501–510 of 684 posts
People in the crypto debate have very short memories. BTC is up like 1000% in the past 18 months and everyone is so quick to point at the current price declaring that "crypto is here to stay!" I mean christ in what world is 18 months long enough to declare that crypto is eating the world? It's clear as day from my perspective that everyone is jumping on the speculative mania bandwagon. It used to have some utility in…
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> Do you know how many people use Bitcoin in this way? Do you?
But if you're actually curious to know it only takes a quick search to find info about proportions of use around the world https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-global-crypto-adop... It's very hard to get exact numbers of users, because of how Bitcoin works, but this should give you a good sense of proportions and you could infer numbers of people based on known population sizes for each country
"We calculate the metric by estimating total cryptocurrency received by that country, and weighting the on-chain value based on PPP per capita"
Weigh how?
"we rank countries by their P2P trade volume and weight it to favor countries with lower PPP per capita and fewer internet users"
Weigh how? How do you get the numbers on internet users?
"We rank all 154 countries according to each of those three metrics, take the geometric mean of each country’s ranking in all three, and then normalize that final number on a scale of 0 to 1"
What?
It's not a methodology conductive to analysis. Is a hodge-podge of smart sounding words that create pretty graphs.
Oh, and they changed the methodology this year, but still compare results to previous years that used the old methodology. Very scientific
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…
With that said, each day that goes by I am more inclined to agree with him in relation to Bitcoin and all projects that tout "fixed supply", "store of value", PoW crap.
I agree that the unbanked and people that fear persecution or censorship can benefit from crypttocurrencies. The part where I don't agree anymore is these people have BTC as their best alternative to protect their wealth or to be sovereign over their finances.
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I reject that thesis given the Chinese sure managed, in like a week. No Bitcoin in North Korea either. The longer we wait, the more painful it'll be.
China vs crypto has been going on since 2013 [1]. Open source, decentralized crypto is a direct competitor to China's CBDC, which they have already developed and are trying to distribute [2]. Of course China would want to squash all competition. Jerome Powell from the Federal Reserve said in a video from 9/30/21 that he has no intention to ban crypto like China did, although it sounds like stablecoins may be regulate…
True, the saga went on for a while, and I suspect their recent kibosh had more to do with domestic financial instability and a shaky power grid than ideology.
> Jerome Powell from the Federal Reserve has said from a video from 9/30/21 that he has no intention to ban crypto like China did, although it sounds like stablecoins may be regulated [2]
Yeah, and frankly, that may be enough to pop the bubble. I have long maintained the position that most price action in crypto is driven by rampant manipulation and un-backed stablecoin issuance. Once number stops going up, I don't think people will care at all anymore.
> The SEC has also already said in 2018 that Bitcoin and Ethereum are not securities [3].
Yes, Bitcoin is not a security because it's distributed solely by mining. Etherium is and always was a security, as it plainly fails the Howey test like every other ICO, in line with the formal guidance issued by the SEC. The SEC elected not to treat it as one, however. They have also indicated that every other ICO is at risk of being treated as a security.
> The head of the SEC, Gary Gensler, taught a course on blockchain for several years at MIT [4].
Yep, he's super smart, and I have a lot of respect for him.
> How do you think this technology is going to be completely banned, or everyone will forget about it and it will totally go away? The seeds are already planted, and as I said, there's no nipping this in the bud now.
I think stablecoins will be regulated, price action will subside and nobody will care anymore as we were on track to seeing before the printing spree of 2020. And I think most ICOs are going to get smacked down as unregistered securities offerings.
The China model of removing the bandaid would be much better though.
That's a best case though, and you could totally be right.
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Well... I wouldn't, nor would 95% of the US. I want to be paid in stable currency backed by the full faith and force of the US Government. "Oh shit, the internet went out. Hope the value of my ETH doesn't crash through the floor while the internet is down...."
Yeah I can't keep track about the weekly times the whole internet went down. Probably a couple of times a week
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$5-$20 for any amount is comparable or much less than almost any international transaction fee. If you're other option is transferring money out of the authoritarian country into your destination then this could be very attractive.
Keep in mind that this purely the onchain transaction fee. You are also going to paying exchange fees each way and those fees are likely to be quite large in authoritarian countries (as any illegal activity is generally more expensive).
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> at what price point and time would you start to consider that you may be tragically wrong? In theory Bitcoin can keep growing as long as people believe in it. It has a strictly negative EV though. * it returns no revenue * At current mining levels, it burns about 1.8% of its market cap annually. By burns I mean literally burns energy and ASICs. (About $18 billion at current market prices) * That’s just for mining c…
Many of these same arguments apply to gold. Do you think gold is (mostly) useless today? If yes, when did it stop becoming useful? Do you think it was always useless?
Bitcoin has and only ever will have a practical use for criminals.
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…
I guess it should be possible to trade bitcoin via the stellar network (according to their intro page[1], any currency can be), but I could well be wrong.
I got some given to me in the Keybase drop so I read up on them, but that's the limit of my knowledge in this area. I'd love to find a way to use them but articles like this talking about ponzi schemes etc tend to put me off bothering.
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I'm curious for those that still truly believe Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme or a bubble - at what price point and time would you start to consider that you may be tragically wrong? What price would tulips have had to have attained for them to be proved "not a mania"? [1] "At the peak of tulip mania, in February 1637, some single tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled artisan." Which is to…
Curious, what other noxious problems?
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> They do not pretend making your money work for you by some magical scheme. No. They instead take your money, buy coal, and burn it. Nothing is left. As you say, Ponzi schemers take money for themselves and keep it. Most of what Madoff stole was recovered, for instance. Whereas virtually 100% of all money invested into crypto has been burned by miners. This is pretty easy to model. So there’s nothing left to recover…
> No. They instead take your money, buy coal, and burn it. Nothing is left. Interesting, I never thought of it that way, and it makes sense. Since money is not created or destroyed the balance sheet on inflows and outflows of BTC to dollars must be zero at all times. And some x% (which is variable) of it is transferred to miners which is the so-called "transaction" cost. I guess there must be a point at which the bub…
Something about anti btcers I don't get you'll wax how smart you are and how everyone else is dumb. Just put your money where your mouth is.