What is bitcoin resilient to? Not falling to $0?
> We might finally have a technology that can resist financial authoritarianism; there is no body that can stop bitcoin transactions and it is proving itself to be resilient enough for medium-term use. That is a change on the same magnitude as the internet.
I don't think that our current financial system fails that often because some transactions were stopped.
If we cherry pick, say, the Vanguard Long-Term Treasury ETF [0] in the last 3 years it is down 30%. So bitcoin isn't as resilient against value loss US treasuries but we're seeing changes in magnitude in price that is similar to a long term bond ETF. That is a lot better than I expected, and probably a lot of others. Really good performance compared to the gains, I suspect. No obvious counterparty risk, so probably superior to the debt-laden US government in some sense.
> I don't think that our current financial system fails that often because some transactions were stopped.
Someone is paying for bitcoin to burn a medium country's worth of energy to keep running. That speaks to a certain sincerity in their disagreement with you.
[0] https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/etfs/profi...
I strongly disagree with this. When SVB failed, there was a system in place to insure some of the depositors' funds. The government chose to augment that by insuring all the depositors' funds. That was an unusual move, and then the banking system returned to normal when a better capitalized bank took over SVB's assets and liabilities. The bank failure cost those who invested in the bank. It cost the bank management. It did not cost the depositors.
When a crypto exchange fails, depositor funds are unrecoverable. There is no system to protect the depositors, no system to recover funds from the failed exchange.
While financial authoritarianism is imperfect, its rules are designed to reduce fraud and to reduce the impact of fraud on innocent bystanders.
That is why I'm anticipating that crypto will be a stronger ecosystem than the traditional financial sector. If we punish people for bad decisions, then by Darwinian logic the crypto ecosystem will not funnel capital towards the sort of idiot depositors who give Joseph Gentile their money. If they cared to check what their money was funding they could have seen this coming.
The traditional finance system is protecting those people. That weakens it. Which has always been the strongest argument against governments handing out money to failed banks. They've been doing that for at least a decade and it means the financial system is shaky enough that it falls over when hit it with 5% interest rates!
Were these reasonable people banking with Silicon Valley Bank like all the smart guys? Crypto is promising a financial system that has so far appeared to be much more resilient than the traditional system and bitcoin is currently at $30k. Tether has survived something like 2x depegs so far.
We might finally have a technology that can resist financial authoritarianism; there is no body that can stop bitcoin transactions and it is proving itself to be resilient enough for medium-term use. That is a change on the same magnitude as the internet.