241–250 of 992 posts
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…
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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.
"No one treats Bitcoin as a currency. It’s treated as an investment vehicle." I, for one, have and will continue to use it as a currency in some cases. I'm quite sure I'm not the only one.
HODL would not be the meme it was if the goal was to actually use bitcoin in day to day transactions.
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Since Bitcoin transactions are enabled only by spending electricity, isn't the whole system dependent on utility companies, which are either in part or in whole extensions of the government?
If you want to be reductionist, you can argue that since almost all of the world's land, people, resources, and equipment are under the control of some government, it's hard for anything to be independent of them.
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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.
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I use Bitcoin where ever possible, so your opening claim is wrong. I've been banned from Paypal. I've run into many verification issues over the last decade with banks because I have no proof of residency once my driver's license expired. Like physical cash, it doesn't need to be superior in all ways to be useful at all.
You also need a valid ID verification to buy BTC from the main platforms now
But one of my points here is that, while I'm sure some people here are chomping at the bit to nail me with a gleeful "see? ironic!", I simply don't have to use Coinbase. I can, for example, exchange Bitcoin locally the same way I can trade USD for pesos with my roommate. I was SOL at one point when I was simultaneously banned from Paypal while my bank at the time spontaneously rejected further access to my own account, the two institutions I was depending on to operate abroad. It's what made me turn to Bitcoin, and I began considering how ridiculous the state of our financial status quo where I have precarious access to my own money.
I can appreciate that my outlier needs make it hard for people to relate to me the same way most people don't understand why an HNer cares about Linux when Windows works for them, but I think most people here are disappointingly eager to reject any possible upside of "digital cash". Even if its upsides are exceedingly niche for most people, that's not reason to dismiss them.
To me it's like reading an HN thread where everyone dismisses Purism's smartphone because Android and iPhone do the job for 99.9999% of people, and who the hell could possibly care about separating the CPU from cellular baseband? Or maybe they're claiming that only criminals would care about that. Well, that very few people are in a position to appreciate it has no basis on whether we deserve the option.
This is my last comment on this particular submission.
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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.
Buying drugs with BTC is very widespread and probably what fuelled the initial adoption. How is that anything but a currency?
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BTC prices have been driven by institutional demand and federal monetary policy.
I've seen sources to corroborate institutional demand, but is there a source for your claim on the link to federal monetary policy? Ideally beyond correlation to show causation.
Asset prices are up across the board.
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Do you live in the US? If so, how do you deal with the tax implications of buying lots of things with crypto? It's my understanding that each of those is considered a taxable event that you have to report on your tax return.
>It's my understanding that each of those is considered a taxable event that you have to report on your tax return. Isn't that trivial to do from a reporting point of view? Just export your wallet history and do a lookup on that day's price.
It's another reason why using a cryptocurrency is still a gigantic hassle in comparison to fiat.
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The dollar doesn't change value like Bitcoin, not cash as a whole.
oh yes it does, it has crashed more than 2000% vs Bitcoin in a decade.
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If you think this, you don't understand Bitcoin.
Or maybe the other way around. Don't just assert. Explain. From the article: > The whole idea of proof-of-work mining is broken the instant hardware comes out which is specialized for mining and useless for general computation because at that point the need to have compute power for other purposes is absolutely irrelevant in having any effect on mining, and there ceases to be any force that causes mining to be distri…
Edit: Your comment was edited after I made this one. I see no relation between the quote from the article and how miners are supposed to be middlemen.