

Losing a bitcoin is like losing gold. Just that no one will be able to find it later, so with lower supply, price should rise.

> “we” don’t all have the same reason. I like Bitcoin as a diversification for being a “better version of gold” - it has the scarcity and you can physically own it but it is much easier to store and send anywhere in the world if needed.

Most people are using bitcoin for this reason today (store of value).

What OP was talking about was the original purpose, which seems to have been mostly lost.

Bitcoin was created with the use case currency in mind and it was used like that by the earlier adopters. I think this is what OP was pointing at with "Many have forgotten why we used cryptocurrencies in the first place" and certainly with the qualifier "many", I think OP is correct: That's how we initially used Bitcoin and other cryptos.

_Now_ many (most?) people use bitcoin as a store of value. But I think this is more out of necessity: Bitcoin as a currency is semi-dysfunctional.

> the westerners that seem to be almost rooting for their own society to collapse just to have another reason to use Bitcoin

I have not met a single person in my life with that motivation. However, I have met people who want to see the current system collapse, but mainly because it's not working for them.

I don't think any westerners want the current money system to collapse either. So it is interesting to hear the perspective we give to other countries that think we want that. Trust me, no one in the US wants to see the current economic system collapse.

We have already seen it. We know how it goes.

We saw it in the 1920s. It was horrible. It permanently scarred many of our great grandparents, and even left scars on our grandparents (because they grew up learning vivid horror stories of it). Seriously it was so bad that it took multiple generations to recover from.

Then we saw it again to a portion of our financial system just a decade ago. Luckily we learned from our mistakes and prevented total collapse, but we still saw how vulnerable the system is. Everyone here remembers that, it was only a decade ago.

No one wants to see the system collapse. I think what people are really thinking is they want to create a system that theoretically can't collapse. We are aware of how fragile our current banking system is. Crypto originally sought to create a system that removed the two main wildcards in the financial system (the Fed and the Banks).

Now we replaced Wells Fargo with Coinbase. So we aren't much closer to our goal. We replaced NASDAQ with Bittrex. We replaced the Fed with unregulated ICOs and Miners (if that's even a thing anymore).

This is my thought as well. There's too much crypto-purity going around in these discussions and not enough bitcoin-pragmatism, I think. Reminds me a lot of the purity games that are being played elsewhere online, just instantiated in a different context.

Let's be honest -- the real reason a lot of people like Bitcoin is because they want to get rich quick. Nobody wants to say that here, but most people who own Bitcoin don't take a flying crap about a store of value or decentralization.

Scarcity itself does not imply value, something can be scarce but if no one wants it it still has no value. So the question needs to be what really drives the value of something like Bitcoin?

In my opinion, I think that Bitcoin derives its value from the idea that one day it will become a widely used currency that can be exchanged universally for real-world goods and services. This has what has driven it to become a speculation tool; because at the end of the day when Bitcoin finally becomes a "universal" currency, everyone wants to be left holding a lot of it. But what if Bitcoin never becomes a currency, what happens to it's value then?

This doesn’t really make any sense. Bitcoins wild fluctuations make it terrible for a currency and its fluctuations have only gotten worse over time. It’s just a speculators game. If it became a universal currency, you would just convert whatever you have to it. There’s really no path for bitcoin to become a universal currency, because that would require stability. And there’s no path to stability with the current speculation interest. If the speculation interest dries up it would plummet, but that would just continue the cycle. It won’t ever stabilize unless it crashes and people stop caring about it.

What drives the valuation is pure speculation, partly by massive vested interests, and then of course by the masses of cultish believers who own a couple coins and are in on the Ponzi mania. The same things that excites people in Amway.

The main point of gold is to be a store of value. Anything as volatile as Bitcoin is a terrible choice for a store of value.

I agree, edited "We" as "Many".

> But I’ll never understand the westerners that seem to be almost rooting for their own society to collapse just to have another reason to use Bitcoin. I don’t have any real need to be independent from banks, and I am lucky that I live in a pretty stable society where that’s true.

I can write a book on why this is, but since 2008 we have seen economic collapse after economic collapse starting in the very cradle of Western Civilization (Greece) and has gone from their.

I despise the doom porn side of Bitcoin, especially because I actually focused and even lived in some of these collapsed societies, and have seen the misery, violence and overall worst of Humanity first hand. Whereas those guys are often people with small holdings that have a very detached view of the World. It's like asking a trophy wife of a celebrity to understand the plight of a factory worker at Amazon during the Pandemic when her trinket is late... it's impossible understand what goes in tier mind, but I'd argue a lot of it is borne of some type of mental illness and is only possible due to such wealth disparity. BUt the haves and have nots is nothing new so I won't delve into that.

With that said, I'd say you also have a version of that (detachment from reality given your statement) and if you live in the Valley and in tech and cannot see the reason why a World run of fiat has led to the homelessness problem, and over all misery, and what it is, then you are in for a very real awakening as this is happening with or without you understanding. The Chinese central bank just started woring with several countries testing its digital currency transfers, JP morgan tried doing payments via satelites using 'blockchain' tech, and has the most patents utilizing 'Bitcoin-like' technology.

In short: Satoshi created this technology with the intended purpose of giving people an option to opt-out of the predictable and inevitable central bank destruction, it's coded into the very genesis block; those of us from the early days were from all walks of life and various networth, but one thing we all noticed was a stark dissatisfaction for the status quo and what the limited options we had to really do about it from within, so it was worth dedicating our time, labour skill set if we even had the slightest chance at reforming the World for the better.

It's hard to explain, but in 2010 (when I saw the community go against satoshi in order to support Wikileaks) I dor the first time wanted all those guys in that thread who donated to Julian Assange and made Satoshi say regarding the NSA 'we kicked the hornet's nest' to have the resources necessary to disrupt our Industries and our countries for the betterment of Humanity, getting rich wasn't the goal it was the means of making a better World we wanted to live in... A guy like Elon makes perfect sense to me, and he has never been the eccentric billionaire in my eyes, he should be the standard: instead we get the worst like Bezos, Gates, Zuck etc...

Now those tables have turned and Musk is the darling of the masses and anything he does makes people take notice--for good or for bad. I hope we usher in a new era of people like this and Bitcoin will have played a significant role in making that happen.

Look up /u/Pineapplefund if you want to see more, try Sean's Outpost and Satoshi Forest. Our History and our culture is rich, and best of all it's not race/gender based which was so damn refreshing given how absurd things have gotten this last decade alone.

Silicon Valley being the parody of all the worst things in tech which lung on to this maxim--making the world a better place--because it sounded good to say during a pitch for the most pointless, non-sensical app/project, but I still recall a tech article from like 2013 I had saved on my old laptop that died in some event and the reporter concluded with 'unlike most people in technology, when Bitcoiners say they 'want to make the World a better place' they actually mean it and go out and do it,'

I consider myself from that generation of Bitcoiners, which was common pre-2013's bubble. My entire career reflects that, and I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have had it, even if I have trauma and bad memories that induce anxiety at times.

I left a career as a (miserable cog) university trained lab scientist after working 60+ hour weeks to pay down crippling student debt wasting away my best years but I sought to try and make my suffering mean something and try tackle the 1-2 killers in the West at the time which are both diet based illness: diabetes and heart disease. And when I left that phase of my life I got to make environmentalism profitable in the process, and have many adventures that made me love Life itself, the good and the bad, and while this wasn't monetarily lucartive (the exact opposite actually) and quite honestly had I just held on to the coins I had I'd probably have a net-worth in the xx of millions in USD had I continued to passively buy, but that wasn't the goal: our vision and our impact mattered more than promise of wealth.

And that's why I don't think you will ever understand the best of us, and why the latter 'moonboi' 'when lambo?' meme guys are what you could at best be able to relate to and cling on to. We lived completely different lives, and no amount of money you have would make me even exchange my darkest year for your entire Life.

I don't expect you to understand, I really can't see how you could, but that is one reason and I probably shouldn't have shared as much as I did.

Folks - the Central Bank is an essential pillar of governance.

If it 'goes down' it means, almost everything else is 'going down again'. Your BTCs are useless in that scenario.

BTC is a terrible currency and a bad store of value - and there is no 'mathematical arrangement' that can replace good governance.

It would be like using digital contracts for legal contracts etc. - that won't solve corruption and inanity.

What we need a are good, well managed currencies. If you don't like how they are managed, don't hold on to currency. Buy real estate, stocks, any other classical form of value and use the local currency merely as a medium of exchange and you'll be fine.

> Folks - the Central Bank is an essential pillar of governance.

Folks, I give you the cowering voice of the disrupted Industry trying to rationalize it's existence: it's pointless, we already won, time is setting everything in motion now, but ultimately your cause is lost. UBI is going to happen now and global inflation has kicked off since the pandemic, and interest rates are at near 0% if not negative in some countries.

These are the same people that outsourced so many jobs in the 80s and then automated what was left in the 2000s and drowned generations of people in debt and destroyed countless amounts of Human Capital in exchange for their arrogant and psychopathic models of command and controlled economies and they now are asking you to re-consider their exceptional role in Society, which has never been anything but corrupt.

The last to heads of the IMF are a convicted money launderer (Lagarde who still works there now) and a rapist (DSK), do I need to say more? Why do you cancel people on twitter and social media but let these people run free?

You're right to be afraid, but you are to blame for this mess now: so, pull yourself from your bootstraps like you told the rest of us to do when we couldn't make rent to debt based economies and an ever inflating currency which wasted some of the best years of our lives living in fear due to a precarious economy and worse environmental conditions created at behest of these central banks.

I'd like to see you guys do doordash during a pandemic, if that is what it takes as humility and empathy was never a possibility before for you. Hoipefully you deliver to an essential worker and see first hand what actual work looks like as you haven't done it in some time, if it all. If this company is what you thought was such a good idea to back it with billions of capital, so fucking absurd, so go and try and be useful to Society and go work for them!

Downvote away, I seriously don't care about your fake internet points, they honestly mean nothing to me.

Thanks for clearing up the uninformed and conspiratorial world view of the BTC supporting legions.

It's fine to question these institutions, but it should be done on the basis of informed understanding, and then, the solutions arrived at from a pragmatic, informed perspective. Because once that is done, it will be clear BTC isn't really a solution to anything. Also, it's important to note the populist mania influence on these systems, to the point wherein they can quickly fall into Ponzi-like manias which defeat the purpose of the entire scheme in the first place.

> Thanks for clearing up the uninformed and conspiratorial world view of the BTC supporting legions.

What are you on about, look at what has happened since the 80s in the US and in Europe and the massive wealth transfer due to policy WTO and the off-shoring to Asia, specifically in China. All of that was possible due to the US moving from a manufacturing giant to a service sector economy only possible due to reckless Central Bank money policy, creation, and market speculation.

I'm lost for words with how absurd you people are about Bitcoin, but Central Banks are the largest ponzi of all, they steal from future generations to pay for the myopic and insane monetary policy of the present. We resisted and opposed all these endless wars and bailouts, but realized no amount of protesting will change their behaviour.

We sought to exit this, and created a system to opt-out, but you are free to stay and have your wealth evaporated as you please.

But consider that the 'smart money' is with us, and their balance sheets get bigger and bigger day by day. What bearing that has on your life and decision making is up to you, we are already so far beyond questioning and anything they say is irrelevant to us at this point, and we do not intend to listen. Janet Yellen is about as releevnt to us as CRW 'faketoshi' a minor inconvenience that simply refuses to go away and makes lots of noise, but will ultimately be silenced and would benefit by just opting in.

> I like Bitcoin as a diversification for being a “better version of gold” - it has the scarcity ...

Why do we repeat the claim of Bitcoin scarcity when we all know it's just a promise and nothing more, there is no technical limitation?

All it takes to "print" more Bitcoins is for the majority of miners to agree to make a fork that will allow for more. And that will happen at one point.

As for Gold, good luck trying to mine an infinite amount of it.

Nothing stops you from changing the 21M cap in the code, but you need majority of the network nodes to agree to the new rules (aka a hard fork), the miners can't willy nilly change the rules of the network.

What you would have at that point isn't Bitcoin, it would be probably be called "Bitcoin infinite" or something, similar to "Bitcoin cash".

You don't need the nodes to agree on anything. If they don't agree, they drop off the network, and form their own chain with little to no hashing power, that will stagnate and die in short order.

We have precedence on what happens if nodes/miners try to attempt a hard fork, it's called "Bitcoin cash". You need majority to agree on the rules, nodes/miners/users/exchanges all need to agree on what's Bitcoin, that's the whole point of a decentralized currency.

If a block size change caused the split into Bitcoin cash, you can only imagine what a cap change on Bitcoin available will cause, 21M cap is a lot less controversial than block sizes.

We do not. With Bitcoin Cash, there was not a majority of miners who supported it. That is all that matters.

> You don't need the nodes to agree on anything. If they don't agree, they drop off the network

The miners by comparison, drop off the old BTC network making difficulty go down and others can now mine BTC.

Certainly miners can make this decision. What they can't do is force the market to value the new fork as worth anything, while they are burning energy to mine it and wasting opportunity cost of abandoning finite BTC.

How is this an actual threat? Doesn't make sense.

You need a majority of computing power on the network to agree to actually do this which is what the parent means.

No, that was the original claim. That you need the miners to agree. They are the ones that hold the computing power.

The claim I responded to says that in addition to this, you also need the majority of the "nodes", which are just computers that do no work and just forward transactions. This is incorrect, you do not need their help. It is easier if you have it, but you do not need it.

>They are the ones that hold the computing power

If they hold this power to dictate value to the market, why don't they do this right now and print infinite money for themselves?

It's because they don't actually have this power.

They absolutely and obviously hold that power. It is just not in their interests at the moment to rock the boat.

The nodes are what actually enforce the rules. If you send out a transaction with 25M coins in, nodes won't broadcast that transaction and it doesn't make it to the blockchain.

Bitcoin mining power is concentrated in China with about eight times the hash rate of number two United States, which in turn has a similar hash rate to Russia and Kazakhstan. Rounding out the top six, composing more than 90% of the total world hash rate, is Malaysia and Iran. Do you think these countries share the ideological goals of Satoshi Nakamoto's dream?

I have no doubt that a persistent 51% attack by a cartel of miners would make Bitcoin liquidity an indefinite hard zero for selected "owners" of BTC.

Also, many of the miners in other countries are also Chinese.

I don't think the Chinese miners follow any particular ideology here other than to extract as much money out of the bitcoin market as they can, though.

>All it takes

Oh just that huh?

The market wouldn't value that new fork on par with finite BTC, so those miners would be hurting themselves, and burning energy for a worth-less coin.

This action is trivial to consider, so what makes you think it has bearing on BTC value? When these miners leave old network, hash power & difficulty go down so other miners who prefer finite protocol can come in to mine. What's the actual threat then?

Actually this isn’t the only way.

If financial intermediaries like Coinbase start extending credit or engaging in fractional reserve banking, then yes, you can “create more Bitcoin.”

Just like how in the gold standard, you could still create more gold backed dollars by making a mortgage loan...

Kind of funny how all these new monetary wizards miss out on this simple fact.

All these replies telling you this isn't possible are amazing. Perhaps they are forgetting that when you hold coins at Coinbase that's no different from a bank giving you a bank note saying you "own" x amount of gold in their vault.

EDIT: I was obviously not the first to say this but it is really interesting to watch the crypo space re-invent all of modern finance, one piece at a time.

Except a bank run on this sort of endeavor would bankrupt Coinbase in a few hours. The "threat" of taking delivery of actual BTC will strongly push against entities that want to fractionally reserve BTC.

"not your keys not your Bitcoin" has been a mantra from the beginning. You can track BTC withdrawals from exchanges. Ability to possess your own BTC quickly and easily is a primary feature of Bitcoin that separates it from gold and fractionally reserved fiat.

Fractionally reserved Gold happens because gold is heavy, hard to transport, store, and secure. This leads to centralized storage and then fractional reserve. You do see how the lack of physical properties, especially in contrast to gold, make the comparison much different in regards to willingness and ability to withdraw BTC and self store?

Again, a physical gold bank run, vs a BTC bank run are so massively different due to fundamental properties that this is a comically absurd threat comparison.

I don't think that would necessarily work with bitcoin. Fractional reserve banking works because bank deposits are fungible legal tender, regardless of what they are backed with at any particular moment.

With bitcoin, the only "authority" that confirms who owns what is the blockchain. Nobody would have to accept that you have made a bitcoin payment just because you transferred some bitcoin based credit that is not actually bitcoin.

Of course bitcoin derived credit/securities/IOUs can work. But it's not the same as bitcoin unless there are laws that ban making that distinction in some context.

> Fractional reserve banking works because bank deposits are fungible legal tender

Actually bank deposits at commercial banks are not legal tender. Only banknotes, coins and deposits at the central bank are. In most (all?) countries, individuals are not able to open accounts with the central bank. Interestingly this is not a rule set in stone. Some central banks like the Swedish Riksbank [1] are investigating the possibility to issue virtual currency to individuals which would be a legal tender and an alternative to bank deposits.

[1] https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/payments--cash/e-krona/

That’s nonsense. Only miners can create new Bitcoin. What Coinbase could do is to issue a financial derivative backed by Bitcoin e.g. a “Coinbase Penny” representing a 1/1000th of Bitcoins. And then could go on issue more of those pennies than actually backed by Bitcoins. But it wouldn’t be cryptocurrency if it wouldn’t run on a blockchain. Of course, the “Coinbase Penny” could collapse if we people stopped trusting Coinbase. Bitcoin wouldn’t notice like the gold price does not care whether a single US dollar is still backed by 24.057 grams of silver like it originally did.

It would work just fine unless there's a run on it. So long as HODLers HODL, nobody would ever notice. That's the premise of the whole proof of keys business. (https://www.proofofkeys.com/)

This is a really dangerous way to create more Bitcoin. If the credit markets freeze, then the entire system collapses.

The core Bitcoin holders don’t want more coins, so it won’t happen. Simple as that.

The real elephant in the room is that new crypto currencies are being printed left and right. We may have a finite number of Bitcoin (in a couple decades) but one look at the list of crypto currencies will show that the number of crypto coins in general continues to explode at a phenomenal rate.

Why do the core Bitcoin holders have much to do with the decision? The decision here would be made by the miners, right? They have a different set of incentives from people who hold BTC. Maybe I’m missing something, I don’t see how holders and miners have the same interests.

First off, miners need to ensure that the coin they're mining retains value, so they need the network effect of the entire economy. No miner is going to make a decision that makes the underlying thing that they are mining worthless.

Even if 80% of miners wanted something, if it was egregious enough, like a change in supply, then no one would go along with it. Ecommerce companies like Coinbase etc would just ignore the fork and keep going with the remaining 20% of miners whose heads are screwed on straight.

Those 80% of rebel miners who are burning all that energy, and have all that sunk cost in hardware, would be stuck mining a nothing coin that no one wants, and would lose everything almost immediately.

Remember, miners have sunk costs. They, more than anyone, need the coin to retain value. Their incentives are incredibly aligned with everyone else in the ecosystem.

Miners have never had any reason to change anything in Bitcoin and will not change anything to this day. They make profit just by doing nothing and have been for a decade. They've held Bitcoin back from being much better than it is almost solely.

> As for Gold, good luck trying to mine an infinite amount of it.

Biggest barrier to more gold is technology. There's a ton of it in space.

I hadn't thought about that before! Very slick incentive structure there...like, build the tech to go to space and mine it and become enormously wealthy on Earth (ignoring the amount of wealth required to accomplish this).

You don't need to go to space. Gold can be created from other elements. It's just a question of tweaking atoms after all.

Honestly maybe it will fork, and maybe that will be a good change. We don’t exactly know how the dynamics of mining will play out in a post-block reward world, maybe it’s actually better to keep mining at the current block reward size indefinitely rather than decrease all the way to zero. Very slow fixed inflation is not necessarily that different than having a hard cap on supply. Gold is still being mined too.

If it forked in a way that completely defeated the limited supply and led to rapid inflation then it would massively tank in value and miners would lose a lot of money. That’s a pretty good incentive for them not to destroy it.

As far as bitcoin existential threats go, there are many of them - the energy cost, a 51% attack, so much concentration of mining in China, etc. Miners mutually colluding to destroy their own investments is not at the top of my list of worries.

Your theory is fantasy, and your conclusion that it is inevitable is hilarious.

Please do a 2 minute read of the BCH wikipedia page and correct your comment.

Just read the BCH wikipedia page. What does BCH have to do with increasing the total number of coins?

Bitcoin is nothing more than a blockchain ledger of who owns Bitcoin

Bitcoin definitely includes more than just the ledger. Without the miners, there would be no transactions, and without the intermediate processors, there would be no transaction intake. Without exchanges, there would be no value. Bitcoin is clearly a lot more than just the ledger.

What you described is just a blockchain implementation.

> And that will happen at one point.

Why?

Probably because the fee market will turn out to be non-viable, and bitcoin would collapse without mining rewards.

It has already happened dozens of times and no one noticed. Probably the only such fork that anyone here has heard of is Dogecoin. And, that one only took off as a collective running joke.

And all it takes to "print" more gold is for a majority of people using gold to decide that lead painted yellow is, in actual fact, gold.

I got some pyrite for sale, great deal at $1600/oz! don't miss your chance to get in on the ground floor.

> All it takes to "print" more Bitcoins is for the majority of miners to agree to make a fork that will allow for more. And that will happen at one point.

Why is this a bad thing? America's founders believed that the people could mint their own coins.

It's not intrinsically a bad thing (some may hold that opinion, though). However, if you are investing in Bitcoin because it is similar to gold in that scarcity is a primary attribute, then the ability to mint new bitcoins is dangerous.

I'd also posit that "because America does it" is a fairly weak argument for many of the claimed benefits of Bitcoin. Much of Bitcoin's charter is that it helps move away from government-controlled currency. If you think America's monetary system is the best option available, then Bitcoin likely is not your thing.