Without any real way to convert back and forth into real money, what reassurance is there that the price even means anything when every single holder is incentivised to lie and transact with themselves just to keep the numbers up?
How can a global system capable of five transactions a second ever be integrated into “the world’s financial fabric”? Side-chains seem to just be a great way to centralise around more unknown entities who may or may not run off with your cash.
Not really. To date, Bitcoin has been used successfully only as an alternate store of value -- one which, like gold, doesn't depend on the financial credibility of a particular government or country. Bitcoin's continued existence depends only on the integrity of its distributed consensus algorithm, which so far has withstood all attempts at hacking it. The "alternate store of value" opportunity is not small. Gold alone has a current market capitalization of $12.9 trillion.[a]
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Let's see if Bitcoin is comparably volatile…
Oh, it's highest point was only 1920% higher than its lowest point. That's definitely the exact same as gold. /s
Also, that ignores that gold has been a store of value for millennia. It's almost synonymous with wealth. In a total financial collapse, if all modern technology dies, you can be sure gold will still have value. 99.9% of people have no idea what Bitcoin is besides funny computer money.
People who believe that it would be "easy" to trade gold for other goods have also clearly never tried - since the entire modern banking system came into existence on the basis of the sheer difficulty of directly trading gold for other goods. No one knows how to value gold, they don't know what it's worth other then a brick is probably a lot. If they could, then the fake jewellery scam wouldn't be as successful as it is[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution
[2] https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/just-say-no-walk-away-fake-...
Stores of value are things like stocks, bonds, treasuries, real estate... and yeah commodities like gold and bitcoin. People don't care so much about volatility if they're planning to park their value there for a long time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Store_of_value#Money_as_a_st...
A good store of value is scarce, durable, transferable and divisible - and I think most people agree that you compromise scarcity to get price stability.
We don’t have to take anyone’s word on this though you can just look at what endowments and wealth funds hold to see what people believe are the best stores of value: https://www.nbim.no/en/the-fund/investments/#/
A double speed attack doesn’t need anything particularly dystopian to happen. It doesn’t even need to result in a large transaction just someone deciding to short BTC and briefly having the computing power to destroy it. Even just a creditable attempt that fails could completely undermine it.
The only way around that is to constantly spend more money on hashing power than any attacker, but that cost is effectively unbound. Trying to stop some random billionaire doing it for the lulz means sky high transaction fees forever. No problem for an actual currency in widespread use, but a serious issue for a hypothetical store of value which needs constant investment just to break even.
I've used this to purchase goods both online and in person seamlessly. Custodial solutions (trust another party to hold your funds, like a bank) are turnkey. Right now the truly non-custodial solutions (i.e., run your own lightning node) are definitely in the realm of hacker/tinkerer, but continue to improve in terms of accessibility.
You can tip people on the nostr protocol. stats are on zaplife.lol
you can tip musicians on wavlake
there's a Minecraft server called satlantis where it is used as a currency
there's a lot of plugins you can use to build your own lightning enabled apps on lnbits
the space is still young so a lot of software is beta, but there's plenty to play with
check out the plebdev course on udemy if you want to dive into lightning development
The one from Bloomberg comes to mind: "He tells me surfers sometimes ask if he’ll take Bitcoin. He’s taken it on a few occasions, but the dips in price burned him. “Now I tell them it’s $25 if they want to pay in Bitcoin,” he tells me. “You don’t know when it’s going to go down.” " [1].
That's also to say nothing of the leader of the nation potentially losing millions of public funds day-trading crypto on his phone, the Bitcoin Bonds that no one bought, or the IMF refusing to offer funding to the impoverished nation as a result of this callous fiscal policy.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-06-17/world-s-b...
Bernice Madoff pulled off one of the largest (literal Ponzi) scams and evidently stated that he started in the 1990s for a run of just over 15 years until being arrested in 2008, although some investigators thought that his fraudulent activities started as far back as the 1970s (!!).[1]
The Lindy effect[2] works until it doesn't. Taleb popularized the theory in pop-culture with his books, but the problem is that it's seemingly impossible to know when/if something will collapse/fail to the point that this "effect" doesn't seem all that useful as a predictive indicator.
What I meant is that the arguments used by many past predictions of Bitcoin's demise have been proven wrong. Anyone who dares to make new predictions of Bitcoin's demise must explain precisely how and why its distributed network would fail. Sorry if that wasn't clear in my comment above!
Someone could say "Many past novel currencies and securities have failed; any prediction of Bitcoin's success must explain precisely how and why it will still have worth in 50 years." To me this seems like the same argument you're making - belief that a trend will continue until proven otherwise - but I don't find either of them very convincing.
I think any argument either way should have more details than "it's worked so far!" or "it'll eventually fall over like Madoff!" but you seem to only be pushing the burden of proof in one direction.
Barring a reasonable, coherent, and factually-supported explanation for why an existing trend might not continue, the existing trend continuing tends to be a reasonable default prediction.
A systemic banking panic.
Everyone becomes worried about being able to extract money/value from the crypto ecosystem as a whole due to the failure of some exceptionally large entity (Coinbase or Binance or Tether failing).
They all run for the exits at the same time trying to cash whatever crypto they can into currency. With no sort of backstop, no FDIC, no government intervention, no failsafes, etc there's nothing to stop it from all unwinding to effectively zero in a panic. And panics aren't concerned about market efficiencies or intrinsic value or network effects or anything other than the ability to flee into some other unaffected liquid asset. The contagion would spread throughout the network with people trying to take any exit they could find until that exit was shut down.
Given that the crypto ecosystem in general doesn't believe in government regulations to prevent panics it is nearly certain that one will happen, which will bring crypto to a very sudden halt. The probability over time reaches 100%, but it will likely take some kind of precipitous drop from a sufficient height that no individual Billionaire will be willing to step in and buy it all up cheap (previously crypto has likely been "small enough" that a billion here and there was able to stop the crash in e.g. 2018).
It is impossible to predict when it will happen since it requires knowing how much systemic cash is available for withdrawals and how much can be raised, and the timing of financial entities failing, and the appetite for risk of anyone with deep enough pockets to try to bail it out.
And Bitcoin has never really been tested by a recession that would cause it any kind of problems. The V-shaped pandemic recession was cushioned by a lot of injected liquidity in the markets and people switched to greed almost right away after the first bit of panic waned. It has never been stress tested by something like 2001 or 2008 in the broader economy.
Mining made illegal by locales, states, or countries -- because of energy pricing.
BTC transfers made illegal through law or made undesirable in some way (say KYC but with like actual teeth)
And then there's the long shot chance that a nation-state (China perhaps) figures how to program their quantum computers to break BTC algorithms, snatching away value, before investors even realize what even happened.
For the record, I don't think it would happen. But also I didn't think that AI would be a thing in my lifetime.
A quantum computer breakthrough that destroys BTC does really fundamentally cause BTC to fail as an algorithm, which is a bit higher level.
I don't think that is likely, and we don't really have AGI, although LLMs are great for certain kinds of queries and polishing language or doing boilerplate coding.
I've read that various cryptocurrencies (including Bitcoin) are/have worked on quantum-proof verification algorithms. Not sure what it entails, but people are working on it.
Some of those "everyone" are people who live in countries with both currency controls (so they can basically only buy their national currency, or cryptocurrencies), and a horribly inflating national currency. Even a non-exchangeable-for-fiat Bitcoin is better in their eyes than the only other alternative they have. No one wants to spend 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollars on a loaf of bread.
In the more stable world you'd need the failure/shutdown of exchanges approximately simultaneous with the strengthening of those national currencies. It might happen, but it'll be a while.
I'm anti-crypto, I just don't see it happening in the near term.
A minority of people flooding to the exits can easily remove all the liquid cash from the system and cause it to collapse. There's probably no more than around ten billion in cash at any one time supporting a nominally trillion dollar financial system. A 1% stampede for the exit can produce a crash by draining that liquidity to zero.
And when the dust settles it will all have been a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.
We don't really need to worry that The Great Pyramids have been a hologram all this time. We don't need to worry that the US is going to make The Great Pyramids illegal (I mean, anything can happen, but it's a much smaller chance than w/ Crypto).
Anyone who predicts Bitcoin's demise must explain how and why its network would stop functioning.
Well, not entirely without precedent, since private ownership of gold was outlawed nationwide in the US during the Great Depression. It wasn't fully legalized until 1974.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Kennedy_Sr.#Wall_Str...
Yet this value is a small fraction of gold's trading price. How do you explain the current price of gold?
For gold, perhaps 20% of its value is its actual use and 80% is for the scarcity. For bitcoin it's 0% for actual use and 100% of the price is its scarcity.
When you look at it like this, the difference between gold and bitcoin is not nearly as dramatic.
And if anyone thinks BTC/ETH transactions are slow and expensive (me!), around here the gas fee on real estate transactions is ~5% with a 6-month processing time...
Real estate market is also heavily (heavily) regulated, to the point that buying and selling houses require so much paperwork that it's not really convenient for scammers.
It's also quite stable, loans are secured by mortgages on the properties, I'm not sure anyone would accept bitcoins for the same purpose.
which entails a lot of the aforementioned paperwork and checks and law abidings.
if bitcoin could provide the exact same level of security, it could be used as an asset, granted it failed as a currency.
the problem is it was designed precisely to not adhere to the standards everyone expects from "old-school" transactions, hence its main purpose is speculation, and it's barely good at that right now.
To paraphrase a quote attributed to Stalin - how many divisions does Satoshi have?
Meanwhile there are a large number of entities that have already entered into long-term contracts denominated in cryptocurrencies and any of them would pay you something for it when they need to satisfy their obligations.
That doesn't mean the value never changes, but that's also true of government-issued currencies. That's what inflation is.
gift cards are vouchers
You pay $30 to the store so that someone else can spend the $30 in that store.
It's a certificate, not a currency, not a store of value.
gift card
noun [ C ]
uk /ˈɡɪft ˌkɑːd/ us /ˈɡɪft ˌkɑːrd/
a card that can be exchanged in a shop or on a website for goods or services of the value that is printed on it
it is also entirely dependent on the same external factors of cash, vouchers and checks: inflation, exchange rates, etc.
because it's simply a certification that you can spend that amount of money, in that currency, in that shop and that's it.
Also: a Patek Philippe is buying power as well
everything that can be exhchanged for something else can be defined as "buying power"
but an American Express or a gallon of water in the desert are buying power too.
the definition is too broad to be useful.
I'd counter that protection of buying power over long periods is what really matters.
My CD collection had an enormous buying power in the 90s, now it's almost worthless.
I reckon one cannot rely on buying power of CD or DVD or VHS.
> often to the benefit of companies and nation states.
In this regards people, companies and nation states interests are usually aligned, i.e a stable currency that provides protection against wild fluctuations and retains its buying power and its usefulness.
Unless you are an enemy of the people, I don't see why someone should not like it.
It works the same way as lending the money directly to a person, gift cards are simply more convenient to handle and are safer than cash, but other than that it's just a gift in the form of cash, no matter how many intermediaries are between the sender and the receiver, the input and the output will always match exactly.
If, for example, I give my friend Alex $20 to buy something for his little daughter but Alex uses it to bet on a football match and loses it, Alex has to take some money from his pocket and then buy the gift with his own money. Which is not different than saying he spent his money on the bet and bought the gift with the money I gave him.
If otherwise Alex wins, he will still buy the gift, but he will also have increased the initial sum by an x% which he can keep (or maybe try his luck again)
Buying a gift card is the same process, the company holding the money at one point has to give back something of the same exact value, it doesn't matter what they do with the money in between, what matters to the sender and the receiver is that the amount printed on the card is fully available at the check out (which is just lik getting the amount in cash and then paying with that)
For that matter some government-issued currencies do that too.
I also would point out that very few if any people would point to gift cards as a durable store of value and new world currency.
No one is tethering their Rolex price to BTC. No one is tethering their home purchase budget to BTC.
Why? It's all tethered to your income, in dollars, and your savings presumably mostly in dollars as well.
Even "jug of water in the desert" is tethered more to dollars than BTC because what are you more likely to have in your pocket, and why?
Dollars are tethered to the government taxing us in dollars, so we get paid in dollars, and our government has nukes & aircraft carriers and such. Everything then gets tethered to it because thats what we get paid & save in.
BTC is tethered to nothing, and there is no natural value you can back into such that you can justify any price level of it.
Other than its usefulness as "untraceable" (what people think, but not what is true.. it is more like "unblockable") cash, and for money laundering/drugs.. it is a trading instrument for punters.
Whether you tether the purchase of a home to bitcoin or the US dollar is more a state of mind, tribalism, etc. Both the US dollar and bitcoin have no intrinsic value. They both derive value from a human belief system - I believe they have value and that others believe the same. They are both just networks in that sense.
> Even "jug of water in the desert" is tethered more to dollars than BTC because what are you more likely to have in your pocket, and why?
This is silly. But to add to the silliness - you could have bitcoin in your brain. Just memorize your words.
> Dollars are tethered to the government taxing us in dollars, so we get paid in dollars, and our government has nukes & aircraft carriers and such
Now THIS is truly different. The US dollar has violence on its side. I concede that bitcoin is a peaceful currency - at least thus far. Hopefully it stays that way.
> Other than its usefulness as "untraceable" (what people think, but not what is true.. it is more like "unblockable") cash, and for money laundering/drugs.. it is a trading instrument for punters.
This is political bias and parroting talking points of anti-bitcoiners. While your other points are thoughtful, this is not. Why not just call bitcoin a butthead?
so how do you explain dollarization of failed economies? Such as lebanon, or venezuela etc?
Surely, you're not saying that the US gov't somehow is exerting violence on another country to make the dollarization happen.
even the Iranian Rial is more reliable
Not surprisingly Iran and Russia are teaming up to create a new stablecoin and not adopting BTC, because using BTC right now is literally the best way to get caught (for example infringing sanctions).
The people that can afford to trust and use bitcoins for exchanges are the people who do not have to fear the surveillance of State actors/secret services/national agencies(NSA,FBI,Europol,China's central bank,...)/etc and that would be much better off using another FIAT currency (USD, EUR, etc.)
With dollars, all Americans need them. So do international companies that transact with Americans. If you think the US government will hold, then that belief will be true, it's only a question of the number of steps.
it depends on what the crisis is, and whether this same crisis also makes people believe that the US gov't will not hold.
Bitcoin appears to be the next phase of that manmade currency.
Some of the main ways currencies and commodities get there are value stability (sticking within a certain band with <100% annual swings), wide acceptance and utility. After 10 years of many techno-smart people trying to engineer cryptos to become that we are nowhere near any of these promises being fulfilled.
I don’t think regulation is a bad thing in crypto exchanges specifically. I think any rational crypto exchange would welcome it. Despite claims to the contrary compliant exchanges in many markets not aligned to big players start up all the time. That’s great, and I think a lot of crypto exchange operators have been hoping for a clear regulatory regime from regulators in the US. The current “you better comply with unwritten regulations or we sue you” regime is absurd.
If it fails, it's most likely because block subsidy will become negligible in a few decades and transaction fees alone won't always provide sufficient security against re-org attacks.
How can a prediction of what happens after 2050 (i.e. after a total of 10 halvings to make subsidy negligible) have been proven wrong "so far" ??
transaction fees were intended to keep miners active
I say this as someone very much opposed to the "deflationary" model, because I think it's bullshit that generates a "landed gentry" (thanks, spez) that can forever dominate the distribution of a currency. If you're going to make a currency, inflation of some degree is required to ensure fair(er) distribution over time.
I just think the idea that, when block rewards dissipate, miners will suddenly lose the ability to think more than one block into the future should be called for what it is: bad logic. It's also readily disproved by the most trivial glance at their history of long-term, forward-looking investment.
The claim is that BTC surely isn't fraud because the chain is public knowledge.
This is irrelevant, because the vast majority of data is bullshit.
The gold market has been manipulated to and fro, even with regulations.
The idea that BTC isn't manipulated to oblivion JUST BECAUSE there's a public ledger (missing 99.99% of the data) is naive.
Madoff also was not ultimately caught and his scheme ended because of the accounting fraud being revealed (i.e. the fraud was not that important). That happened later. He was caught because a market downturn resulted in him being unable to acquire new victims for the Ponzi scheme, which would have otherwise perpetuated it by taking new money in and using that to pay out existing investors.
Since Bitcoin depends on a functioning network it seems more likely than something physical like Beanie Babies or baseball cards to one day become effectively worthless.
That's a 162 contiguous years of financial records.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/repayment-of-26-billion-h...
If you live in America with this viewpoint, its pure doomerism.
Isn't there a value of Bitcoin that if it falls below all mining is unprofitable?
Are these incorrect assumptions?
Power is more complicated. By design, Bitcoin has one block created by one miner every 10 minutes on average. All other work by all other miners is discarded and unused. So no, only a single miner is required to sustain the network. But, there is a economic incentive to add miners to the network when the price goes up, because even though only one miner gets rewarded per block, that reward is worth quite a bit. Currently approximately $1M of bitcoin are mined per hour.
There is no specific value at which all mining is unprofitable because mining difficulty is dynamically adjusted to maintain a 10 minute block generation rate regardless of the number of miners.
And arguably, Madoff-style Ponzi schemes are more prevalent than ever.
The issue here is that the Bitcoin reward has to pay for the mining cost, but there is nothing preventing the Bitcoin price from dropping lower. So miners will either have to mine at a loss for (on average) a week until a difficulty adjustment, or turn off their equipment. Turning it off will make the wait even longer and the mining price per block will increase even more for the remaining miners - leading to more of them operating at a loss or shutting down which makes the problem even worse.
I've been saying for years that Bitcoin will go down like Second Life. Remember when there were news stories about Sony or whoever buys an island for X million dollars? And now... I mean it's still there (presumably), I don't think they've turned off the servers or anything, but no-one cares and it's obviously not a good investment (and that's with it being propped up by a few people who actually enjoy the game, which Bitcoin won't have).
The ability to actually buy stuff with Bitcoin is already past its peak (more places are removing Bitcoin payment options than adding them). It's less in the news than it was. There probably won't be a specific collapse moment (when Tether's reserves get exposed as fraudulent and they stop withdrawals I expect Bitcoin's price will crash, but it's crashed before and there are still true believers left over). I mean eventually the last miner will turn off their rig, but it will be irrelevant long before that happens.
People have criticised Oceangate’s approach to security for years. By your logic I could have turned around to all of them and said “you’re wrong”, up until a few days ago when the CEO got trapped inside a submarine to die. The people who said their safety approach was a ticking time bomb were right all along, it just took time to be proven out.
Doomsday cult leaders no longer insist the world will end on a specific day; they insist it will end imminently after a series of vague events. Your skeptics will die of old age before you can ever be proven wrong.
But where BTC does have utility is the underground economy: prior to Bitcoin if you wanted to buy drugs online you’d have to hassle with burner PayPal accounts or relive the 1970s by mailing-off an order form with cash in the envelope and hope you aren’t being scammed while waiting 28 days for order fulfilment.
So long as there’s demand for contraband, there’s a utility for BTC - which means it has some value, independent of its stability. But because BTC is also, in a way, a finite-resource (which can ne easily lost forever on a HDD in a landfill site…), it means, in the minds of modern-day libertarian gold-bugs with mass undiagnosed autistic spectrum disorder, it’s a safe, deflationary investment. Which gives BTC value. Which keeps the general public at-large interested, as well as the NFT-toting, smooth-talking cryptobrahs looking to exploit everyone else’s ignorance - which leads to demand for BTC, and the inevitable physical and irrevocable loss of BTC (landfills, lost-phones, etc) which then drives the price higher. The cycle repeats. Forgive my ignorance, but I don’t believe we’ve ever seen anything quite like this kind-of perpetual-motion-machine in economics before (“perpetual-value-machine”?). This is why BTC interests me.
Perpetual-anything-machines are impossible - that’s a given; but I just can’t fathom BTC’s value being reduced to zero (absent a superior replacement, of course) simply due to drugs being illegal.
Drug money... while that was true at one point, you have to be the stupidest MF'er in this planet to deal with DNM tx with BTC at this point unless you have secure OPSEC (something most who operate DNM couldn't even do, see SR1/2).
The truth is BTC has more usecases than you are lining out, go look at Ukraine's Bitcoin address, that was what was using to fund early escape missions during the attacks of Russia when the central bank failed to operate and imposed liquidity collapse in the onset of the War. This was what led to the realization of United24, the official Ukrainian governments solution for continued fundraising (using not just BTC, but other alts too) for support in other critical needs--like invincibility centers that provide food/water/shelter in these war torn areas.
Want an even longer use case? Go look at Return Alive's BTC address going back a decade now, we as a community have been proving non-lethal aid to Ukraine since the Maidan Revolution in 2013 when the collapse of their currency and capital controls and rapid inflation took over.
Really I can go on, and while I don't deny our past (in fact I'm quite proud of our origins as a means to transfer value freely on the Internet) you are misled to believe it still operates much volume towards those ends these days because of the analytics and monitoring that is being done 24/7 by intelligence agencies and 3rd party affiliates for just this. Hell, I bet there are more scams/hacks by the North Korean cyber military than there is in drug money.
Lots of stupid MFers out there. I know quite a few people who have mail ordered their drugs for 10 years using bitcoin. There’s lots of atms that cash in bitcoin out and have dubious identity checks. And there are still in person meetups to swap cash for bitcoin.
Not perfect, but easier than mailing cash or burner PayPal accounts.
This is also like the only use case for bitcoin in the developed world.
You’re missing the point entirely. Bitcoin will gain usability parity with the US dollar. And bitcoin is a better currency that anything mutable and controlled by governments. Bitcoin is a currency that is not subject to the whims of unpredictable central government financial policies. Bitcoin’s buying power fluctuates because we are still dealing with The Fed monetary policies. In time that will smooth itself out. Aside from violence (US military), what is the US dollar’s features that make it better than bitcoin in any way?
using USD doesn't make me look like a criminal or a scammer.
And it actually work and is useful for everything that isn't shady.
Oh, yeah, almost forgot: I can go to a bank and ask for a loan in USD that I can then use to buy a house, start a business, go on a trip, instead of risking of losing everything the day after. I can repay the loan in comfortable installments, at a predictable rate which won't bankrupt me because I have to acquire bitcoins that are deflationary, so basically in 20 years my debt will have nominally grown up, instead of losing real value, due to inflation, hence costing me less, and whose price is unpredictable.
Based on what evidence exactly? Consider that an entire nation state has since adopted it as its national currency, along the USD in the last 3 years; that means it works in parallel with the USD. Not to mention that merchant adoption, while as you said may be in decline (citation needed), what you have instead is more and more commerce being dealt with on LN: as was always intended due to network bloat.
Listen, I get HN is entirely averse to BItcoin at this point (look at my post histpory, I prove it time and time again it's based on stuborness rather than fact), what I fail to understand is why you persist in this folly in thiking becasue it doesn't work for YOU, you assume no one else has any use for it.
Again, most here who work in tech are not c-level corps or founders so you don't understand very much about the narrow mechanics of day to day because you are not rewarded for doing so, and quite frankly are paid very well for your ignorance on these matters.
But try to understand that if even China has backed off with Hong Kong dealing with BTC, you have to come to terms with the fact that adoption in trackable and metric based analytics are out the window at this point. Exchanges are one way to track transaction volume and that has been as healthy (perhaps more so, I don't know I'm not a trader) than it was 5-6 years ago. I know this because I was there, helping scale this tech and giving it more usecases that even it's most ardent proponents couldn't see and used similar points of view as you are making now (hence USAF and it's MANY forks before that).
You are wrong, and the fact that you can't even admit that possibility is what makes your point even more invalid because you refuse to see a contrary POV.
That I agree with actually! Part of its utility in being used for drug purchases comes from the other uses for BTC meaning that theres liquidity. Without that, it's still useful for black market transcations, but less useful than it is today.
Roughly speaking, the folks "living" in Second Life are part of a strong online community, and don't much care about the "investment".
The sociology and economics of Bitcoin are very, very different from Second Life.
>Anyone who predicts Bitcoin's demise must explain precisely how and why its network would stop functioning.
This can be done pretty easily, once enough countries ban and condemn it for its contribution to the climate crisis and to crime. There's no need to catch every transaction, just to ban it enough to shrink the mining pool. Once the active network has shrunk enough, the transparent permissionless structure ensures we can ran the obvious attacks on it.
Since it's now underground and these actors aren't the nicest of people, coordinating the forks to resist the attacks will be difficult and costly. People give up after each attack, which makes running another attack easier and so on. Eventually maintaining the network as is won't be worth it to anyone.
Only a small number of people can participate in new block chain entries, assuming demand is high.
These happen every ten minutes, and well under a hundred thousand transactions are allowed.
Get in line to spend your money; it may be years.
This would never work!
It’s pretty easy to hide wash trading in the ledger to manipulate the price of bitcoin to artificial levels.
Just because transactions are public doesn’t mean that there isn’t associated data hidden (eg, identities, if dead wallets are really dead, etc etc).
Bitcoin may be great, but to say it must succeed because it’s transparent doesn’t address the risk that there is no basis for value and it’s only purpose is speculation and tricking a greater fool to keep the price up.
No, they don’t. There are a variety of scenarios that do not require the government to eliminate the ecosystem.
For starters, they could make if very, very difficult to use for large capital purchases (houses, cars, etc.)
They could impose fines on businesses for accepting crypto — or specific types of crypto — as payment for goods and services.
Can they completely eliminate your ability to trade a bitcoin with your friend? No, of course not, any more than the federal government retrieved every ounce of gold back when that was illegal. But they can make it so painful to use that most people simply won’t.
It's called the efficient market hypothesis.
If it was known that the price of Bitcoin will collapse on the 7th of June 2025, every owner would have sold their Bitcoins on the 6th of June. But then the price would collapse on the 6th, not on the 7th. But of course, the definite knowledge the price will collapse on the 6th would mean the price would collapse on the 5th and so forth.
Hence why accurate, definite and widely believed predictions are impossible.
Source; I make a living exploiting market inefficiencies.
It was so cool, especially after reading ready player one and discovering that one of my favorite Sega games as a kid was Galaga, but didn’t know the name until I saw it in an arcade a few weeks ago
80s movies about smart kids are awesome
If economics was a functioning field of scientific study, The list of top 100 richest people would all be economists withholding scientific findings for their own gain, not a bunch of rich kids swinging their money dicks around.
There are a lot of examples where the assumptions, especially this one, of microeconomics hold. Profit-maximizing corporations don't have cyclic desires. In many cases, people don't have cyclic desires (e.g. in the flavor of the soda they want). Microeconomics starts with those, much as becoming a structural engineer requires understanding the basics of Newtonian physics.
They get into more complicated math in more advanced courses, but they don't start there. All of engineering, science, etc, is "the math at a deeper level is too complex, here's a simplifying but false set of assumptions". And then a subset of people who learn about that care about cases when the assumptions break down and studies the next level.
GP: Bitcoiner, dooming everything else.
Parent: Anti-crypto (the majority here), up to the point on comparing Bitcoin (which might be a bubble, that's not the point here) to a Ponzi (that it is not: Supply is fixed, there is no new deposits paying previous depositors).
This might be confusing, because many other crypto products are very Ponzi-like. For example, Voyager literally paid new "stakers/depositors" (a.k.a. investors) with old "stakers'/depositors'" (a.k.a. investors') money to reach the insane return rates they were advertising.
Huh? Every time somebody buys a coin with fiat that's a new deposit paying a previous depositor.
A healthy 20-year-old can fall over dead from a brain aneurysm. Doesn’t mean actuarial tables aren’t useful.
In theory, it does win. In practice, few people have enough liquidity to keep up and even then, they need to know when to quit.
Few people have enough liquidity to keep up with bitcoin... what does that mean?
But... There's enough demand for an international unregulated currency that I think it'll be around for awhile. There are plenty of people that tolerate its flaws. (Specifically, the volatile value.)
I personally think once the scammers and "true believers" move on, Bitcoin will stay around until some other international "unregulated" internet money comes around.
Interesting! If I couldn't find reliable data, I'd have concluded that I didn't know.
In this regard, ETH always seemed a bit more on track, in the sense that there have been attempts to use the ETH blockchain from the beginning for the purposes of computation, other than "just" as a currency.
I'm not disputing what you're saying about the SEC position regarding Bitcoin, it just seems to highlight for me something a bit off about the SEC position, even if it is favorable in certain ways toward Bitcoin. I come away from all of this feeling a little like neither the SEC nor the crypto community at large are quite being honest or accurate about what's going on with crypto or how it should be regulated.
That is the sense in which it's commodity-like. It's the underlying electricity which is consumed.
It's far from clear that this is really valid, but that's the sense of it.
No intrinsic use. No mass. No degradation. Transports at the speed of light. Perfectly scarce and not debaseable.
All other commodities exist at various vectors outside of this null point. They have various usefulness in and of themselves. They have mass and volume. They degrade at different rates. They take a lot of time and energy to transport. They aren't perfectly scarce and some are absurdly abundant.
Humans have overloaded various commodities throughout history with the memetic concept of "moneyness". Mostly gold and other precious metals because they have properties close to the null point that we find most important (primarily scarcity and close to zero degradation). We hoard these non null commodities because we came to collective consensus to imbue them as the database of our debt to each other, otherwise known as money. However, this had the negative effect of tying up otherwise useful commodities that we might have been able to put to productive work. This money also had the negative effect of being difficult to transport, store securely, and fractionalize.
Then came government backed, faith based currency. It's a near null point commodity and we really like that when choosing something to imbue our collective moneyness concept in. No intrinsic use. Low mass (paper) to no mass (digital). Limited degradation (paper with replacement service) to no degradation (digital). Easy transport (paper with high denominations) to light speed transport (digital). However, it's scarcity is highly questionable. To quote Satoshi, "The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust."
Bitcoin is the null commodity because it solved the final piece of the puzzle that we tried to solve with fiat currencies. Eliminating trust in central authorities and perfect scarcity.
Bitcoin failed as a store of value, it's up some 20,000% since 2010 and basically infinty since the day of its first trade (back when the first bitcoin was traded for some trivial amount of electricity)
Store of value is a very specific term
You're arguing that because Bitcoin hasn't met its demise, it will therefore be widely adopted as a "store of value"?
As if there are only two possible outcomes: Complete failure or complete dominance as a store of value. This is where your argument doesn't make any sense.
I suspect we'll discover that all of these altcoins and weird financial instruments didn't actually detract from Bitcoin at all. Rather, they contributed to its rise by juicing demand and pumping huge amounts of leverage and pseudo-liquidity into the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
If crypto becomes boring, I don't think the natural conclusion is that adoption will increase.
How long do we need to give Bitcoin a chancer to gain mainstream adoption as its been 15 years already ? So far I don't see much real use except speculation, extortions, get rich quick scams and websites where you want to be anonymous. For the most part.
"We" don't need to give it a chance. Time is giving it a chance, every new day, indefinitely. For all I know, it could take decades, not years, for Bitcoin to gain as much credibility as, say, gold, which has been around since the advent of ancient human civilizations. I don't know. Maybe it will happen much faster, like everything else online?
> So far I don't see much real use except speculation, extortions, get rich quick scams and websites where you want to be anonymous. For the most part.
The biggest use of Bitcoin today is as an alternate store of value, by a large mass of "HODLers" who, as their name suggests, will hold on to it for dear life.
Bitcoin is not the main asset used for speculation, extortion, scams, ransoms, drug deals, etc., today. The main asset used for illegal activities today, worldwide, is the US dollar. It's not a coincidence that the briefcase full of $100 bills is a prop in so many movies/TV series depicting illegal shenanigans. I suspect that more money is stolen in USD via hacked bank accounts, hacked credit cards, hacked online accounts, hacked SIMs, etc. than in BTC via difficult-and-dangerous-to-execute online ransoms.
> We sure live in interesting times!
I'm not really sure it's that interesting, or new at least. Since ancient times people have valued things as a store of value that have have been valued by other people as a store of value for a long time. Some of the best material examples are gold, silver, natural gemstones and works of art. These things are overpriced by orders of magnitude compared to their material economic value.
Bitcoin just takes it to the extreme in having negative objective physical value, i.e., in being immaterial and physically completely worthless, while taking up resources to even exist as a concept or meme.
So sure, it very well might be here to stay as a store of value for a long time. If history is any guide on these matters, it will be a store of value (and a profitable area of speculation) for the rich and big powerful institutions while the enduring and persistent meme in the heads of the common people keeps its value alive.
Bitcoin is fundamentally a terrible store of value thanks to how fuckin volatile it is.
2. Err, I can't see any big banks or other entities touching COIN, and the CRIMINAL proceedings that it will likely be embroiled in with a 10-ft pole!
3. Maybe BTC will come to 'dominate' the 'crypto' space, but that space will be a smaller and smaller part of the US (and global) economy. Although it never got very big to start with. BTC is used for approximately 0.0% of US transactions right now (rounded to nearest decimal place).
Or do they mean conceptually it is, even if it’s a terribly volatile one?
I have not seen a single of use Bitcoin within 50km of me _and_ online outside of uses in degenerate countries and trading them for the sole purpose of trading them.
This feels like flat-earth theory, which will never go away, but their "science" if you call it that, is so flawed that they can't be used for anything outside of small terrestrial physics.
Similarly, Bitcoin itself will never go away. But there is no way the average folk will be able to wield them given how many times they have been scammed out of their fortune.
I don't know the details but, basically, it's not because we can manufacture synthetic diamonds that we'll one day be able to manufacture non-radioactive synthetic gold.
Either way, there's no foreseeable way either would ever be cost -effective
That's ok though. Playing with new paradigms is a young person's game.
1. The courts are more likely than not to rule that many crypto-assets -- but not all -- should be regulated as investments. It won't be fun for a lot of crypto traders.
2. Over time, the usual giant financial institutions are bound to become the dominant market makers in crypto-assets. In all likelihood, one of them will end up buying Coinbase. Those giant financial institutions already know how to comply with regulatory bureaucracies worldwide, efficiently, at scale. Rinky-dink exchanges lacking the machinery for large-scale efficient compliance will not be able to compete and go out of business.
3. Bitcoin, which the SEC considers a commodity (it's explicitly excluded from the lawsuits), is bound to become even more dominant in terms of market capitalization. The longer Bitcoin survives, the more it will get adopted and integrated into the world's financial fabric, e.g., as a store of value. If this sounds far-fetched, consider that many smart and smart-sounding people have predicted Bitcoin's demise, and so far all have been utterly wrong: https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/ .
We sure live in interesting times!