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Bitcoin is a disaster

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Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#591

Post by imtringued »

christophilus wrote: post #554
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Consumer inflation is well defined and a policy goal so it does make sense. The problem is that you have to clarify which goods are inflating, otherwise you run into misunderstandings.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#592

Post by xapata »

stale2002 wrote: post #571
xapata wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nearly impossible to stop What's nearly impossible to stop? Can't the government simply shut down the internet to stop Bitcoin? Or insert itself as the man in the middle of all network traffic.

No, the government can't "just shut down the internet". If any government did that, then the country would suffer extreme economic damages, if such a policy was maintained for a long time. Your argument would be like if someone were to say "actually, the government can stop all theft, now and forever. All it has to do is launch 1 thousand nukes, start world war 3, and kill off 99% of the population". Like, sure. The…

My point was that the government has control of the internet, and thereby all activity on the internet.

> extreme economic damages

We're talking about Venezuela, which has had extreme economic damages caused by a government trying to maintain control over its population. It seems that they don't care about damage, only power domestically, not internationally. The comment we're replying to said that Bitcoin is valuable in transactions with Venezuelan counter-parties because of Venezuela's government's damage to the domestic economy.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#593

Post by arcticbull »

doopy1 wrote: post #577
1-6 wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still question the early bag-holders of Bitcoin. Where are they and what do they do now? I think Litecoin came at a time when more people had an awareness of cryptocurrency, it's more democratized during the initial phases because of Scrypt and GPU's being the dominant mining tool at the time. ASICs shifted that balance again but I still have my doubts about who owns the majority of Bitcoin.

Bag-holder usually has the connotation of holding a worthless asset, bitcoin is currently at an all time high.

The underlying asset is utterly worthless, for all the reasons posited here in the article and more — that people are willing to pay you for it doesn’t change that.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#594

Post by syshum »

xapata wrote: post #563
syshum wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>People talk about governments cracking down on BTC because it will undermine the local currency or banking system but I think that's mostly paranoia Incorrect, the government has no concerns over undermining the local currency. The primary purpose of banking regulations is population control, it has nothing to do with currency perservation Know your Customer laws, book keeping regulations, etc are all about control…

Government isn't a monolith. There are individuals within the government that have altruistic goals. It may be helpful for certain analyses to simplify and consider a government as an individual, but for other analyses that's counter-productive.

Government is a monolith, the goals of the individuals that make up the government are irrelevant.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and the most terrifying phrase in the English language is "We must do _____ for the greater good"

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence,it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#595

Post by aazaa »

For those who don't know, Ray Dillinger is one of the first people to review the Bitcoin source. He collaborated with Satoshi prior to the first release:

> In November of 2008, I did a code review and security audit for the block chain portion of the Bitcoin source code. The late Hal Finney did code review and audit for the scripting language, and we both looked at the accounting code. Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous architect and author of the code, alternated between answering questions and asking them.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/id-known-what-we-were-startin...

To pick the first point of his critique:

> The pseudonymity of coins being owned by the bearer of some cryptographic key is a failure; People have been eavesdropping and aggressively analyzing the block chain from day 1. And the block chain will always be there, it will always be public, and it will always be subject to further analysis. And we are learning that analysis of that record is sufficient to destroy any pretense of anonymity or pseudonymity.

The public nature of the Bitcoin block chain, and its privacy implications, were discussed in the white paper and have been known since the beginning. So it's odd to be labeling Bitcoin a failure now, given that nothing new has developed within Bitcoin itself on that front.

What has happened since 2009 is that exchanges have fallen under the influence of the US government and its perpetual wars on terror and drugs. The on/off ramps are where most of the privacy loss is happening. Bitcoin users do the rest to themselves by lax opsec, including address reuse and address publication.

The rest of the points are not that clearly laid out. To take the very next one:

> 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. Including debt brokering (lightning network) ...

The lightning network isn't debt brokering because no debt is involved. It's a consensus-enforced contract over bearer instruments.

The critique on mining centralization has been around for many years now, and Dillenger's analysis doesn't bring anything new to the table.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#596

Post by imtringued »

beaner wrote: post #206
542458 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economists weren’t born yesterday. Inflation is measured in many ways, most often by looking at a basket of goods where the prices are relatively non-volatile. Using the USD/Bitcoin ratio as a yardstick for inflation seems very misguided, as Bitcoin is heavily speculated.

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.

It's not just a quantitative problem, it's also a qualitative one. You want the dollars to circulate and therefore it makes sense to look at the most important subset of goods that is relevant to the every day person.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#597

Post by kryogen1c »

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…

you are exactly arguing the authors point, just in a use-case not specifically addressed. the hassle involved in transfurring funds internationally exists for a reason, and as soon we rediscover the associated problems there will be an outcry for some manner of regulation bitcoin purposefully subverted in the first place.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#598

Post by cesarb »

majewsky wrote: post #429
rkagerer wrote: post #324

I bought my smartphone from Hong Kong, in part because I wanted a specific variant that would be more likely to work with open-source ROM's. The seller initially requested payment via Transferwise, who sought crazy amounts of personal information and bullied me into a privacy-hostile customer agreement. Days went by and they still hadn't activated my account. Growing frustrated, I convinced the seller to accept Bitco…

Can we have "cash you can email" that doesn't consume as much electricity as several nation states combined?

Here in Brazil, we have that since last month. The new money transfer system (Pix) allows anyone to send money to a key, which can be a person's CPF (the tax ID number nearly everyone has), a phone number, an email, or a randomly-generated number. These all map to a bank account (you can also use Pix to send directly to a bank account number); the directory with these mappings is kept by the Brazilian Central Bank, and the mappings are inserted by the participating financial institutions.

So assuming my email was something@example.com, and I had asked my bank to map the Pix key "something@example.com" to my bank account, anyone could "send cash" through Pix to my something@example.com email; the cash would arrive at my bank account nearly instantly (even during weekends and/or holidays).

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#599

Post by stale2002 »

xapata wrote: post #185
sunshinerag wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are confused. There is nothing in Bitcoin that prevents VAT. It's just Germany's policy. Elsewhere they charge VAT on it like any other currency. I have paid VAT on all my bitcoin transactions like any other currency. I am not in Germany.

That's good to hear. What about exchange controls? How do you see governments adjusting inflation with widespread international Bitcoin usage?

Government can do whatever inflation adjustments that it wants.

What it can't do, though, is force people to accept them.

If you want your money to inflate, you are free to use any infatuation currency that you want.

But other people, who prefer to not be subject to inflation, are now free to not be subject to it.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#600

Post by eli »

gruez wrote: post #411
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal experience: not only bitcoin was the only practical way I was able to receive funds in Russia from an Indonesian client, it was cheaper than just one leg of converting Indonesian currency (to USD). Think of it. Buying bitcoin, sending and selling resulted being cheaper than just buying USD. The spread was that much lower. (It was in a relatively static price period in summer 2016) And regular banks just didn…

>And PayPal was somehow banning the client for some reason. Maybe the russian was on OFAC's sanctioned entities list? (only half joking)

Or just had a similar name or used a “bad” word. The data quality for those lists is very poor.
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