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Bitcoin is a disaster

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Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#311

Post by nichohel »

etimberg wrote: post #26
sunshinerag wrote: post #8

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…

Why do you believe there should be no capital gains on it?

Possibly funny thought: If you have to declare a capital gain on every BTC purchase of a cup of coffee, why can't you declare a capital loss every time you spend dollars that you earned long ago, and which have decreased significantly in value since then, due to inflation?

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#312

Post by vulturalcptlst »

yonixw wrote: post #9
ancharm wrote: post #2

Does bitcoin moving to a proof-of-stake algorithm change your opinion?

What is the difference? Maybe at the start, but after rich entities will buy the most, they will only need to decide whether to buy "shares" or hardware, a random person will not have more say either way.

I recommend looking up the pareto distribution.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#313

Post by zik »

nwienert wrote: post #131
hombre_fatal wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just the reality of cash, no less in digital form, so it would be naive to think Bitcoin wouldn't inherit the same uses of USD (speculation, money laundering, fraud). It's just not very damning. Though I'm sure various people in the government/Visa would love to ban USD cash with the same demonization.

Not the reality of cash as cash doesn’t change value like Bitcoin (in either direction), it’s also usually not scarce, and always much easier to use.

The value of cash dollars changes all the time. You just don't notice it because you pay for everything in the same dollar denomination. But when everything gets more expensive year by year that's your dollar devaluing. CPI is one measure of that.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#314

Post by thebean11 »

aplummer wrote: post #291
thebean11 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's volatile, but the overwhelming trend has been upwards. Historically it's a great investment if you can weather volatility

So is roulette if you win. A "good investment" in many contexts has a 20 year lifespan and low risk profile, so TBD. I'm not saying its bad, but its an extremely high risk investment so not suitable for the money you can't afford to lose. I've heard of many people withdrawing superannuation to put into crypto (or using credit) for example.

Well I don't think roulette is a good comparison, roulette has a capped upside with a known, negative expected value. Agree with the rest of your comment though.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#315

Post by vulturalcptlst »

api wrote: post #217

Bitcoin is a very interesting piece of technology that has become a bubble due to a combination of historically low interest rates (and QE, and other forms of actual money printing) combined with a scarcity of good investments. Without the forces transforming it into a bubble, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies would be interesting technologies used by enthusiasts, as an international wire transfer method, and for so…

Each bubble has popped and maitinted a price higher than last.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#316

Post by beaner »

xapata wrote: post #296
beaner wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miners have no ability to retract or redirect transactions. And to exclude them would require 100% collusion. Miners as "middlemen" doesn't make sense. 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.

> collusion It doesn't take 100% collusion, but certainly no more than 51%, and I've read speculation (though no proof) that less is sufficient. > middlemen A mining cartel can't edit a blockchain, but they can choose to accept a different blockchain, which is effectively the same thing. Do you accept the premise that a sufficiently large cartel can exist, by state intervention in the price of electricity? [Apologies…

It requires 100% because it only takes one miner to include the transaction for it to eventually be included.

Chain splits do not "edit" blockchains, they still require their own proof of work, and they cannot modify transactions, only drop them. Honest participants in a chain that is orphaned will not have had their money spent in the new chain, leaving it available to spend again. That's all that can be done. It requires a lot of work to be done once, let alone maintained over time on consecutive blocks, and in extremely short order the rewards sacrificed by fucking with the blockchain make continued attacks expensive to the degree that they'd be practically impossible.

People aren't thinking this through. The "race to the bottom" endgame is not that miners consolidate in one state with subsidized electricity, but that mining operations eventually power themselves off-grid through renewables, making distribution entirely detached from geography and jurisdiction.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#317

Post by baby »

tokai wrote: post #168
baby wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often is it used for that use case? Does gold have a high value due to this? No. I would even say that we might see more use industrially if people weren’t inflating its price by using it as a store of value.

37% of gold use in the US is for electronics. https://geology.com/minerals/gold/uses-of-gold.shtml

Stats that include gold used as a store of value show much different numbers. But as I said earlier, the price of gold was never inflated by industrial use, it’s the other way around. The good thing about bitcoin: you’re investing in something that won’t negatively impact real world use cases.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#318

Post by px43 »

kens wrote: post #293
px43 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted by user]

> I've been advised that there's an income tax exemption for "hobby income" ... up to 10k USD per year If you're talking about the US, I think you're wrong: you need to declare all your hobby income, and since 2018, you can't deduct hobby expenses. See e.g. https://www.creditkarma.com/tax/i/hobby-income-taxed https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tips/self-employment-taxes/4...

Ah yeah, looks like things might have changed since I got that guidance.

That's annoying. Would be nice if they didn't keep changing things around all the time.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#319

Post by tomphoolery »

I think the biggest failure of Bitcoin is that it was marketed as a "currency" and ended up becoming a commodity. Bitcoin isn't something you use to spend wealth, it's used to hold wealth. Unlike a stock, however, whose value is based on what price people are willing to pay for it, Bitcoin's value is determined by its scarcity. Sound familiar?

That's why I hate the term "cryptocurrency". It has a lie baked right into it, the fact that this is supposed to be a "currency", when in reality it's just the same kind of digital assets that dominate all forms of entertainment these days. If the term you're using to refer to your product is itself a lie, what does that say for the rest of the product? The organization creating it?

Crypto, overall, is just hard to trust.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#320

Post by mandelbrotwurst »

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.

Bitcoin is volatile because it is not yet widely used and the market for is still relatively small.

Yes, people are investing to speculate on its price, but they are also investing because it has a fixed supply that cannot be inflated away by governments.

Take a look at the U.S. M2 money supply YTD and the DXY and consider what happens next as more wealthy investors begin to recognize this advantage inherent in Bitcoin.

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