Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which country is this?
South Africa I presume
Yup
Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling
141–150 of 369 posts
Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
You hit the nail on the head. Hodling is, in some cases, the best use case for Bitcoin.
There is a reason why an investor that holds a security until it is worthless is called a "bag holder". It makes no sense to "invest" in any currency when you can own productive assets instead. If you are concerned about the government seizing your assets, I would suggest emigrating to a country that respects private property rights. Countries that undergo hyperinflation are fairly rare, and the citizens of those cou…
Your argument is also applicable to gold yet it doesn't hold there
Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling
#143My thinking, probably wrong goes like this:
what is money? It is a messaging system that allows people to decide what to do in a decentralized fashion. We need more food, the price of food goes up, more people grow food. What happens when you make money from money? Dysfunction. World currencies are increasingly dysfunctional - the most profit comes not from productive economic activity but from speculation, arbitrage, etc.
Bitcoins are completely dysfunctional because they are not tied to any productive economic activity, they are completely speculative. The idea of cryptocurrencies is great, but without being tied to real economic activity, they are ... well speculative.
Would love some explanations on why this thinking is wrong.
Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, what advantage does it have over gold? Advantages of gold vs. Bitcoin: - gold is pretty easy to find, not that hard to buy for the average consumer; BTC is anything but - gold is physical in form and securing it is not hard; BTC is not physical, exchanges get hacked with losses to accounts, in the event of a natural disaster or some event where power generation and internet is lost you lose access to BTC. (So…
Bitcoin advantage: easily and instantly divisible. Gold not so much. Bitcoin advantage: weighs nothing, highly transportable. Gold not so much.
> Bitcoin advantage: easily and instantly divisible. Gold not so much.
Not so important for a store of value.
> Bitcoin advantage: weighs nothing, highly transportable. Gold not so much.
Yet requires an order of magnitude more skill and overhead to handle.
Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling
#145>And Bitcoin-based transactions can’t be reversed, an issue when a merchant or a consumer comes up against fraud
That's the fucking point. Use multisig/escrow if you need it.
Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling
#146My thinking, probably wrong goes like this: what is money? It is a messaging system that allows people to decide what to do in a decentralized fashion. We need more food, the price of food goes up, more people grow food. What happens when you make money from money? Dysfunction. World currencies are increasingly dysfunctional - the most profit comes not from productive economic activity but from speculation, arbitrage…
They’re tied to economic activity — buying drugs, money laundering, paying ransoms, funding intelligence operations.
Just nobody is using them to buy legitimate products.
Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling
#147A 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.
There is one group of miners for whom electricity costs and Bitcoin price don't really matter much: home miners in cold regions whose homes used electrical resistance heating. Almost all of the energy consumed by a computer ends up as heat released directly into the room. A computer is, for most practical purposes, an electrical space heater that is as efficient as a "real" space heater [1]. It's just more complicated and the power consumption (and hence heat output) tends to vary a lot depending on what computation it is doing.
I wonder if this will result in mining eventually becoming mostly a home activity again, as it was when Bitcoin was starting out?
[1] https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Gaming-PC-vs-Spac...
Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 havi…
His point is the fundamental principles of fractional reserve are flawed, and the system will alwayssuffer from the looming threat of a bank run. It's rather disingenuous to say that people having money stolen from them isn't a problem when you have a system that cyclically chucks out an Enron or Sub-Prime mortgage crisis every ten years or so that typically ends up getting resolved on the taxpayer's dime. The defini…
I have no idea how switching to bitcoin for currency would prevent Enron.
Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, what advantage does it have over gold? Advantages of gold vs. Bitcoin: - gold is pretty easy to find, not that hard to buy for the average consumer; BTC is anything but - gold is physical in form and securing it is not hard; BTC is not physical, exchanges get hacked with losses to accounts, in the event of a natural disaster or some event where power generation and internet is lost you lose access to BTC. (So…
In this context, it's much harder to protect gold from the government (if it decides it wants to take it away). Plus buying stuff online is more tricky. I could envision alternative reality though, where there are companies specializing in providing tokens that have 100% coverage in gold. You would need to trust them and their software, but some trust is always involved. The problem is those would be an easy target w…
> In this context, it's much harder to protect gold from the government (if it decides it wants to take it away).
If you're to the point where some authority is forcefully taking your assets away, I'd much rather have physical possession of gold than Bitcoin. You can bury gold somewhere and pretend you don't have it. Bitcoin, on the other hand, takes place on a public ledger, so they can, in theory, always track it down. And a thug who's willing to take your gold at gunpoint will be equally happy to take your wallet keys at gunpoint.
In terms of @#*%ing up the economy, governments are just as able to trash the Bitcoin economy as they were to trash the gold economy 100 years ago. Using exactly the same methods, too.
Re: Bitcoin's Use in Commerce Keeps Falling
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe its a generational thing, but i have no clue how i would go about buying/trading gold and i dont think anyone in my friend group does either. Bitcoin is far more accessible.
It’s pretty easy to just buy $GLD with any brokerage account if you just want gold exposure. If you don’t trust the ETFs to honor your claims when the apocalypse arrives things are harder of course.
I'm sure when the apocalypse arrives, we'll have bigger problems...