111–120 of 992 posts
- It's easy enough to store bitcoin on a hardware wallet and not use an exchange.
- As the world pivots to solar and EV's electricity becomes much less of an issue over time.
- There are significant technological breakthroughs (e.g. Eth 2.0) coming every day in the way of scaling blockchains.
It really hadn't hit home to me that yes, BTC is being mined using ASICS by a handful of players, probably operating out of various authoritarian regimes. We've got the US getting all angry because TikTok is a Chinese country, and yet we've oestensibly got libertarians telling us to move out money into a currency controlled by Chinese BTC miners. It'd be fascinating if China could cause a recession in the west by tak…
I have no idea what he is talking about. I use bitcoin to buy things both onchain and via lightning and the experience is so smooth and much much better than the circa 2017 period when fees were high. Don't keep it on exchange. The real thing that is stopping adoption is countries trying to classify it as a commodity and insist to pay capital gains on every microtransaction. Some countries are backwards (US, UK) than…
The capital gains tax issue isn't stopping your average person from wanting to use Bitcoin. If we're being honest, how many people would be voluntarily reporting taxes on their Bitcoin purchases anyway? I suspect it would be similar to how many people self-reported the sales tax they owed on out of state online purchases before it was automated: Near zero.
The bottom line is that rational consumers like the features and services offered by traditional banks and credit cards.
If someone steals your credit card and spends a ton of money, you just call up the credit card company and get your money back.
If someone gets access to your Bitcoin wallet and takes all of your Bitcoin, that's it. Game over. Should have had better OPSEC, grandma.
Likewise, people don't want to manage wallet passphrases and key files themselves. They want an exchange to handle the details for them, including as much risk as they can move to the exchange.
The reality is that Bitcoin is still far and away an inferior experience to traditional payment methods. If I pay with Bitcoin, I have to deal with transaction fees and variable network delays and I have zero recourse if the vendor simply steals my money. With a credit card, the bank literally pays me 1-3% to use their credit card, payment is instant, and I can simply call the bank up and reverse charges if something goes wrong.
I don't understand all of these mental gymnastics to explain away Bitcoin's shortcomings for payments.
Related: the current rise of Bitcoin prices has been peculiar to me, and seems to be a bit of a canary in an inflationary coal mine. We've injected trillions of dollars of fiat into the economy this year. It feels like the sky-high valuations of technology companies and Bitcoin are "shock absorbers" of sorts, or early signals of inflation-yet-to-come. If we assume the market is efficiently pricing these assets (like…
BTC prices have approximately zero relation to inflation in the real economy (for whatever definition of that you want to use). Rising BTC prices are driven by pyramid scams, fraud, and speculation. There is no useful signal here related to anything else.
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I don't see the irony. The point is that Bitcoin has introduced an actual "digital cash" currency without institutional/governmental middlemen. That institutions can be built on top of that, and that some people want such institutions, doesn't change the novel utility of finally having a currency that functions like digital cash. It's like saying it's ironic that people use physical USD for anonymous p2p transactions…
No one treats Bitcoin as a currency. It’s treated as an investment vehicle. And the reason behind that is obvious. Something whose value may double in a month or whose value may halve within weeks is a terrible currency. If I expect it’s value to increase then I would be a fool to spend it. If I expect it’s value to drop I would be a fool to accept it. Cryptocurrencies are anything but currencies.
Bitcoin has a potential to serve as that kind of saving “currency” a lot of people actually need.
There does seem to be a fundamental design issue in bitcoin and proof of work in general: Mining has economies of scale and therefore winner takes all mechanics leading to centralization. At that point the mechanism that ensures ledger integrity is the calculation that if the miner tampers with the ledger, that would destroy trust in the coin and hurt the miner in that way. But 1) that's exactly how conventional curr…
Has any government promised how and why they will maintain their currency. They supposedly claim they help people why screwing up the very same people. Case in point, the 2008 crisis and the various modern monetary based crises.
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But then what would one invest in? The stock market may just as easily crash.
But a stock represents ownership of a real company that (hopefully) will make profits that can be distributed as a dividend or be used to grow the company and increase the value. A Bitcoin is totally speculative and has virtually no useful purpose in the real world yet. You can’t actually buy stuff with it from stores, due to its niche status, high fees, slow transactions, and wild price fluctuations. Looking at it t…
In short, from a quantitative perspective, it never makes sense to look at a security or asset in isolation. Instead one must consider the total portfolio as a whole.
Source: work as a quant trader
tldr: If the question is "does crypto have a place in everyone's portfolio?" The answer is emphatic an "yes". And indeed, we are quickly moving towards a world in which crypto is held by most institutional investors. Even at this early stage, the institutional flows into btc is staggering. And it will only increase with time. From my vantage point as an insider, btc is here to stay. full stop
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> What kind of things do you buy with it and where? Drugs, CP, cryptotrojan ransom, other crime related transactions. Bitcoin value is directly related to relevant criminal activity.
Dollar is STILL the king of criminal activity, money laundering, kidnapping, ransom ... it will take awhile for the shift to happen.
Edit: replaced "any" with "all" in the first sentence