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Bitcoin is a disaster

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Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#191

Post by mrjin »

Barrin92 wrote: post #3

>The scarcity of block chain space has led people to re-invent every last feature of the banks they thought they were going to be escaping. This is a pretty funny point because every time I go on twitter and see people talk about crypto, what they're essentially having is a discussion about public policy, and often they seem to try to reinvent institutions that already exist without even knowing it. From market-maker…

Well, obviously the designer of bitcoin or any so called cryptos did not take a serious thought why centralized financial authorities are there. They believed books kept by those financial authorities are the real problems and thus they made the books public and introduced the mining process. The real problems have never been about records, they are really about the integrity of the transactions, which in turn pointing to the trustworthiness of the counterpart. By making books public can never ever resolve those trustworthiness issue and actually introduced more problems such as everyone is storing heaps of info which does not concern them at all, 51% attack etc. To establish trust between parties in the transactions, as you mentioned, market-makers, exchanges etc came into play, which defeats the purpose: to decentralize by introducing other centralized authorities which are actually less trustworthy than current ones. In other words, catch-22.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#192

Post by viraptor »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #165
exclusiv wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of ways. And the banks reconcile the cash movement behind the scenes. As I understand it, in a simple example, if you send $1k to someone. And someone at their bank sends $1k to someone at your bank, there's nothing that the banks need to do other than record it.

That you brought up banking is precisely my point. Imagine if you needed a bank account to give someone $100 cash. Or to spend a few bucks at a street hotdog vendor. Most people take it for granted that they need a bank to do anything, and they don't really consider how powerless they are over their own money. Like how it's illegal to carry too much cash (and it can simply be taken away). And how your bank can impose…

> Like how it's illegal to carry too much cash

Which country is that? It's not illegal anywhere I know of.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#193

Post by x87678r »

BTC is so pointless to me. The problem is it keeps going up. It looks like its more likely to hit $100,000 before $0, so you can still make a lot of money by buying now. Which is why I bought some.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#194

Post by guidovranken »

ve55 wrote: post #103
raziel2701 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the 21 million cap is just a line of code no? No reason why if enough people agree to it they could just print more. Or they could fork and print more no? I find it strange that people speak of bitcoin's scarcity as if it were a physical thing.

Getting most people to agree to such a fork is likely impossible

It has happened before. Ethereum Classic is the "original" version of Ethereum, but it's a nondescript altcoin, while the one that reversed transactions is the number #2 in the world.

I don't see why that can't happen to Bitcoin if the network participants (ideally normal users but practically the miners) and major stakeholders can benefit from it.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#195

Post by thekyle »

smabie wrote: post #118
brokencode wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It doesn't matter how safe an investment is. Uncorrelated alternative assets (metals, crypto, art, etc), when added to your portfolio, lower the total volatility (risk) and boost the risk adjusted returns. You can take a really crappy asset with low returns and high volatility (like gold) and add it to your portfolio to boost your risk adjusted return. In short, from a quantitative perspective, it never makes sense t…

One of the most common critiques of modern portfolio theory is that it defines risk by volatility rather than downside risk. While a stock will never have price-to-book multiple less than 1 (unless fraud has occurred) a cryptocurrency has no such limit on how far it can fall.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#196

Post by TheAnswerMan »

m1sta_ wrote: post #102
baby wrote: post #31

That’s nonsense. Bitcoin is as good a store of value as gold due to one unique feature: scarcity. Actually, it’s even less power consuming than the gold industry and is much more transparent. I wouldn’t really advise bitcoin for anything else, like day to day transactions, although I and many of my friends have used bitcoin to transact on dark markets and it works. The only argument I’ve heard about gold being better…

Bitcoin is scarce like beanie babies are scarce, except you can make more bitcoins.

Their scarcity is not "like". The owner of beanie babies has/had full power to produce any amount of beanies, inflating their supply. The owner could start up the factory again and flood the earth with beanies.

Bitcoin scarcity is protected by mathematics and the nature of the universe. And the public ledger.

I guess anyone can dream up a new mathematical system and ledger and unlimited dreams can be dreamt making more supply of electronic currency. But the specific instance of a dream "bitcoin" and it's public ledger cannot be inflated.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#198

Post by newbie789 »

sunshinerag wrote: post #66
raziel2701 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of things do you buy with it and where? I remember seeing some adoption back when steam started accepting it, but sometime later they stopped because it was too volatile. I thought paying fees for the transaction made bitcoin very unappealing as well. It's not anonymous either, so I just couldn't find a reason to use it as it didn't solve anything that I couldn't do with my credit card. And my credit card o…

I buy computer hardware (SSDs, network switches etc.), recently bought t-shirts and etsy like stuff on gethaven.app Bitcoin has always been pseudoanonymous and its perma history is something that I am aware off and not that bothered off. Though looks like the bitcoin devs are working towards something to improve privacy called taproot and schnorr. The thing that it solves for me compared to traditional fiat currencie…

I think you might be one of a small handful of people that I've heard from that continue to use BTC as a currency for goods over the past few years. It's good to know that this still happens!

Out of curiosity, you mention depreciating value for fiat being a liability, which is absolutely true. That being said, doesn't appreciation also create a different sort of liability?

For example, let's say I buy a 1TB SSD for $60 worth of BTC on Monday, and then that same amount of BTC is worth $75 on Friday. In theory, would it be reasonable for me to feel like I've overpaid?

Of course in this scenario, I pay for rent, food, taxes etc. using fiat, so I'm exposed to the difference in conversion rates. I suppose if I lived somewhere where I could transact wholly in BTC for everything and its value wasn't in any way tied to a fiat currency and the value of goods and services were negotiated in BTC in a way that's entirely decoupled from market value on exchanges, this wouldn't be an issue for me. Is this possible?

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#199

Post by louwrentius »

carlineng wrote: post #177
louwrentius wrote: post #47

This is written from the perspective of a person who believes in blockchain-based currencies but thinks Bitcoin as an implementation of said currency is a failure. He thinks the concept of mining is a fundamental flaw. But he keeps the door open for different implementations. Personally, I think the whole concept of blockchain-based currencies is flawed. But let’s not go there right now. The value of Bitcoin is very…

Bitcoin total market cap is ~$500 billion, so it's still a pretty small niche, and I think there's quite a ways to go before it becomes "too big to fail". For comparison, the market cap of gold is ~$10 trillion. The majority of the US economy is not hooked into Bitcoin, and very few institutional investors have any significant exposure to Bitcoin. Contrast that with the '08 financial crisis that was based in real est…

I hope you are right and only a few people will get hurt.

That people will seriously get hurt, that’s not a question.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#200

Post by [deleted] »

addicted wrote: post #95
hombre_fatal wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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