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Nouriel Roubini: Bitcoin is not a hedge against tail risk

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181–188 of 188 posts

Re: Nouriel Roubini: Bitcoin is not a hedge against tail risk

#181

Nano completely solves this. Under 1 second transactions fully confirmed, no mining, no inflation, it's decentralized (and getting more so). All the coins were premined. It uses a block lattice rather than a blockchain, so it is scalable (the main net is doing 185 transactions per second now (1776 tps on the test net). The system to determine voting power (regarding confirming transactions) is basically a liquid demo…

I meant to post this in a thread about Bitcoin energy consumption, but it looks like I posted it under the wrong thread. Anyways, Nano is still a better version of Bitcoin.

Re: Nouriel Roubini: Bitcoin is not a hedge against tail risk

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Electricity gets generated and either consumed or wasted. Bitcoin eats excess available supply. :-o Is this... a joke? Your claim is that production exists, regardless of demand? That simply isn't the case.

A waterfall power-plant produces energy 24/7 whether the townspeople are awake or not. They consume energy in the form of electricity during the day. At night, they have no need for it shut off the turbines. This is unused and uncaptured energy that could have been put to use. The potential energy is "wasted" because the infrastructure is underutilized, the energy could not be preserved. This is starting to change as…

Sometimes they turn the waterfall up and down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Control_Dam

And then most of the rest of the time, cheap, reliable power would get consumed by the grid.

Re: Nouriel Roubini: Bitcoin is not a hedge against tail risk

#183
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a general pain in the ass is of negative utility. Define "controlled supply of money" with reference to counter-examples of uncontrolled money supply? Money supply needs limits, surely?

I could have been more specific, you're right! I believe the value of cryptocurrency is to neuter governments' abilities to inflate or devalue currency with the push of a button, and to improve our ability to transact freely with one another. I absolutely agree with you that money needs limitations, such as hard rules on supply increases. A money supply that is uncontrolled in such a way that you can make more or les…

I think that's a great goal to have (I'm pro anarchy and for the dismantlement of all governments) but I don't like spending all this energy just for it.

Besides, government will stop all of this before we get to anarchy, if we want anarchy (or even moving in that direction, instead of the opposite as we're doing now) we need to get there politically.

Any government can say at any time: "Everyone holding cryptocurrency is a terrorist and will be persecuted" and use their monopoly on violence to enforce it.

Incidentally, that's the reason I never invested in BTC (and missed out on this generation inequality wealth transfer).

Re: Nouriel Roubini: Bitcoin is not a hedge against tail risk

#184
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>while that is true, you could also argue they deserve it because of the risk they took. they didn't take any risk though, they just "mined bitcoins", which were more abundant then.

Well if the price increased at 1$, and you didn't sell any, you risked it going back to 0$. From that perspective, there's a risk holding on to it.

That is not a "risk" in the sense of adverse outcomes. Anyone can throw bitcoins in a wallet and forget about them for 10 years. There is no risk of adverse outcome involved in doing so, and people should not be rewarded it.

Re: Nouriel Roubini: Bitcoin is not a hedge against tail risk

#185
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not better in terms of Bitcoin's goals of decentralization and censorship resistance...

We've decided to solve that problem by consuming very nearly the entire residential power consumption of Canada, a country of 38 million people. We've done this with a network that can process 400k transactions per day (at $20/transaction in fees), as compared to visa, which does 150 million per day. Surely, we can do better?

You're a software developer, so if you really believe that, get to hacking.

It's clearly an industry with huge potential if it is economically viable to spend money buying an Argentina's worth of power on it.

Re: Nouriel Roubini: Bitcoin is not a hedge against tail risk

#186
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t agree with what he says let’s attack his intellect... “originates from the fact that it escapes his alleged ‘expertise’” “he’s basically clueless on the topic”

He says that bitcoin has "no intrinsic value" and he's wrong about that, because value of something is not decided by financial experts, but by people willing to pay for it (even if those people are criminals looking for new ways to launder their money). He has also been predicting that "Bitcoin bubble will burst" for the past few years, and he's been wrong about it so far. So yes, I would say he is clueless when it…

Bitcoin doesn't have a government and armies defending it.

If tomorrow your government wakes up and make "dangerous cryptocurrencies" illegal because "criminals use them" they can do that.

The reason Bitcoin value is skyrocketing is mainly speculation. People buy because they want to get rich and quit their crappy job.

There is literally nothing that can't be replicated tomorrow and have the same technological characteristics of Bitcoin. Actually, other cryptocurrencies are even better.

At some point, governments will have their digital cryptocurrencies to track you even better than with the current system.

Re: Nouriel Roubini: Bitcoin is not a hedge against tail risk

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin and cryptos in general are actually worth more than $0 because people are tired of seeing their cash devalued on the whim of politicians and bankers. How do you justify this, given that inflation is so low? (at least in the EU it's been oscillating between 0 and 2% for a very long time) https://tradingeconomics.com/euro-area/inflation-cpi Is this what people are so tired of? 1% inflation? I'm just trying to…

It's an open secret that inflation is purposefully miscalculated. As another commenter notes, CPI leaves out many of the most major expenses, e.g. housing. There are estimates as high as 8% annually when you account for everything.

Is there a specific estimate/study that you'd wanna suggest to me? I've heard these claims but I've never taken the time to read the research myself, and I'm feeling like it now :-)

Thanks in advance.

Re: Nouriel Roubini: Bitcoin is not a hedge against tail risk

#188
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you spend cash farther than you can throw it?

Maybe any of the established global banking and payment providers that allow me to pay for things online significantly quicker and with much lower fees than Bitcoin, without the huge cost to the environment? Or pigeon. Sorry I meant pigeon.

Internationally what's wrong with transferwise or paypal (for advanced economies that aren't still based on cash and checks)? Or western union?

In most countries I know, in-country transfers from bank to bank are free.

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