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Bitcoin is a disaster

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Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#731

Post by stale2002 »

xapata wrote: post #671
stale2002 wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

Holding enough currency to have a small amount of hedged safety against risk of that currency changing in value is not really a good enough reason to say that a country would be able to "force" "taxpapers to be subject to its currency".

Even if we say that people would hold some of that original currency, there could still be a significant benefit to transferring most of your wealth to a deflationary currency. Therefore, people would still be able to avoid being subject to that original currency to a large degree.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#732

Post by traceddd »

leadingthenet wrote: post #538
ZguideZ wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the most powerful thing about Bitcoin is that the guy who created it is unknown (if Satoshi was a guy or a lone person at all) and that it mostly runs on autopilot and at this point is not governed by a single body. It can't be sued. The creator of it can't be sued. And yes, more of it can't be made and there is deflation built into it. Genius.

I think you mean deflation, the exact opposite of inflation, is built into Bitcoin.

and technically, it’s not deflation, it’s a decrease in emission. Deflation is the expected result, but not necessarily guaranteed.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#733

Post by corty »

brokencode wrote: post #681
colinmhayes wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Precautions on that or higher levels of expense and complexity, like burner phones, dead drops, networks of couriers, cell and gang org structure are standard procedures in organized crime. Un"organized" single small criminals might have a larger fraction of bad opsec, but they aren't all stupid.

A few will be caught by making mistakes, but the rest will learn from that. Criminal methods undergo evolutionary pressure.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#734

Post by cyphertruck »

xapata wrote: post #516
DeafSquid wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post disgusts me

> Your post disgusts me I'm happy to hear reasons to change my mind. What's disgusting?

I can’t see the flagged post, so don’t attack me here, I’m just going to explain the bitcoiner view.

Your presumption that inflation is good and that bitcoin needs to be able to support whatever “social policies” governments decide is antithetical to the purpose of bitcoin.

Bitcoin was created to escape currency debasement because it is how the people are impoverished. Currency debasement is the engine that creates wealth inequality. The Catillion effect means that people who get the newly printed money (eg wall street) benefit from it, while the regular people only pay the cost via reduced purchasing power.

Bitcoin is really a savings technology that allows people to escape debased currencies, like the zimbabwe dollar or the Venezuelan peso.

It also has censorship features and other useful properties, but this is the aspect most at odds with the assumptions in your post that the other user apparently disliked.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#735

Post by _-___________-_ »

uncletammy wrote: post #687
rthomas6 wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course there's a good reason. BTC is much, much easier for the Indonesian person on one side of the contract to purchase with their local currency, and much, much easier for the Russian person on the other side of the contract to liquidate into their local currency. Almost any country has a highly liquid market of local currency BTC, and that's often not true for any other crypto.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#736

Post by cyphertruck »

steeve wrote: post #683
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...

Bitcoin is inflating, and will for 130 more years, though it is seeing increased adoption and is riding in price.

But in answer to your question,I’m glad you picked food fir your example— would you starve to hold onto your bitcoin?

Is your computer ten years old because next year better ones will come out? Or did you bite the bullet and upgrade because your time preference made it worthwhile?

It is true, deflation encourages savings, but that is the essence of capitalism, savings keeps people better able to avoid poverty in the event of a bad year, and capital accumulation makes you more able to do a startup and retain control.

Part of the reason there is so much VC money is inflation (VCs get new dollars cheap and carry trade through startups)with a hard currency like bitcoin the fotmula would be reversed, and founders would retain more ownership.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#737

Post by redisman »

cambalache wrote: post #489
nootropicat wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are they using bitcoin rather than dollar stablecoins? Too new?

Of course! Every exchange and currency are as valuable and accepted as the group decides them to be. Same way you can pay anywhere with US dollars and not with South-African Rands.

> you can pay anywhere with US dollars

Huh? Maybe with a credit card that converts your usd to a local currency. I’d like to see you walk into a French or Japanese grocery store and offer them your freedom bucks

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#738

Post by throwaway666494 »

Taek wrote: post #709
rthomas6 wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Bitcoin has the most infrastructure surrounding it. And Bitcoin is the most careful to make life easy for infrastructure providers. Eth is very challenging to operate securely. Breaking updates are frequent, often with little warning. Bitcoin hasn't changed in many years, and new software updates are optional, and don't require you to write any new code or change how you operate. Most other cryptos suffer from the sa…

Breaking updates are not frequent, there's never been a breaking update on the ethereum blockchain.

Bitcoin changes all the time (e.g., taproot)

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#739

Post by toyg »

bconnorwhite wrote: post #512
toyg wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except Bitcoin has no way to “stabilize”. Without central banks’ intervention and governance, even regular currencies would fluctuate like crazy. Unless the bitcoin world can come up with a Federal Reserve / ECB equivalent, it will continue to be a wild ride, which will effectively impede further uses. It will always be a speculation vehicle rather than a store of value.

I think the difference is that currencies fluctuate against each other, whereas if everything is priced in Bitcoin, its whatever you're pairing it against that's fluctuating. Goods (ex: loaf of bread for 200 satoshis for example) would stay stable

When you have a system that can only function if everything and everyone works in the same way at the same time, it will never actually function. The whole world is not going to move to Bitcoin, there will always be competing currencies - hence, there will always be speculation and uncontrollable fluctuations.

Re: Bitcoin is a disaster

#740

Post by Izkata »

ineedasername wrote: post #630
syshum wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ACH is US Banking only. You can not do Direct person to person transfers, you must go through a US Bank for ACH ACH is also SLOW and painfully insecure relaying on the banking institutions to stop gap the security and its built in slowness to allow for reversals of fraud or error transfers ACH is not a model people should be promoting as good method to do money transfer

Thanks, I didn't know ACH was US only. As for slow, I've had things go through literally instantly, where I make the transaction, login to my bank account, and see it posted. When it's been slow, that always seems to be a factor with the sending entity (like PayPal) not my receiving bank. (Could be bank specific though)

Might be something else going on (wire transfer, maybe?); ACH payments are batch-processed a couple times a day, and so can't be instant.
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