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Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

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Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#31
post #21

A currency with no mechanism for monetary policy is not going to be adopted. Bitcoin is purely deflationary for more reasons than just people losing their keys. For example, a fixed reward split between a growing group of miners will also cause a rising price floor. The miners will not sell for less than their electricity costs, which makes the smaller piece of the block reward they receive have a higher price. So yo…

Currency that is guaranteed to be deflationary sure has its problems. But taking ideology and using it for every day stuff aside, why wouldn't you want to own some?

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#32
post #21

A currency with no mechanism for monetary policy is not going to be adopted. Bitcoin is purely deflationary for more reasons than just people losing their keys. For example, a fixed reward split between a growing group of miners will also cause a rising price floor. The miners will not sell for less than their electricity costs, which makes the smaller piece of the block reward they receive have a higher price. So yo…

> For example, a fixed reward split between a growing group of miners will also cause a rising price floor. The miners will not sell for less than their electricity costs, which makes the smaller piece of the block reward they receive have a higher price.

No that's not how markets work.

Miners will sell at the best prive they can get. If they cannot cover their costs, they'll stop mining and the difficulty will drop until mining is profitable again.

The resulting mining rate may be too low though to secure the network, bug that's a different topic.

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#33

The primary utility of money is this: it is the good that best lends itself to exchanges for other goods. Its been clear to me for some time now, and I'm not alone in this, that as the properties of Bitcoin have moved further away from its primary function as a useful unit of exchange that its usage would decline. There are other crypto-currencies which are now much better suited as a medium of exchange, which ones p…

Isn’t this issue inherent in its design? If you can only have 21 million Bitcoins, the value will skyrocket until the currency is worthless.

It's more than 21 millions since bitcoins can be divided. And no, it could serve as a digital gold / long term investment, and others crypto currencies could be used for day to day transaction

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#34
post #21

A currency with no mechanism for monetary policy is not going to be adopted. Bitcoin is purely deflationary for more reasons than just people losing their keys. For example, a fixed reward split between a growing group of miners will also cause a rising price floor. The miners will not sell for less than their electricity costs, which makes the smaller piece of the block reward they receive have a higher price. So yo…

> The miners will not sell for less than their electricity costs, which makes the smaller piece of the block reward they receive have a higher price.

That's not how it works. If you spent $100 in electricity and you have an asset that's worth $50, you can either sell it for $50 and only be down $50 on your electricity, or you can not sell it at all and be down $100 on your electricity.

Electricity cost of mining does not set a price floor. The price floor is 0.

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#35
post #31
post #21

A currency with no mechanism for monetary policy is not going to be adopted. Bitcoin is purely deflationary for more reasons than just people losing their keys. For example, a fixed reward split between a growing group of miners will also cause a rising price floor. The miners will not sell for less than their electricity costs, which makes the smaller piece of the block reward they receive have a higher price. So yo…

Currency that is guaranteed to be deflationary sure has its problems. But taking ideology and using it for every day stuff aside, why wouldn't you want to own some?

Exactly: own some. Not spend some, hence the problem with using it as a currency.

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#36
post #15

Bitcoin (and crypto) is not a currency, commodity, stock or bond. It's a combination which makes it a completely new and different kind of asset class. It's a programmable asset that primarily serves as a 'trading vehicle' in the mind of traders and Wall St. Understanding this helps to understand why Goldman and others are stepping over themselves to setup trading desks for most crypto now and in the future.

I totally agree with the assertion that it doesn't fall into existing asset type (or-- maybe that it can move between asset types in a novel way), but what do you mean by "programmable"? Isn't the simpler explanation or enthusiasm on the part of Goldman et al. just classic FOMO?

When you can engineer sophisticated scripts or wrappers around a globally accessible immutable tradable asset it increases functionality and innovation in financial products which includes autonomous machines trading crypto with one another in exchange for data. I think we're in for a world of fun.

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#37
post #22

How Google is entering the crypto space is https://blog.usejournal.com/google-entering-the-blockchain-s... very telling. Bitcoin is not going away. Get over it.

Crypto space doesn't necessarily mean Bitcoin, could be another better technology that eventually becomes mainstream.

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#38
post #16
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, money works pretty well. Bitcoin is not 10x better. Maybe 0.1x. Bitcoin is not even useful for illicit transactions anymore.

By money you mean what exactly? Anything in a bank account is not money but promise of money that can be taken away without your knowledge. Any specific currency is subject to whim of corresponding central bank. Sure, some are safer than others but still. Even the right to participate is not a given as you can be banned from opening a bank account. Bitcoin is orders of magnitude better money than anything else in eve…

It's becoming clear that people who say what you just said sound more like the loons parroting Sovereign Citizen manifestos than rational individuals who actually understand international monetary policies. Instead of screaming about flags with yellow fringes, and "Am I being detained?", you will be screaming about how POW works and "Is BTC illegal?!".

Whether you want to believe it or not, enough people are not having their money "stolen", "without their knowledge" in the real world that anything you said after that would make sense to them. In fact, you gloss over how the one thing everyone fears in crypto is - having their money taken away without their knowledge!

I mean hot storage, cold storage, private keys, public keys... your online trading company being hacked... Do you honestly think that anything in crypto is safer or 10X better or easier than a regular bank that everyone in America or the modern western world, has access to?

Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling

#40
post #30

By no means am I a bitcoin-enthusiast, but I've shared this story before: > We had to send a payment to someone who lives in a commonwealth country - what a pain in the ass that was. For the first time I actually saw a use for bitcoin, but the volatility and my general desire not to run afoul of any weird money laundering laws got the better of me. I do think there's a legitimate case for bitcoin as a means of gettin…

> We had to send a payment to someone who lives in a commonwealth country

I use it for that purpose all the time. In general, People in developed countries don't have a clue about how painful and time consuming an international payment can be. Even with credit cards banks put very low limits that are unrealistic for someone who travel often and consume cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud.

That is why I think the Bitcoin narrative is misleading, the main point was to make P2P transfer, not holding. In this context stable coins like DAI are currently one of the killer use cases.

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