261–270 of 684 posts
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> Elon and SpaceX will be able to mine gold on asteroids within the next 20 years, which would crash the price of gold. what would be their incentive to do it, then?
Well, if the cost of mining is less than the value of the gold, I’d imagine there’s plenty of incentive.
As far as I'm concerned cryptos are backed by cocaine and at a much higher tangible rate than fractional banking the dollar is.
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How about the stock market? Everyone I know that invested in stocks did so hoping to trade it back later on for more fiat than they paid.
Well the idea that stocks must go up is a kind of scheme in itself. The whole financialization of our economy is based on constant growth. So you could argue that it’s a Ponzi scheme as well. Our children will likely be caught holding the bag.
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So no different than gold?
https://www.usfunds.com/slideshows/the-many-uses-of-gold/ Go to Coinbase and try to figure out how to use Bitcoin to buy something with. All they talk about is Bitcoin as an investment. A currency can’t be an investment as the expectation that it will rise in value undermines the main quality of a currency, which is to maintain a stable value, so it can be used as intermediary.
A lot of the "Common Objections" relate to the REASONS people choose to own Bitcoin and how those cases make it a Ponzi. There are many different reasons to own Bitcoin, however the author seems to only view it through the lens of someone living in a wealthy and developed country with financial stability. The properties of it being difficult/impossible to confiscate and its privacy make it valuable in oppressive regi…
The fees for Bitcoin are way too high to make sense for citizens in poor authoritarian counties. The average transaction fee during slow periods is about $5 and it jumps to $20 whenever there is load on the network. And the lightning network is a poor solution to this because the LN requires a lot of capital to fund channels, something poor people explicitly don't have. Finally, the fact that Bitcoin proponents have…
When people say this, do they mean $5/$20 per bitcoin or per any transaction whatever size?
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My bank account is a digital store of value, in US dollars. I never visit the bank (was impossible during the lockdown), rarely handle cash, and when I do, it's inconvenient.
Your digital store of value promises to lose around 2% of its buying power every year, and they beat that by a lot this past year.
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"Bitcoin privacy" is a contradiction in terms, as has been repeatedly proven. You set up a scene of a refugee "storing their wealth in Bitcoin", but it begs the question: where are these refugees with substantial wealth they are looking to exfiltrate? Typical refugees are emigrating from locales where they were earning dollars per day. The use case of shielding hoarded wealth during a journey to a freer locale is a b…
Venezuela
Again, these proposed use cases are absolute fantasies.
Hashrate and mining investment is a reflection of that belief.
Don't take this as advice to buy Bitcoin at 50k.
Normal currencies like USD are, in the end, also based on trust. They're just pieces of paper, and the value is in the belief that those pieces of paper will represent approximately the same thing tomorrow. Trillion dollar pieces of paper could be made worthless tomorrow, but everyone trusts that they won't due to the dire physical consequences.
Even those currencies, that we consider normal today, were bootstrapped over a very long period by originally representing physical metal that could be redeemed.
I’ve discouraged friends from investing in CC as I could never see a material basis for value, present or future. I wonder what if anything exists that is similar that is not a Ponzi scheme. Ask yourself this: if you woke up in the morning to find BCs value had zeroed out, how surprised would you be
I would be absolutely shocked if Bitcoin's value ever dropped to zero. I can't see any conceivable way that happens at this point. Even a coordinated effort by the world's governments to "ban" it (they can't really ban it) would not drive its price to zero... if anything it might even have the inverse effect. Can you provide any conceivable way this would actually happen? Maybe an asteroid hitting Earth and wiping ou…
1. Tether defaults.
2. People panic and sell at whatever price they can get. Let's say Bitcoin drops to $10k.
3. All miners that don't make a profit at $10k shut down.
4. With most miner's shut down, block times go from 10 minutes to 1 hour.
5. The fees to transact Bitcoin go up exponentially as people rush to get out. 10 Bitcoin to make it into a block, sure!
6. The price drops further.
7. More miners stop mining.
8. Block times go up so much that it will take the miners YEARS to reach the difficulty adjustment point that normally hits every 2 weeks.
9. Blocks stop being created, and the price is essentially 0.
With China shutting down a lot of their mining, this is less likely than in May. The higher it goes, the more likely that a sudden shock can destroy it all. Eth has shorter block times and would be able to stabilize better. The block fees going up might actually save the system to keep enough miners mining, but I also think they will scare users away from buying at cheaper prices.
I think some of these are a stretch. I think some of these would definitely happen if the things up to them happened.