Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin is a disaster

metzdowd.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 992 posts

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#331

Post by thelittleone »

bluedevil2k wrote: post #240
thelittleone wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I’ll call BS on this - are you actively selling it to buy things online? And you buying BTC when you have spare money in checking accounts? Is your turnover like 10-20%? I’m guessing you’re a buy and hold person with BTC, which makes you an investor in it.

I've accepted payments for a holiday rental via Bitcoin, some of which I've used to purchase other items.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#332

Post by beaner »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #298
beaner wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflation doesn't need to be measured in many ways, you can view it directly on the m2 money supply chart: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2 Everything else is just a derivative of this. You're measuring the side effects of inflation. If you want the deeper cause, it's here.

Inflation is a loss of value, most directly observed in rising prices. Everything else–money supply, borrowing costs, etc are linked to it, but do not necessarily correlate. The price of a Big Mac is almost certain to be a far better approximation than any of those indicators. This really isn't that complicated.

It really isn't, you're right.

Historically, inflation always meant inflation of the money supply. Its definition has changed over time and you've been swindled.

If you have a name for something, name the root cause, otherwise you're obfuscating its study, and perpetuating the non-identification of the root cause.

"Inflation, as this term was always used everywhere and especially in this country, means increasing the quantity of money and bank notes in circulation and the quantity of bank deposits subject to check. But people today use the term `inflation' to refer to the phenomenon that is an inevitable consequence of inflation, that is the tendency of all prices and wage rates to rise. The result of this deplorable confusion is that there is no term left to signify the cause of this rise in prices and wages. There is no longer any word available to signify the phenomenon that has been, up to now, called inflation. . . . As you cannot talk about something that has no name, you cannot fight it. Those who pretend to fight inflation are in fact only fighting what is the inevitable consequence of inflation, rising prices. Their ventures are doomed to failure because they do not attack the root of the evil. They try to keep prices low while firmly committed to a policy of increasing the quantity of money that must necessarily make them soar. As long as this terminological confusion is not entirely wiped out, there cannot be any question of stopping inflation." [0]

[0] https://mises.org/library/defining-inflation

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#333

Post by gruez »

foepys wrote: post #58
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…

The Lightning Network doesn't solve the congestion problem for global adoption. To open a lightning channel you need an on-chain transaction. The same is true to close one. Assuming 2,500 transactions per block, you will need ~970 days to just open a lightning channel for each US citizen (assuming 350 million citizens and no other Bitcoin transactions). Due to his limitation the Lightning Network is unsuited for any…

>Assuming 2,500 transactions per block, you will need ~970 days to just open a lightning channel for each US citizen (assuming 350 million citizens and no other Bitcoin transactions).

>Due to his limitation the Lightning Network is unsuited for any large scale use outside of exchanges.

But do we need to onboard everyone everyone in a year? It's like saying the internet will never scale because modem manufacturers can't keep up.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#334

Post by wcoenen »

haolez wrote: post #303
wcoenen wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We've injected trillions of dollars of fiat into the economy this year When the government issues debt and then uses the money to send out cheques, that money had to come from investors in the first place. So the money was reallocated, not created. (New assets did get created: someone is going to hold those bonds and count them as part of their assets. But they can't use these bonds directly to buy groceries.)

Let's inject quadrillions, then!

The limitation is that the bonds need to be payed back with income from taxes.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#335

Post by howinator »

wcoenen wrote: post #288
keithwhor wrote: post #24

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…

> We've injected trillions of dollars of fiat into the economy this year When the government issues debt and then uses the money to send out cheques, that money had to come from investors in the first place. So the money was reallocated, not created. (New assets did get created: someone is going to hold those bonds and count them as part of their assets. But they can't use these bonds directly to buy groceries.)

But recently, the U.S. Treasury has issued a ton of debt to the Federal Reserve. The Fed is creating dollars and handing them to the Treasury in exchange for T-notes. The recent debt increase has actually created U.S. Dollars out of thin air. Following this line of thought, those dollars have made their way into the "real" economy in the form of PPP loans and Covid checks. It was a similar story in 2008, but the amount of federal debt held by the Fed has exploded this year [1].

Furthermore, the last time the Fed has tried to draw down its balance sheet of federal debt, commodity prices went crazy and Jerome Powell had to abandon that quantitative tightening program. So, it's not even like the Fed can easily move those T-notes to the private sector and pull USD out of circulation -- we're stuck in an inflationary period.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FDHBFRBN

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#336

Post by xarthna »

rhacker wrote: post #64

The entire point of some of the alt-coins was to address all these complaints. So instead of piling onto Bitcoin which is years of stuff we already know about, focus on those alt-coins that support the ideas you want in a cryptocurrency.

I've been reading about the tech behind bitcoin and I find it interesting yet have been skeptical due to some perceived flaws. I've been concerned about the market externality due to the amount of energy it takes to mine blocks. What are some alt coins worth exploring?

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#337

Post by bitxbitxbitcoin »

templarchamp wrote: post #289

Bitcoins are digital-hawalas and therefore are keepsakes. You can find yourself or pay to get someone's keepsakes. There is no counter-party, just like gold and oil. Once I own it, there is no way to consume it other than to barter it. It could be made illegal anytime by authorities.

I also like the digital-hawala analogy for explaining bitcoin's value.

The fact that it could be declared illegal by fiat doesn't completely remove its usefulness because at the end of the day it's open source software.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#338

Post by mantenpanther »

The author has an opinion. This opinion has at least five debatable concerns. Each of them could be contradicted with good arguments. But discussing this arguments does not make much sense online, nowadays there is only pro or contra at all costs. So the market must decide.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#339

Post by darawk »

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…

This isn't a very good criticism. Lots of new things recapitulate the structures they are replacing in many ways, while improving on them in just one or a few areas. The fact that ground is being retread is not itself a criticism or a sign of a lack of innovation.

Yes, Bitcoin requires many of the same structures as traditional finance. That does not make them equivalent. Traditional finance does not allow you sovereignty over your money. Bitcoin has central custody, sure. But it's opt in. That's what makes it different. You may or may not care about this property, but its undeniable that it's novel in the digital realm, and empirically many people do care about it.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#340

Post by zik »

oblio wrote: post #57
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…

What's "digital cash" in this context? What does it offer extra compared to regular cash and online payments?

With cash you can hand it to another person in payment. With conventional digital payments you request a trusted intermediary (your bank) to transfer that value to them. What if you don't trust banks but still want to be able to pay people?

Bitcoin was born in the Global Financial Crisis when the world was discovering the massive scam which the financial services industry had perpetrated, causing the whole problem. People wanted a way to do transactions without having to trust institutions which demonstrably couldn't be trusted. Hence Bitcoin which acts like digital cash with no trusted intermediary.

Post reply on HN