321–330 of 332 posts
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Inflation is a different problem: a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but if you have a bird in your hand you are better off trading it for a table because somehow a table in the hand depreciates less than a bird?
I mean, yes? Are we explaining investing from first principles?
A) time value of money
B) inflationary aspects of fiat currency vs hard currency
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I'm afraid that if I try to retort to each point we may end up talking past each other. But I will say this, I think that your assumption in point 1 is wrong. I think that the mismanagement of the financial system worldwide has proven that there is no country currency invulnerable to manipulation. Jeff Booth talks about this towards the end of this interview which is great in it's entirety IMO. How Inflation Is Steal…
There are over 150 nations, most of them tiny that have a currencies, it's not rocket science. A nations currency will have the integrity and competency of the governing class, so El Salvador will be able to have a basic currency when they are not corrupt. Frankly, this whole thing stinks of corruption, my bet is that the leadership are already speculating on BTC and are making big statements like Musk to drive it up…
Notably, the British Pound Sterling is named such because 1 British pound originally represented a pound of Sterling Silver. Today it takes over 400 British pounds to buy 1 pound of sterling silver.
Twenty US Dollars were worth 1 oz of gold until 1933. Today it is nearly 2000 USD per oz.
I challenge your statement that it is easy for a government to manage a currency over the long term. In fact it seems impossible for politicians and central bankers to resist the temptation to inflate their currencies to infinity.
Why haven’t the US, Canadian, UK or Brazilian banks provided services to the 70% of El Salvadorans today? What are were they waiting for all this time? I believe it simply wasn’t profitable enough for them.
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> Inversely, with BTC, you would want to spend as little as humanly possible. Sign me up. Hyper-consumerism has laid waste to our planet, commoditized every human interaction, and polluted our minds with its drivel. Behold Denmark and its glorious decision to punish its citizenry for saving any amount of money at all. Hope you weren't thinking of saving your pennies for a ticket out of the renter's racket, Denmark wo…
I don't think you know how economics works. If no one would spend money, the related countries would go bust within a year.
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Are lightning transactions completely transparent?
The transactions pass through generally only 1-2 nodes which will be required to log everything unless they want to risk punishment for laundering illegal BTC, and people dont want to close their channel and end up with illegal BTC without evidence of how it happened, so yeah. There are huge problems with trying to build fungibility on top of a traceable foundation.
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To invest in a data center requires things like reliable property rights, a functioning judicial system, peace and security, network connectivity and other supply chain issues. You want rule of law, peace, security and infrastructure. The advantage of bitcoin is that once you mine the coins, it is a lot harder for someone to come and take them from you, whether that someone is a rebel group or a corrupt government of…
I think you misunderstood my question. My guess is that the plan to use the volcano for mining bitcoin is to put a big bitcoin mining data center close to it and powered by it. My question is why this is better than expanding distribution of the power generated to be used for more useful things across the country and region.
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The transactions pass through generally only 1-2 nodes which will be required to log everything unless they want to risk punishment for laundering illegal BTC, and people dont want to close their channel and end up with illegal BTC without evidence of how it happened, so yeah. There are huge problems with trying to build fungibility on top of a traceable foundation.
So then lightning network transactions are not automatically transparent, then. Transparency depends on the willingness and ability of nodes to log transactions, and then to share those records.
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A: Bitcoin has inflated 40% in value in the last month. B: This is probably the strongest argument for Bitcoin and the original vision. C: Sending BTC is immediate but since you can’t really use BTC to buy much (yet) you still need to sell and wait for funds to clear, which takes about as long as just wiring money.
When OP talks about "inflation" they're talking about the amount of money entering the money supply. Bitcoin didnt "inflate" even though it got more expensive. The price did, not the supply. The supply of BTC is algorithmically programmed and there will only ever be 21 million produced. You can't print more Bitcoin at will but a government can print their fiat currency, for better or worse.
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When OP talks about "inflation" they're talking about the amount of money entering the money supply. Bitcoin didnt "inflate" even though it got more expensive. The price did, not the supply. The supply of BTC is algorithmically programmed and there will only ever be 21 million produced. You can't print more Bitcoin at will but a government can print their fiat currency, for better or worse.
Bitcoin is actually inherently shrinking in supply. Once the 21 million are created there can only be coin loss (via lost or destroyed wallets). And a deflationary currency is far from desirable.
A deflationary currency doesn’t mean no one will ever spend or invest. It simply means that there is less forced incentive to spend and consume in order to avoid inflation.
Inflationary currencies are like a tilted playing field, they artificially force savers to spend or invest in risky assets while skewing economic metrics to make the economy look better than it is.
While the gold standard was not deflationary, the relatively fixed supply resulted in strong stable economic growth until countries in Europe began secretly debasing their currencies in the run up to WWI.
Inflating fiat currencies gave the European countries the power to perpetuate the first endless war - I strongly believe if they had been forced to tax their citizens to pay for WWI instead of stealing the wealth of the people by inflation, the World wars would not have been so severe and so prolonged.
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I'm afraid that if I try to retort to each point we may end up talking past each other. But I will say this, I think that your assumption in point 1 is wrong. I think that the mismanagement of the financial system worldwide has proven that there is no country currency invulnerable to manipulation. Jeff Booth talks about this towards the end of this interview which is great in it's entirety IMO. How Inflation Is Steal…
There are over 150 nations, most of them tiny that have a currencies, it's not rocket science. A nations currency will have the integrity and competency of the governing class, so El Salvador will be able to have a basic currency when they are not corrupt. Frankly, this whole thing stinks of corruption, my bet is that the leadership are already speculating on BTC and are making big statements like Musk to drive it up…
Ok, so I’m going to straight-up ask you to either retract this racist statement or justify your position with evidence.
I want to see your proof that the government of El Salvador is corrupt. This link seems to indicate the opposite [1].
To help you see the light, let me highlight the fact that El Salvador lost their own currency after a bloody 12 year long civil war that was funded by an interventionist US government that raised an army of child soldiers in the 1980s.
Per Wikipedia [2], the Carter and Reagan administrations spent $1-2 million per day in 1980 dollars to raise and train this army of child soldiers.
Tell me again why El Salvador is corrupt and that is why they lost their currency?
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> generally speaking, is there no other way of profiting from surplus electricity (which essentially, this is)? Making hydrogen, smelting aluminium, de-salinating water. But bitcoin can be transferred over internet, so the logistics is easier.
unless the US ramps up nuclear or renewables to a level as of yet unseen, i can see the US building fresh water pipelines to central america in the next 25-50 years.