201–210 of 256 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The government didn't actually print any money, the central banks just acted as a "lender of last resort," which works just as well in Bitcoin as it does in cash.
They printed $4+ trillion in the aftermath and gave it to banks.
Dogecoin is kinda like a control/placebo for real cryptocoins. And the fact that it exploded without providing real distinct utility apart from existing coins is an indication that something is indeed wrong.
I love this and am going to steal the phrasing. Doge is an absurdity. Like "Cards Against Humanity" or the "C'est non un Pipe" paintings. That it can be considered to be 'legit' or anything else is fantasy. Anyone that is investing in Doge is a fool. Unfortunately, there are just too many damn fools.
Interest in coins are going up, so of course that will spill over to the easier, less risky coins like Doge that people will want to experiment with to see if they like the model.
And with that increased demand inherently comes increased value, not because people are pumping up the meme coin, but just because it's becoming more active, along with the rest of the ecosystem.
It also probably serves as a reliable intermediary coin to use as an exchange or more common coins.
>"To deliver a peer-to-peer alternative to cash that, through decentralization, did away with the need for trust in financial institutions, which the 2008 crisis showed to be unscrupulous, and often corrupt." The sort of activity which led to the financial crisis would not be mitigated by the establishment of a decentralized currency. Decentralization would not do away with the need for financial institutions (or the…
Your concept of decentralization is off. The purpose of it is this: How many points of failure are there? How many of these points can break before the cards all fall? If this happens, who pays for it?
This illustrates that the USD is not decentralized.
Cryptocurrency is an exit from this, much like gold or real estate or other investment vehicles. Cryptocurrency is available to anyone with a phone and internet access -- that cannot be said for any other investment vehicle.
This will take the wind out of the sails of financial institutions as there is another option for people.
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I don't think you understand how that works. The government didn't literally print more money, they bought securities from the banks in exchange for credit in the central bank's account. No actual money was printed. The increase in the BASE is because the Fed was reducing its reserves. This is entirely possible to do in Bitcoin, you can still have a "lender of last resort".
Not "credit" in the sense of a "line of credit", but "credit" in the sense of "increased the amount held in their account" -- the banks, if they so desired, could ask the Fed to deliver, as cash, the money held in reserves, so long as they upheld their reserve requirements at the same time, and the Fed would have, by law, been forced to instruct the Treasury to deliver the specie. Of course, the plan was that the tro…
Nobody likes "consumer price inflation can't happen if rich people steal all the money before consumers can spend it" as a theory?
>"To deliver a peer-to-peer alternative to cash that, through decentralization, did away with the need for trust in financial institutions, which the 2008 crisis showed to be unscrupulous, and often corrupt." The sort of activity which led to the financial crisis would not be mitigated by the establishment of a decentralized currency. Decentralization would not do away with the need for financial institutions (or the…
You are correct that the activity that led to all financial crises will not be mitigated in the domain of national currencies. It will be avoided in decentralized money that is uncorrelated, like gold. Your concept of decentralization is off. The purpose of it is this: How many points of failure are there? How many of these points can break before the cards all fall? If this happens, who pays for it? This illustrates…
What does the end game for this situation look like? Will people just create Bitcoin Zero, which is identical to Bitcoin but preallocates the existing coins starting from the genesis block? (A manual GC, as it were.)
Otherwise it seems like crypto will be around 100 years from now, but probably not BTC. At least not in a form where non-miners can participate.
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What if someone comes to your house and steals your gold bars in a vault? That's the same thing as stealing your Bitcoin. If my private keys are in cold storage in a vault, it isnt any easier to steal that, than if my Bitcoin was instead gold bars.
Gold bars in a vault are at least something of value, and not just bits on a drive. The physical gold can be used to make things. What can you do with the bits on a drive?
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Satoshi did mention it elsewhere: >The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We ha…
What's really fantastic, though, is that cryptocurrencies are currently in a large bubble themselves. Privacy of the exchanges is no better as you literally have to send them a picture of your ID. And several exchanges have been hacked with the money stolen. So far, I'd say cryptocurrencies (for the average joe/jane) are WORSE than regular banks. And, on the last point about micropayments, well Bitcoin now has such m…
Everyone criticizing the current state of crypto as being worse than banks is missing the forest for the trees. These systems are early tech. Ethereum is barely 2 years old. It was easy to criticize dial-up internet, too. I'm sure Barnes & Nobles scoffed at Amazon at one point. Easy to do this, and assume this "dot-com" thing is just a bubble that's going away at some point.
Decentralization is ONE feature of crypto currency. One of several. It's not decentralization alone, but the combination of features that brings value to crypto, including programmable economic incentives (a powerful concept we're just learning the implications of).
To answer some of your other points: even exchanges are being built on the blockchain now. We have 0x, EtherDelta, etc, which allow you to trade tokens without revealing your identity. So, that problem is starting to resolve itself.
We have Proof-of-Stake coins like Qtum, which avoid the Proof-of-Work issues (Ethereum will be moving to PoS soon).
Still not sold on the idea that proof-of-work is inherently bad though. I consider that system very secure, as Bitcoin has proven. The blockchain itself has proven quite resilient to hackers, DDoS attacks, government intervention, etc.
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As others are saying, Satoshi made some political-sounding statements about financial systems around the time of release, but the paper only refers to facets of traditional financial institutions in measured, objective terms. Then again, given that Satoshi's true identity is unknown, a lot of this is necessarily speculation by interpreting a small set of clues.
Satoshi worked online with a group of developers for more than a year while keeping perfect operational security. Developed a solution to the byzantine generals problem, but has no published maths papers, otherwise something would have come up through text analysis. Designed bitcoin as a financial instrument, indicating inside knowledge of the banking industry. Has mined enough bitcoin to be on the list of the world'…
Crypto allows people to do 2 very important and useful things: 1) Move money around government currency controls (for a small fee) 2) Invest and speculate on potentially valuable assets. Sure you can't live in, eat, or drive a Bitcoin, but finance/trading is all about creating and betting on abstractions, and virtual currencies are the ultimate abstraction. Crypto is especially attractive given the current easy money…
It's also an improvement over PayPal or banking for sellers who don't want chargebacks/bad checks/their account frozen for writing "Nico" in the transaction comments.