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Bitcoin is a disaster

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Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#551

Post by drschwabe »

reiderrider wrote: post #371
addicted wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I also use Bitcoin as a currency (via Coinbase). I love the reactions. It’s not commonly accepted in my area so I’m only using it for haircuts and holiday bonuses, but would gladly buy more with it. Excited about Etherium’s DApps but having trouble creating viable ones in my industry (insurance). BTC’s transaction cost is worrisome (who is spending $6 in transactions fees for small purchases). Monero has some serious…

Encourage your current 'Bitcoin friendly vendors' to accept Lightning network payments. Your Bitcoin tx fees can then be fractions of cents.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#552

Post by ZguideZ »

ZguideZ wrote: post #535
leadingthenet wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really "Anarchy" if it's essentially controlled by small a clique of miners with specialized hardware that most people don't have / can't realistically have access to?

To the system as it exists? Absolutely.

The misunderstanding about anarchy is that no one really knows what will come out of it.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#553

Post by everfree »

rebelos wrote: post #485
DethNinja wrote: post #478

Bitcoin is a disaster alright but a disaster for the fiat system and for the parasites who need the fiat system to survive. Funny thing is bitcoin is only a small technology that will hurt the fiat system, there are more such disruptive technologies on the way but governments are far too stupid to see the writing on the wall.

> Funny thing is bitcoin is only a small technology that will hurt the fiat system, there are more such disruptive technologies on the way but governments are far too stupid to see the writing on the wall. Examples?

I'm not the person you're responding to, but smart contracts will be disruptive to the finance industry.

Why settle a contract in court when a computer can make a free, automatic, final deliberation based on software rules that both parties agreed to?

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#554

Post by christophilus »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #285
keithwhor wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To my understanding, inflation -- and the causes of such -- is something that can only really be assessed ex post facto. What's being asked is, "is what we're seeing a warning sign of inflation-yet-to-come?" Rephrased, "are people bullish on technology stocks and Bitcoin because they're speculating that there's major fiat inflationary risk and these asset classes are most likely to hold value?"

Inflation is a loss of value and it hasn't happened until it has happened, and when it happens, you notice very much instantly.

Not really. It’s a matter of what you’re measuring. If you measure inflation by assessing the price of a Whopper, you won’t find much. If you measure inflation by measuring the cost of college tuition, you’ll find plenty. What’s meaningful varies dramatically from person to person. That’s why I think it’s almost pointless to talk about inflation as a single, measurable thing.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#555

Post by imtringued »

hertzrat wrote: post #88
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…

If almost the entirety of the money ends up, in the medium run, in the hands of a few wealthy people who want to invest, it explains the lack of inflation for everything but investments

Consider that the money is mostly going to the owners of assets. Assets have the unfortunate property of only giving returns to their owners and most people simply do not own assets so it's an incredibly poor way of introducing money to consumers.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#556

Post by leadingthenet »

ZguideZ wrote: post #535
leadingthenet wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really "Anarchy" if it's essentially controlled by small a clique of miners with specialized hardware that most people don't have / can't realistically have access to?

To the system as it exists? Absolutely.

How? What I've described is closer to an oligarchy than it is to anarchy.

So either you disagree with my initial description, or you disagree that that description matches something other than anarchy. Either way, I think you'll find either one of those a difficult argument to make.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#557

Post by hedora »

I wish the crypto currency described in the second half of Applied Cryptography had caught on.

Basically, the bank issues a signed secret coin, and you (recursively) spend the money by using the secret to generate another signed secret. As with onion routing, you can only “look back” one step of the signature chain unless you collude.

It’s anonymous and supports offline spending. Anonymity can be broken via collusion by an unbroken chain of downstream recipients of the money, but that’s a necessary feature to catch double spenders.

It also integrates in well with modern day to day transactions, in that “atm”’s can issue and retire currency at will. There is not blockchain, so it trivially scales linearly, and is not energy intensive.

It could be a reserve currency, but it’s not optimized for that. Instead, think of it as allowing any bank to issue its own digital fiat currency.

In short, it solves most of the problems everyday people wish bitcoin solved, but isn’t very interesting to speculators.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#558

Post by arcticbull »

cambalache wrote: post #304

I agree with most of the points raised by the author but as a Venezuelan Bitcoin is a godsend. If you live abroad and want to send remittances to your friends and family it can be pretty easy in a normal country , with wire transfers,western union and so on. If your family lives in Venezuela your options are extremely more limited. These are some of the options Venezuelans have had to use: 1. Ask the money to be sent…

It’s a godsend to a small handful of Venezuelans, it’s not a general solution as of course a transaction fee is a few months minimum wage. It does literally nothing to solve the problem more broadly. You’d be better off holding value on their behalf stateside.

Of course the government could shut it off in a heartbeat. How many North Koreans does Bitcoin help?

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#559

Post by jpmattia »

ur-whale wrote: post #484
jpmattia wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Early adopters weren't enthusiastic about bitcoin because they hoped it would end fractional reserve banking Just to amplify your point: There is a weird idea that that monetary multiplication (like fractional-reserve banking) is not possible with bitcoin. However, anytime someone lends bitcoin or shorts it on an exchange, they increase the bitcoin in circulation past the base count of 21 million btc (or however ma…

>The idea that bitcoin would somehow escape fractional-reserve banking You are correct, but unlike with banks, at least there is an escape hatch: "not your keys, not your coins", which is a lot simpler to implement than walking to your bank and withdrawing all your savings in cash. Sadly, the vast majority of Bicoin buyers just leave their coin on the exchange (or worse: in the case of Paypal, they can't do anything…

> You are correct, but unlike with banks, at least there is an escape hatch: "not your keys, not your coins", which is a lot simpler to implement than walking to your bank and withdrawing all your savings in cash.

To be clear: "Not your keys, not your coin" equivalent in the fiat world is not putting your money in the bank, but holding on to it instead. So you put all your fiat in a safe eg.

> Sadly, the vast majority of Bicoin buyers just leave their coin on the exchange (or worse: in the case of Paypal, they can't do anything else), thereby opening the door to all kind of shady practices, including FRB.

In order to short bitcoin on the exchanges, the exchanges need to have bitcoin to lend out. Naturally these lent bitcoin come from deposits. Exchanges are already practicing FRB on a large scale, but somehow nobody is calling it that (mostly because FRB is not well-understood by the bitcoin community.)

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#560

Post by yunesj »

jackcosgrove wrote: post #452
yunesj wrote: post #402

Bitcoin's value prop isn't in its anonymity. Early adopters weren't enthusiastic about bitcoin because they hoped it would end fractional reserve banking or any other financial product. Rather, it was incredible to see the entire financial industry quickly rebuilt on top of sound money. I agree that small transactions and mining can be (and are being) improved, but not for the same reasons. It's silly to blame bitcoi…

> Rather, it was incredible to see the entire financial industry quickly rebuilt on top of sound money. What is your definition of sound money? It has been said many times but it bears repeating that a money supply that grows more slowly than the economy it is traded in will be deflationary. Deflation inhibits economic activity because money saved is worth more tomorrow than today even when not invested in productive…

> deflation

You are making a lot of assumptions. But yes, a productive enterprise has to outperform doing nothing to be successful. And no, it is not possible to generate unlimited wealth simply by investing in a deflationary currency.

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