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Bitcoin is a disaster

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Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#671

Post by xapata »

stale2002 wrote: post #635
xapata wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't the government force taxes to be paid in the currency of its choice, thereby making taxpayers (residents, visitors, and their counter-parties) subject to its currency?

> thereby making taxpayers (residents, visitors, and their counter-parties) subject to its currency? It does not make them subject to inflation, no. If you hold entirely cryptocurrency, you are not subject to the inflation of holding the currency. Instead, you can simply convert to that currency, only when you need to pay taxes. This avoids the inflation, in the same way that hold stock in a company, and not holding…

Suppose you had a particular debt, denominated in currency A, owed at the end of the year. Would you want to hold some amount of currency A throughout the year to ensure you could pay that debt? I suppose you could argue that you'd buy some currency swaps or somesuch, but most people would just hold that currency.

Remember the Asian Financial Crisis, when a bunch of the "tigers" had loans denominated in USD, Francs, etc., and then there was a big capital outflow, tanking their local currencies against those debts? People will want to make sure they don't float against the currency they owe.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#672

Post by cpursley »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #400
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…

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…

What's the easiest, cheapest and legal way to convert Bitcoin into rub?

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#673

Post by mumblemumble »

The situation reminds me a bit of Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. It's a great bit of political philosophy where he argues pretty convincingly that an anarchist society cannot exist for any appreciable length of time. Because the arrangement is fundamentally unstable, and will inevitably be replaced by certain minimal set of social mechanisms in response to some basic social forces. Those mechanisms are, collectively, things that we recognize as basic features of government, such as police and taxation.

Bitcoin strikes me as an experiment to see if the same kind of thing happens in economics. It would seem that it does.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#674

Post by jiggawatts »

tluyben2 wrote: post #446
bob33212 wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Western Union is also very useful, but the vast majority of transactions are not made by Western Union because it has tradeoffs that make other things like credit/debit cards and checks a better option. Bitcoin Evangelists are trying to pump up the price by advocating that bitcoin will be the best method of making payments for a huge variety of use cases. I'm not going to call it a pump and dump scam because I think…

WU is very expensive though; btc, if you know what you are doing, does not come close. WU is a horrible but unavoidable evil for millions of workers worldwide. This is one of the cases that should be disrupted.

I just checked, it seems that WU charges approximately 1% for transfers relative to the nominal exchange rate.

I don't transfer money much, but superficially that doesn't seem too expensive considering the volatility risk to WU due to fluctuating exchange rates combined with the overheads of regulatory requirements.

It seems to me that Bitcoin is only as cheap as it is because it sidesteps those regulatory overheads. So it's great, I suppose, as long as everyone is fine with it being used to launder money from human trafficking, the drug trade, corruption, or whatever...

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#675

Post by saalweachter »

arcticbull wrote: post #628
shawnz wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but I believe it's the economic side which is moving slowly, not the technological side. People have been working on improved technologies for cryptocurrencies for a while now but the problem is that none of them have gained the same trust as Bitcoin.

I suspect ETF cash inflows far, far outpace crypto cash inflows.

I suspect you could take a lot less cash out of crypto without collapsing the market.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#676

Post by corty »

brokencode wrote: post #648
NicoJuicy wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never heard of crypto mixing obviously

What happens when the NSA hacks the mixing services or congress passes a law forcing them to store information for law enforcement? Surely the mixing services know at least for a certain amount of time where the coin is coming from and going to.

I think those laws might already exist, imho anonymous mixing could be prosecuted under the relevant money laundering laws.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#677

Post by steeve »

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…

That must have been one expensive phone.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#678

Post by sneak »

LatteLazy wrote: post #466
AlexCoventry wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does anyone know if you can tell country of origin of a transaction request? Maybe the IP sending the request is public to the network? In this kind of setting, where the transaction is illicit, you wouldn't go through an exchange, you'd publish the transaction directly to the bitcoin network, and organizations like chainalytics do track the origin IP addresses.

That makes sense. Not to criticise but... Isn't the IP of a transaction initiator being public a bit of a design flaw? Is it just assumed that users will obscure their own IPs (vpn, tor, etc)? Otherwise my isp/government can see my transactions and infer wallet ownership and I'm suddenly very un-anonymous...

Last I looked, bitcoin p2p connections are not encrypted by default, so your ISP/government can see any transactions you initiate yourself. I implored the bitcoin developers to add this functionality about five or six years ago for this exact reason.

That said, someone who isn't in a position to monitor the L2 network can't know if you are initiating a transaction or simply rebroadcasting it.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#679

Post by xapata »

bconnorwhite wrote: post #650
xapata wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They" print more every day. In the US, I think the economic stimulus has been a success this year. Trump should have spent his campaign talking about all the efforts to boost unemployment insurance benefits. He might have fared a bit better in the election.

The economic stimulus has certainly been a success for asset prices, in dollars...

Not just asset prices.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-cares-superdole-was-a-huge-...

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#680

Post by protoman3000 »

OOPMan wrote: post #631

People here talking about Venezuela seem to be ignoring the fact that maybe if that country wasn't such a disaster politically bottom-of-barrel solutions like Bitcoin wouldn't be needed. If the best excuse for Bitcoin is that it's the only thing that works when a governed society has broken down almost completely then maybe it's better to think about how we can avoid that kind of breakdown than it is to invest energy…

> maybe it's better to think about how we can avoid that kind of breakdown

Yes, how about unite and peace instead of divide and conquer?

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