When bitcoin first came onto the scene I personally knew a guy who was running a website to act as an exchange. It was small because bitcoin itself at that time was very small.
Then bitcoin had its very first dip and it became unprofitable to mine bitcoins. When that happened he shuttered the website and kept everyone's bitcoins.
I knew of bitcoin early on due to this guy, but even then I had no interest and considered it bullshit. Then when I saw what this guy did it just solidified my opinion that it can't be trusted.
That's not to say that in theory there aren't uses for it, but it's 100% speculative and nothing else. People try to compare it to things like gold for protecting your money from inflation, but that's completely nonsensical.
If the value of gold crashes it still has an inherent value because it's a useful physical good (looking pretty is not the only application of gold). a bitcoin has ZERO inherent value. It's not possible for the value of gold to go to zero, but it's absolutely possible for the value of a bitcoin to go to zero.
crypto will never go away, but it absolutely should.
I'd go a step further with the comparison to gold. If everyone would stop mining gold today, gold would retain value (or perhaps even go up in value). On the flipside, if we turned off all bitcoin miners today, bitcoin would go to zero instantly (as its worthless without continuous resources being pumped into it).
This is why I'm sympathetic to those who say its ponzi scheme, it only has value because of new resources continuing to be poured into it.
>if we turned off all bitcoin miners today, bitcoin would go to zero instantly
You talk about this like this is an easy action with profound consequences. It's like saying If everyone killed themselves, there would be no people. This is trivially true, but it's not going to happen.
>(as its worthless without continuous resources being pumped into it).
All forms of transaction has some form of resources put into it. The quantity of resources is what is at issue here. Bitcoin does not need the massive quantity of resources it currently uses to operate. That is an artifact of the high value of Bitcoin coupled with the subsidy of the mining reward.
I'm not sure if the creator(s) of Bitcoin evaluated what kind of value a Bitcoin should have over time, The mining reward halving rate suggests that they were not expecting it to have a continual average rise above 20% per year (which makes sense because that would be insane). To date, however, it _has_ been averaging more than that, resulting in an increase in value of the mining reward relative to other currencies. Should the value drop or simply not increase for a extended period, the mining subsidy becomes less. Then only the most efficient miners can make money mining and the difficulty drops to a new equilibrium as the ones who can no longer make money drop out.
I've read elsewhere that below $13K it is not profitable to mine bitcoins.
We're very close to this threshold now, given what is happening now and during the next few weeks I would not be surprised if BTC is going below that threshold.
I think it's time to stash a few bottles of champagne.
The adjustment algorithm still requires blocks to be generated before it adjusts. If enough miners shut down at the same time, time between blocks will skyrocket, pushing the difficulty adjustment forward even further and crippling the transaction throughput.
Different mechanism, Bitcoin's difficulty adjusts based on how quickly blocks are mined so that on average 1 block is mined every 10 minutes.
The protocol adjusts every 2016 blocks, if it takes longer than two weeks (20160 minutes) to mine the 2016 blocks then the difficulty decreases, if it takes less than two weeks to mine 2016 blocks then the difficulty increases.
It really depends from miners to miners. As effectively it's about how cheap your energy cost is. Since there's no transport cost, your cost is to acquire cheaper energy.
> If everyone would stop mining gold today, gold would retain value (or perhaps even go up in value). On the flipside, if we turned off all bitcoin miners today, bitcoin would go to zero instantly (as its worthless without continuous resources being pumped into it).
"Mining" in bitcoin means two different things, creating new coins AND adding transactions to the ledger. If mining reward went to 0 (which will actually happen someday), and new coins stopped being created, miners would still be able get a profit from transaction fees, although it wouldn't be "mining" in the same sense as gold.
Normal people would notice and agitate for the internet to be restored. Most people’s daily lives would be significantly impacted.
In contrast, only speculators would notice bitcoin going offline. They might laugh at the guys who told them they weren’t going to make it but that’d be it. Nothing would break, nobody would be in line ahead of them failing to buy something, etc.
That matters because bitcoin’s floor value is zero: as a very weak fiat currency, the only reason to use it is when you think it’ll be profitable and if that confidence drops miners will stop putting more hard money into the system.
> The floor value of EVERY company is $0, but what is your point in saying that?
There's a big difference between something like a Beanie Baby, which has a base value of whatever someone will pay for a toy (you're not getting rich, but it's not zero), a company whose shares convey fractional ownership of assets and an ongoing revenue stream, and a very weak fiat currency like Bitcoin which has value only to the degree to which your buyer believes they will be able to resell it at a profit.
With a strong fiat currency like the US dollar, that belief is anchored by the size of the related economy and the millions of people who are guaranteed to use USD to pay taxes and other government fees, sell goods and services to the government or be paid by it, and the millions of business relationships specified in dollars. Yes, that could change over time but it's not something which happens quickly except in disaster scenarios where the value of any currency is moot and you wouldn't be running Bitcoin miners in any case.
I believe that's what we call a pyramid scheme. It only works as long as resources are being poured into it. The second the money flow stops, it instantly collapses.
I think Bitcoin has no value. But I don't think mining issue you raise is a reason why. The difficulty of mining is pegged to size of the mining pool so you don't actually need that many miners to operate the whole network.
Mining is bad for other reasons--it's a huge waste of resources when bitcoin is worth a lot of money.
>if we turned off all bitcoin miners today, bitcoin would go to zero instantly
isn't true. You couldn't trade them normally with the miners off but you could start mining up the day after - it only takes a couple of computers really.
But you understand why this hasn't happened yet right? if everyone else turned off their miners, I for one would be interested in money and turn one on
I guess it's a different scenario but if all the existing miners were turned off today, there is nothing to stop me running the open source bitcoin software on a spare computer myself the day after. I guess if you ban that for all time and all places bitcoin would be over.
My impression of the intent of the statement was "disable mining altogether" not "turn off the existing physical mining rigs until someone turns one back on"
The mining reward is not supposed to be the end state of the system. It is a subsidy, reducing over time, to get the system established.
Once established, the idea is that transaction fees are used and the distributed nature of the network causes a natural competition to be the most efficient so miners can charge the lowest fees while making a profit.
> If the value of gold crashes it still has an inherent value because it's a useful physical good (looking pretty is not the only application of gold).
The value of gold is protected by the fact that the majority of it's holdings (at least, according to this[1]) aren't used for speculation. Still, a good chunk of them are, which means there can be pretty huge swings and it's considered a poor investment.
Have tried to say the inherent value of a dollar is because it's backed by the U.S. military, but fundamentally, it's the same reason. Dollars aren't held as speculative assets. The poor returns from the dollar are one of the reasons why people push other investments. If currency does enter into speculative territory, bad things can (and do) happen. See Hot Money[2].
Anything, even if it has inherent value, can be extremely dangerous when there's a large number of speculators. Because no matter the value, speculation can drive the price much, much higher. And it's a snowballing effect - the more an asset rises, the more people want to buy it for speculative reasons, and the more people buy it the more it rises.
And then any inherent value (if it even exists) looses significance - you're in a game of chicken with the other investors, trying to both hold on as long as you can and get out before everyone else does. The winner gets the fortune, the loser is left holding the bag.
The thing is, almost everyone in the crypto space seems interested in speculation. It might be speculation + decentralized voting rights or speculation + digital ownership, but speculation is always at the heart of it. The idea that if you get in early you'll be able to cash out for a big profit. Of course a space almost entirely driven by speculation is going to be inherently dangerous and unstable, and the "opportunities" are the same type as those of a casino.
Gold is priced way higher than it's worth due to speculation, yes, but it does have intrinsic value in industrial processes and electronics. I wouldn't invest in shiny pebbles personally but there is a very real, fundamental difference.
One could argue that the complete and utter strawman by the other poster is more likely to start a flamewar than someone asking if they understood the actual point.
But let me guess, if I press you on this I'm going to get banned in a week or so for such and such reason.
Sure, but it always feels like the other person started it and did worse—so everybody always argues that.*
Let's assume you are right and the other person is wrong. Posting an unsubstantive snark is the worst way to respond. It poisons the atmosphere, evokes worse from others, and ultimately discredits your own position (which, if you're right, means you're discrediting the truth—and that hurts everyone**).
What you should do instead is one of the following:
(1) respectfully provide correct information, so we can all learn; or
(2) chalk it up to the internet being wrong about everything and just move on.
guidelines state to assume good faith, I asked if they understood the actual point.
What's happened here is my assumption of good faith with a question got turned into a warning by the mod because they, themselves, did not assume good faith on my part.
So the question becomes, are those guidelines taken seriously by the moderators of this site or not?
If they are, then maybe admit to your error and lets all just move on.
It was obviously an unsubstantive comment, unduly personal, and basically a variation on "did you even read the article" which the site guidelines ask people not to post. That makes it flamebait, regardless of your intention when you posted it. I don't think it was a borderline call, nor is it hard to understand.
Ironically, the sort of legalistic pleading you're resorting to is a sign of a lack of the good faith you're claiming. So is the style of your reply sequence: never admit or accept a thing, never address what the other person says, and simply bring up a new argument every time. These are troll tactics, whether you're using them that way intentionally or not (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), and part of how we moderate HN is not to dance that way.
It's never been clear to me why some people think implication cannot be considered an accusation.
You jumped the gun and have caused more issues than you've avoided. Your warning was more about preparation to ban me than anything related to the actual conversation.
I get it. I understand. Just do it now if you're so inclined, it will save both our time.
I wasn't preparing to ban you! I looked at your history quickly and what I saw was mostly pretty good. I'm just asking you not to post things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33643127 for what ought to be obvious reasons.
Re the word 'troll', the link I provided points to a thwack of explanations of how precisely we use that word. It doesn't have to do with impugning someone's intent (which we have no way of knowing); it has to do with the impact that certain kinds of posts tend to have on the threads (which we have plenty of ways of knowing, as they are externally observable). I'm not accusing you, by implication or otherwise, of anything more than making such a post. That's why I asked you not to do that!
The other poster took the idea you expressed - that "[crypto is] 100% speculative and nothing else" - and further explored the idea, and some markets they have seen where the price action either devolves or remains rational.
What exactly did he do that was a "strawman"? Why are you so angry? It was an interesting comment thread, and then you are acting as if persecuted by the other commenter and HN moderators.
They spent 90% of their post talking about gold also being speculative rather than crypto.
I asked if they understood my actual point because I was never denying that gold had speculation, but that when that speculation collapses gold still has value due to it's application in the physical world.
Broadscale, crypto seems to have had an "Eternal September" moment and I think that's where the problems really began. Back in the early days before crypto entered the mainstream, it was pretty much like any other internet project. It was cool to be able to buy a pizza with internet funny money but by then it was still pretty small and everyone knew the inherent risks.
Then came the "Eternal September" where cryto went mainstream and many people started pitching this formerly niche project as a real investment vehicle. And people bought in thinking it was like any other investment. IMHO cyrpto itself isn't bad, it's all the people that pitched it like an old school investment vehicle.
I remember getting into Bitcoin in early 2010 when the pizza thing happened. Even back then it was hyped to me as an investment and an alternative to the corrupt financial system.
There's always been an undercurrent of this stuff. The eternal September came years later, after big scams like Mt Gox had already long imploded.
I guess you could argue that it wasn't a scam because it wasn't the leadership doing the theft, but it's a bit of a meaningless distinction in the end. Lots of bitcoins were stolen, withdrawals were halted, and customers lost their money regardless.
> When that happened he shuttered the website and kept everyone's bitcoins.
> I knew of bitcoin early on due to this guy, but even then I had no interest and considered it bullshit. Then when I saw what this guy did it just solidified my opinion that it can't be trusted.
But isn't it instead an early lesson in "not your keys not your coin" maxim that Bitcoin advocates preach?
> If the value of gold crashes it still has an inherent value because it's a useful physical good (looking pretty is not the only application of gold). a bitcoin has ZERO inherent value.
Yes, but: 1) it's very difficult to self-custody gold (it's bulky, needs a safe place for storage — and if you put it in a bank, you need to be able to trust that you can get it out again); 2) it's very difficult to transfer, especially cross borders, especially in large amounts; 3) it's very difficult to use as an actual money, whereas bitcoin could conceivably be used as such (especially with Lightning).
> "not your keys not your coin" maxim that Bitcoin advocates preach?
I keep seeing this phrase crop up throughout the past several days of cryptocurrency news, and something always rubbed me the wrong way about it, but I couldn't put my finger on it until today.
It's demanding a change in human nature to accommodate the system, rather than changing the system to accommodate human nature.
It's really not that different than the people who, 15 years ago, were saying, "Well, of course your accounts got hacked, because you didn't create a separate 27-character totally random password for every single account you need, like I do, and never store those passwords anywhere except your head!"
People don't want to deal with a hardware token every single time they want to do anything with their money...and the only reason they have to, with cryptocurrency, is because its proponents think an unregulated "decentralized" financial system where the only law is code is a good idea. (Of course, it was never going to stay unregulated forever. None of the aspects of cryptocurrency that rely on the government not paying attention can last more than another few years.)
"People don't want to deal with a hardware token every single time they want to do anything with their money"
Maybe not, but they have to regardless. Banks force this on users anyway (outside the USA). To pay for things I have to use either a chip card (token), or equivalent embedded in my phone (a token), or log in to e-banking using a chip card PIN pad (token) or my phone again, or auth an online CC tx with a phone app (token).
But no matter what I do the only way to move money around without invoking a hardware cryptographic token at some point, is use paper money and physical coins.
So this isn't really something new. Bitcoin was just ahead of the curve in this regard. Also, it's really hard for banks to reverse transactions outside of the USA. What makes bank money "safe" compared to crypto is simply that:
1. Governments will bail banks out because they're too big to fail. Of course you end up paying for it through inflation anyway.
2. Everything is KYCd/AMLd up the wazoo so even if money is drained from your account in the same way it could be for a cryptocurrency, the perps will find it much harder to evade capture.
Self-custody means users withdrawing their coins from exchanges or other custodial services.
>"Well, of course your accounts got hacked, because you didn't create a separate 27-character totally random password for every single account you need, like I do, and never store those passwords anywhere except your head!"
The keys can be recorded as a seed phrase. Typically this is a sequence of dictionary words. Look into it before you dismiss it so flippantly. Things have come a long way to make things easier for the user. There are also dedicated hardware wallet devices for key storage.
If you're not transacting or conducting business with cryptocurrency, why do you care so much? It is literally none of your business. Nobody is forcing you to pay taxes or finance wars with BTC.
I wasn't aware that something had to be "my business" before I was allowed to discuss it on HN.
And "dedicated hardware wallet devices" are exactly the kind of thing that I'm talking about here. There is no way those are going to be appealing to mainstream users; thus, if cryptocurrency were ever to genuinely enter the mainstream, the vast, vast majority of users would be keeping their crypto on exchanges.
Y'know, exactly the way the vast, vast majority of people keep their money in regular bank accounts. Which don't require this kind of rigamarole, and never result in regular people (ie, not the very wealthy) losing money, because it's all regulated and insured by the government.
(Yes, I know FDIC insurance has a limit. The limit is high enough that regular people will never even have to care that it exists.)
That's fine if you want to champion the cause of the normie. Just don't do it in a paternalistic way. If people were satisfied with the high transaction costs and regulatory overhead of traditional finance, they wouldn't be in crypto.
There are a few more reasonable options here.
1) Create or advocate for a cryptocurrency with reversible transactions and all of the regulatory features you desire. Let the market decide how large that niche is.
2) Loosen or advocate for loosening the existing regulations on traditional financial products so that they are competitive with some of the features of cryptocurrency. See also, Zelle. Another product HN seemed to hate.
Yesterday someone was arguing that Peter Thiel is a super villain. Another full page of comments was decrying one of PayPal's policies necessitated by regulations. People are generally unhappy with PayPal's fee structure, but they continue to use it. The fees and draconian policies are largely required to comply with regulations. Want more personable human support? That also costs money.
The argument for regulating cryptocurrency is basically an argument for creating a captured and gatekept ecosystem. Of course, I get it. "Think of the children", "Think of the helpless normies", same story. What we will get instead will be more PayPals.
As for scams and outright Ponizis, it is worth noting that those go on under the watchful eye of the regulatory state you love so well. Bernie Madoff was similarly connected and even served on regulatory boards. SBF, the disgraced FTX head had direct connections to the SEC and chairman Gary Gensler. SBF even testified, asking for more regulation.
I'm doubtful, but still hopeful for the possibility of a good faith discussion. Regulation is not a pancea against fraud. Instead it creates an atmosphere were connected insiders can create greater frauds. The FTX debacle is illustrative of this. Yet here we are hearing the same appeals for more regulation from would be saviors of normies. Posters who themselves do not use cryptocurrency and insist that it has no legitimate use.
For myself I just wanted to run a few online games with payouts for players in cryptocurrency. Now players also want NFT character saves. I've never used a centralized exchange. I don't make big money in this niche. I do have fun. The community is happy. Nobody is crying about valuations. Actual users of cryptocurrency aren't saying, "There outta be a law!". None of my users are claiming, "If only there were a statist savior protecting us from this video game!" or, "This game would be so much better with barriers to entry for developers"
From that perspective, yes I do feel comfortable asking you and the rest of HN's passionate cryptocurrency haters to butt out. You could also go out and build a better alternative in the marketplace of ideas.
You are looking for a Crypto utopia where everyone is as "enlightened" as you. When something goes mainstream that gets lost. However I suspect if Crypto hadn't gained the popularity (and paper value) it did it might not be as fun as you think.
>You are looking for a Crypto utopia where everyone is as "enlightened" as you.
I'm not sure how you read my comment as elitist or utopian. All I'm asking here is that paternalists don't ruin it with saviorism, regulatory capture and gatekeeping.
>When something goes mainstream that gets lost.
Isn't this an elitist sentiment?
Our community has fun with people who aren't deep into tech at all. I started it with faucet rewards integrated into an io game. Anyone can install a wallet when transactions are free. Couldn't be further from what you're projecting.
It is stating the truth. If you don't like it, don't participate on the market. If you don't like it and insist on participating on the market, you will get scammed.
None of that has any ethical or sociological consideration inbuilt. It's a simply observation of the system.
Anyway, yes, that means the system is bad. But this is an ethical and sociological consideration.
Your parent was talking about gold in the niche case of protecting from inflation, and passed no judgement over the merit of doing so, only that it was better then cryptocurrency in that particular niche.
If you want to purchase gold to protect your money from inflation (which you probably shouldn’t) then you probably buy it through some insured exchange—maybe even through your bank—that will keep it for you, if you don’t trust any exchange, that is your problem. If you need to transfer your money, or use it, then you’re not protecting it against inflation anymore are you? So you will just use regular money for that.
Anyway, you shouldn’t buy gold to protect your money from inflation. Instead you probably should just risk an inflation and keep your money in a savings account, or buy secure government bonds for it, or something.
The weird thing to me is that the total mass of silver mined is only about 8x the total mass of silver, but the price spread is 80x.
Copper is much more abundant, over 400x more copper than silver has been mined, but silver is almost as scarce as gold. It really seems like the price spread should be closer.
Uh, I wear some gold on me and cross borders with it and keep it at home when not and there's this thing called pawn shop in my village and otherwise and... are you sure those you mentioned are real problems? Or maybe you mean only the large amounts problems - in which case we should underline bitcoin aims to solve the problems of the rich, which most people on earth are not.
If the value dropped to
Zero, I’d “buy” them all and then run my own miner to confirm the transaction and sail off into the virtual sunset with my story about how I bought all the bitcoin in the world. I’d keep running the miner and publishing my chain. But then someone would come along with more hashpower than me and rewrite all my transactions with their longer chain and my sunset would turn to darkness, and I’d be poor again… but ironically they’d probably not be worth zero anymore. Then people would rewrite that chain with more hashpower… And so on, until greed secures the transactions again and restores value.
At which point I’d turn my miner off and wind the chain back to when I was rich on my private virtual island for one and live happily ever after.
> It's not possible for the value of gold to go to zero
The price might go to zero, though. The price of oil, which is arguably more useful than gold, went negative a couple of years back. Having intrinsic value doesn't necessarily mean it is exchangeable, especially if it needs to be exchanged at a given moment in time.
The price of oil futures went negative. The spot price of oil has never and will never hit zero or negative.
You can't use your regular intuition about commodity prices when talking about futures contracts. The negative price was a one-day event, and all it really represents is a higher-than-normal premium on the calendar spread.
Oil (and gas) are specific cases, not relatable to gold...
The point with oil is its extraction can't be stoped overnight, and thus has to be stored in case of excessive production, which has itself a cost.
Demand droped significantly when the lockdown occured ; storage facilities where saturated ; and oil was kept in oil tankers which are pretty expensive.
The exchange value might fluctuate but the use value remains, in the case of oil and gold. Bitcoin has no use value. Could say that about other financial instruments and derivatives, but they serve a purpose to those who use them. There's a big difference to exchange value and use value though, Marx made a career out of defining it.
I used the phrase 'inherent value' to describe what you're referring to as 'use value'. But of course someone decided they had to argue against it by arguing that the trade value between countries went negative at one point (which isn't all that surprising but has nothing to do with the original point).
arguably 'use value' is a better phrase, but given the surrounding explanations, the poster engaged in a clear strawman.
Its value is all well and good if you personally have a use for it, but if you are merely stockpiling it in hopes of selling it later then that doesn't help much if the price has fallen to zero. You might be left with something pretty to look at and little more as you hold out for a recovery, if you don't take the bath and end up with nothing.
Which could also be said about Bitcoin. I'm sure someone out there would find some kind of academic interest in looking at Bitcoins or enjoy collecting them. There might be almost no value in Bitcoin, but it would probably never erode completely.
In fiction there's an idea known as 'plot armor'. In essence, it's the idea that causality and realism are suspended for some reasons related to the plot.
Your scenario here is plot armor.
Sure, if we pretend that gold stops having ANY use outside of being pretty, then when it stops being considered pretty it's value will go to 0.
But the fact is, gold has a myriad of uses besides being pretty and those uses give it an inherent value.
And when you go to sell it, others' use of it is what sets the sell value, not your personal use of it. It doesn't matter that I'm not personally using it for conductivity if the person I'm selling it to is (or someone downstream of them is).
> Sure, if we pretend that gold stops having ANY use outside of being pretty
I fail to see the purpose of this 'pilot amor'. There is no reason why gold would stop being useful beyond being pretty. This fiction you've come up with doesn't even make any sense and certainly has no relevance to the discussion.
However, that doesn't mean there is always a user available. When we saw the price of oil go negative there were still just as many uses for oil as there ever was, but for various reasons there weren't buyers in that moment. Gold is not immune to the same.
In case you are still confused, let me be clear: Price and value are not the same thing.
> People try to compare it to things like gold for protecting your money from inflation, but that's completely nonsensical.
It's just like gold. You give me your gold and I'll take it all right now, saving you from losing it incrementally or at a later date. Not your vault, not your bars. Theft-as-a-Service. /s
Gold has a special status because of how long we've mythologized it, but generally you'd be encouraged to invest/buy futures in things that impact your life and income directly. Your inputs and outputs.
If you produce food from fertilizer and power then those are your three important commodities. Gold isn't a great fit because you can't eat it, fertilize with it, or run a tractor on it. You have to do a gold-to-dollars transaction first which can waste a fair bit of the value.
If you forward packets and consume electricity to do so then holding gold also isn't economically relevant, but by trading proofs of work which were generated by burning electricity you track the value of your commodities and do so natively.
If we used HashCash (or similar) to solve the initial-contact problem then we'd be creating a secondary market in the proofs and they could be used as currency by a related ecosystem like hosting providers with little friction or risk.
Tulips didn't cause the problem, speculators (and scammers) did.
Although I agree with almost everything you said, under certain conditions it would be possible for certain prices of gold to go to zero, or even negative.
Can you teach me about this, like with a link or something? I have known wealthy people who for generations kept a portfolio like 60% equities, 35% cash and very liquid things like bonds, ~3-5% gold, usually in the form of equities that track gold.
I am not saying that is good.. I don't know. Tell me why it is bad. Thank you.
However, I don’t get how holding gold – which doesn’t generate dividends and therefore cannot benefit from compound interest – could be a good long term invest, compared to, say, an accumulating ETF.
I don't think I've ever seen a convincing argument that the physical "usefulness" of gold is a significant factor behind its market value.
The closest is the argument that it's useful as marker for indicating wealth/status/privilege, because of its rarity (and obviously the skill involved in crafting it into various ornaments/utensils etc.).
But yes, arguably more useful than cryptocurrency (where there's value in the concept of a distributed cryptographically-backed ledger, and the software that exists to support it, but not really in any individual unit of a cryptographic currency). Then again, there's really no absolute utility in units of fiat-issued currency either - it just happens to be the only sort of currency that governments accept for paying taxes (therefore necessary for keeping yourself out of jail).
A lot of things have no value to most people. Go to an antique show or an art auction and you yourself may see boring drawings and literal garbage, but many others pay handsomely for it! BTC has no visual or any sensory representation so it's not apples-to-apples but it's a collector's item at the very least.
I have seen a lot of resistance against GNU Taler so I think if any country adopts a CDBC it will be fully surveiled with no privacy for customers. After all that is what people want. They don't want privacy in their CDBCs.
Well, if that happens I hope they implement negative interest rates on them because that would end the need for surveillance and political corruption within a decade.
The government doesn't need a cryptocoin to monitor transactions, or to make using paper currency illegal. It can already do what you think it needs a cryptocoin to do, and it doesn't do it because it supports wealthy people being able to launder money and avoid taxes. US politics runs entirely on laundered money and misdirected/avoided taxes. You're lobbying for the swamp.
I anticipate CBDC being something for the peons to use, not the elite. Yes, the government can monitor transactions, but it currently has to jump through a lot more loopholes to do so. I understand and agree with your sentiment, with the additional point that smaller banks are also going to be made obsolete if a CBDC is rolled out.
But the wealthy and connected will most certainly have their own way of getting around the system. Whether that means moving their money into physical assets, or onto the market, I don't know. I don't think cash is going to go away, but I do see the government incentivizing regular people to solely use CBDC, and once you're on that system, you are a serf.
I suspected early period Bitcoin gained enormous deposits from corrupt "Tiger" traitors (or defectors) in the Communist Party. They exited China's smog for Canada, for example.
it honestly sounds a lot like banking. We just have some rules now to prevent this sort of thing. It's not bitcoin that's the problem... It's the money changers.
If an item only works well in theory, then the item itself is the problem.
A firearm is absolutely, 100% safe as long as no one ever interacts with it.
Because we are humans, in a society, and everything we do relies on human interactions, if Bitcoin (and crypto in general) cannot operate positively and effectively, except in theory, then it is the problem, regardless of the underlying reason.
the history of money seems to be lost on you. It literally went through the same sorts of things. Fiat works because we learned. My Good that gun comparison was dumb.
Then bitcoin had its very first dip and it became unprofitable to mine bitcoins. When that happened he shuttered the website and kept everyone's bitcoins.
I knew of bitcoin early on due to this guy, but even then I had no interest and considered it bullshit. Then when I saw what this guy did it just solidified my opinion that it can't be trusted.
That's not to say that in theory there aren't uses for it, but it's 100% speculative and nothing else. People try to compare it to things like gold for protecting your money from inflation, but that's completely nonsensical.
If the value of gold crashes it still has an inherent value because it's a useful physical good (looking pretty is not the only application of gold). a bitcoin has ZERO inherent value. It's not possible for the value of gold to go to zero, but it's absolutely possible for the value of a bitcoin to go to zero.
crypto will never go away, but it absolutely should.