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Bitcoin is a disaster

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Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#681

Post by brokencode »

colinmhayes wrote: post #343
brokencode wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all terrible uses of Bitcoin, as mentioned in the OP. All transactions are publicly visible in an immutable database. With a little investigation, law enforcement can find out who owns certain accounts and trace transactions very easily from there. If you are a criminal, you want no paper trail whatsoever, which is why they use paper money.

Bitcoin is pseudonymous if you take enough precautions i.e. always use tor, only use addresses once, coin join everything before converting.

I guess that’d work if you’re the guy from White Collar or something, but I’m not sure your average criminal would have the attention to detail and knowledge to get that all right. And one misclick or bug can pretty much seal your fate.

You are right though that you can take measures to make it much more difficult to trace.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#682

Post by gautamcgoel »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #186
VintageCool wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that cash in USD is also used as a medium of exchange.

This is an extremely tiring response. I pay for most things in Bitcoin. I just built a new computer from parts I ordered off of Newegg, paid 100% with Bitcoin. I pay my rent in Bitcoin. I get paid in Bitcoin.

Can you explain how you paid rent in Bitcoin? There's no way my landlord would put up with that!

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#683

Post by steeve »

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…

Serious question: Bitcoin being subject to deflation, why would you spend it? Sort of like the $82 million pizzas [1]

1. https://qz.com/1285209/bitcoin-pizza-day-2018-eight-years-ag...

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#684

Post by agumonkey »

mumblemumble wrote: post #673

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,…

Nozick may be accessible through web.archive.org

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Anarchy%2C+State%2C+and+Utopia+arc...

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#685

Post by steeve »

raziel2701 wrote: post #37
jokethrowaway wrote: post #13

Completely agreeable, albeit it misses a point: Governments can't print more of it. That's it really, everything else is noise. I can sympathize with btc (I wish we still had a gold standard, or a standard based on the price of common goods) but I don't see much the other benefits. On top of this, governments could ban btc.

I mean, the 21 million cap is just a line of code no? No reason why if enough people agree to it they could just print more. Or they could fork and print more no? I find it strange that people speak of bitcoin's scarcity as if it were a physical thing.

Why would they agree to that? Deflation is what guarantees the investment for most users.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#686

Post by marcus_holmes »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #610
jiofih wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TransferWise is the tech incarnation of it. I bet they don’t operate in Venezuela due to US trade sanctions.

The TransferWise model is the future of global banking imho (disclosure: I work in the financial infra space). One user account, the ability to hold a variety of currencies simultaneously, and banking info for each currency to plug into financial rails for said currency (routing/acct in US, IBAN in the EU, etc). Turns out money is just rows in a database and ISO 20022 messages, queued and processed.

I had enormous problems trying to do anything with Transferwise from Cambodia. It's still plagued with problems left over from the conventional banking system.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#687

Post by uncletammy »

rthomas6 wrote: post #669
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…

Yeah but, why BTC specifically? Why not ETH or ETH tokens, or any of the hundreds of other cryptocurrencies that are faster and have lower fees?

There's not a good reason. Of all the cryptocurrencies, BTC is one of the worst for this use case.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#688

Post by opendomain »

aent wrote: post #79
doggosphere wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTC prices have been driven by institutional demand and federal monetary policy.

Or 21 billion fake tether dollars.

I have serious questions about tether.

As far as I know, they have not proven they even have 1 billion on reserve. How can they claim 21 billion?

Is this pyramid scheme the real reason bitcoin prices are so high?

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#690

Post by arcticbull »

saalweachter wrote: post #675
arcticbull wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

lol that’s very much backwards, by crypto advocates own admission there’s zero liquidity in the space.
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