211–220 of 262 posts
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- confiscate my bitcoin, or even find out how much I have Bitcoin's public ledger is especially vulnerable to FBI "follow the money" investigation. Only one end is required to be known, and the entire trail is easily followed. The federal agent who stole a portion of Dread Pirate Roberts' Bitcoin was quickly tracked and prosecuted.
Tracking crypto-coins are actually real business [0]. [0]: https://www.chainalysis.com
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Exchanging Bitcoin for Monero or Zcash, making a private transaction, then selling it back for Bitcoin under a separate account would seemingly stop this dead in its tracks.
But then untraceability would be a quality or Monero or Zcash, not Bitcoin itself.
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The worth of a cryptocurrency is a bit of a weird thing to me since the decision where the decimal point is arbitrary, the different cryptocurrencies aren't that different in value, they just use different decimal points. If ETH decided to shift the decimal point by two digits, it would suddenly be twice as much "worth" as bitcoin.
If a company issued twice as much stock, would it have a market cap that's twice as high as it's 1x issuance? If Amazon offers 100 AWS-Bux for every euro/yen/dollar would they bring in 10x as much revenue if they offered 1000 AWS-Bux for every euro/yen/dollar[1]? No, to suggest otherwise would be economic delusion; economic literacy doesn't seem to be the ETH's community's forte. The quantity is irrelevant, the excha…
If a company simply turned each share into two shares, then the market cap would be the same but the fractions of the markteshare that can be traded are smaller.
If the company suddenly issued the entire stock on the market again, the price would plummet to half.
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As an example the ECB (European Central Bank, central bank for the Eurozone) declared exactly that [0], as I said in my original comment. The ECB, the Fed, the SEC (as you can read from the current HN article) all see crypto as securities and way too volatile at this time (something you don't want in a currency). This may change in the future but it doesn't change the current state of fact. Another important aspect i…
Sorry, pressed for time. But I don't think missing an unsourced comment from earlier in the thread and asking a question about it deserves that kind of response. I asked the question hoping to learn something, and I did. So thanks for that, if not for the attitude.
Also because I noticed only now, whether currency is paper, electronic, or any other material is not actually what tells currencies apart. But while classic legal tender is backed by the goods and services of the country that uses it (I know this part is a bit arguable but let's go with it), crypto is more or less backed by nothing but the trust that the blockchain can't be hacked. One bad hack and the value of BTC becomes 0, something very hard to do with a classic currency but catastrophic if it happens. It's also very susceptible to volatile bouts, as seen before. BTC could be a "real" currency but it would be an overall bad one that could not replace the classic currencies in it's current form. It doesn't mean it can't become one but it would have to change in ways that would take it away from the current BTC.
Take a hypothetical CMU (Close04 Monetary Unit) backed by the value of my belongings. That's a token that goes up and down in value as I buy more stuff or my house gets more expensive, or as I issue more tokens (inflation). But it's only as valuable as the trust you have in me and the laws that prop up that trust. If I sell all my stuff and disappear your token is worth nothing and there's very little you can do. There are no protections, there's no legal mechanism that prevents me from selling my stuff. For a coin to become a proper currency it needs some of those props. Unfortunately most people are internet educated in these aspects so they only understand once they get swindled. Every time a cryptocoin is abused, an exchange goes bust, you see a lot of converts and crypto regulation starts to sound better.
Cryptocurrencies are scam. End. This is very simple. Yes, they are a new kind of scam, a good name suggested is Nakamoto Scheme. https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/ Also notable: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-bu... which doesn't outright call it a scam but certainly points out > Git gives you pretty much everything offered by the business case for blockchains. The one thing…
If you’ve ever needed to buy something that your government doesn’t want you to or get your money out of a country that doesn’t want you to remove your money you’d have a different view of cryptocurrency. Scam is not how I would classify all of them at all. I’d classify them more as a mechanism of freedom. You may find yourself singing a different tune when the current QE house of cards falls and you want somewhere,…
Given that our government is democratically elected and all laws have a democratic foundation what you call freedom I would call criminal.
In that regard cryptocurrencies have a problem.
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Sure, if you want to do that, Bitcoin is one of the very few working solutions that have been found. But do you actually want to do that? Who are you providing a service for by doing that? We know the answer: Scammers and criminals, by and large. Everyone else is better served by a centralised service.
I know a handful of people who benefited a lot from Bitcoin by just speculating with it. They got wealthy, some even rich and now they have much better living standards. That group fits into the niche that were quite well "served" by Bitcoin. Just pointing out that "scammers and criminals" is clearly not the only ones benefitting from Bitcoin, and I would suspect it is also minority.
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> And for sure, you can’t pay taxes with them. This is a bad necessary condition for considering something a currency. I definitely cannot pay my taxes in USD. Does that mean USD is not a currency? Or did you mean that you have to be able to pay taxes with it somewhere ? So, hypothetically, if someone founded a microstate which allowed paying taxes in Bitcoin, then it would become a currency? But that seems ridiculou…
> This is a bad necessary condition for considering something a currency. On the contrary! 'Money' is just IOU notes. What gives these IOU notes value is that governments use them for paying welfare and civil servant salaries, and in turn take them back when collecting taxes. > So, hypothetically, if someone founded a microstate which allowed paying taxes in Bitcoin, then it would become a currency? Yes. But with a c…
So then the various cryptocurrencies fit the bill because a lot of people are willing to treat them as IOU notes among themselves.
> What gives these IOU notes value is that governments use them for paying welfare and civil servant salaries, and in turn take them back when collecting taxes.
But if some people are willing to treat a cryptocurrency as IOU notes, then that cryptocurrency is exchangeable for a currency like USD, EUR, etc, again allowing me to pay those taxes. This is no different than the case of me using USD to produce money for paying taxes to my own country which doesn't acknowledge USD, which you haven't addressed.
> Yes. But with a caveat: the wealth of a government's welfare/civil servant class and the threat of its tax collectors is what gives currency value.
I disagree. I agree with your initial point, though: money is just IOU notes. As long as there is someone willing to buy those IOU notes off of you, it's valuable.
Cryptocurrencies are scam. End. This is very simple. Yes, they are a new kind of scam, a good name suggested is Nakamoto Scheme. https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/ Also notable: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-bu... which doesn't outright call it a scam but certainly points out > Git gives you pretty much everything offered by the business case for blockchains. The one thing…
Do you have a background in distributed systems? In the same why the common advice with cryptography is, "one can build cipher unbreakable to the creator but not the world", the same way too "one can create a 'blockchain' that's unbreakable to the creator but not the world". Git cannot provide byzantine fault tolerance. The fault tolerance it can provide is costly in human time. Senior Engineer: Hi, I'm new here and…
e.g. https://support.mindbodyonline.com/s/article/Best-practices-...
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If you’ve ever needed to buy something that your government doesn’t want you to or get your money out of a country that doesn’t want you to remove your money you’d have a different view of cryptocurrency. Scam is not how I would classify all of them at all. I’d classify them more as a mechanism of freedom. You may find yourself singing a different tune when the current QE house of cards falls and you want somewhere,…
You're talking about the low morals of banks vs. cryptocurrencies, but I feel much safer depositing my savings in a regulated bank than I would converting them into any type of cryptocoin. Is my perception wrong? I understand that in particular cases (e.g., hyperinflation), you may prefer cryptocurrency, but for the vast majority of people, official currencies and regulated banks are much safer and practical.
I converted all my fiat back in the days to crypto. I didn't feel safer back then, but later on as the value skyrocketed and I diversified crypto gains to all kinds of assets my comfort level increased very nicely. I still have good stake of crypto, now I wouldn't feel safe not having some amount.
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If you’ve ever needed to buy something that your government doesn’t want you to or get your money out of a country that doesn’t want you to remove your money you’d have a different view of cryptocurrency. Scam is not how I would classify all of them at all. I’d classify them more as a mechanism of freedom. You may find yourself singing a different tune when the current QE house of cards falls and you want somewhere,…
I'll classify that as criminal. Given that our government is democratically elected and all laws have a democratic foundation what you call freedom I would call criminal. In that regard cryptocurrencies have a problem.
No, cryptocurrencies don't have a problem if some random guy on internet thinks nonsense.